Judith Scott’s What is Property?: an inquiry into principles of dependency, propriety, and self-possession of an “outsider” artist

Abstract

The essay addresses the politics of biography in the interpretation and reception of “outsider artist” Judith Scott’s work. Drawing from feminism, disability studies, and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy (1981) and its political economy of labor power, the essay proposes a new method of analysis which would foreground Scott’s work as a mode of institutional critique. Kluge and Negt ask “Can capital say ‘I’?.” The essay argues that Scott’s work compels a concomitant questioning of this “I” and the very terms of biography, authorship, and ownership that undergird the myths – and the institutions – of the “outsider” and her “art.”

Keywords:

• Judith Scott
• Park McArthur
• Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt
• outsider art
• feminism
• disability studies
• living labor
• labor power
• institutional critique
• biography

Note on contributor

Soyoung Yoon is Program Director and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College, The New School. She is also visiting faculty at the Whitney ISP.

Notes

1 “That precise feeling with which a person in China, Europe, or the United States tightens a screw (‘it fits,’ ‘like a glove,’ ‘it wiggles,’ ‘has clearance’) is a characteristic that all workers mutually recognize, but that evolved over the course of a long chain of relays,” (Kluge and Negt 2014, 73).

2 “I don’t suppose it’s necessarily innocuous when a fully fluent, well-rewarded language user, who has never lacked any educational opportunity, fastens with such a strong sense of identification on a photograph, an oeuvre, and a narrative like these of Judith Scott’s. Yet oddly, I think my identification with Scott is less as the subject of some kind of privation than as the holder of an obscure treasure, or as a person receptively held by it … But in acknowledging the sense of tenderness towards a treasured gift that wants exploring, I suppose I also identify with the very expressive sadness and fatigue in this photograph. Probably one reason Scott’s picture was catalytic for this hard-to-articulate book: it conveys an affective and aesthetic fullness that can attach even to experiences of cognitive frustration … ” (Sedgwick 2003, 24).

3 See for instance John M. MacGregor, Metamorphosis: The Fiber Art of Judith Scott (1999). Note the rhetorical turns resorted to in describing Scott’s work in this summary of Metamorphosis: “Judith Scott, a sixty year old woman with Down’s Syndrome, has spent the past fifteen years producing a series of totally non-functional objects – obsessively wrapped, knotted, braided fiber masses revealing hints of concealed scavenged objects, pieces which loom large and wraithlike or sit as small tightly wound secrets. Her works, to us, appear to be works of Outsider Art sculpture, except that the notion of sculpture is far beyond her understanding. As well as being mentally disabled, Judith cannot hear or speak, and she has little concept of language. There is no way of asking her what she is doing, yet her compulsive involvement with the shaping of forms in space seems to imply that at some level she knows. Does mental retardation invariably preclude the creation of true works of art? Is it plausible to imagine an artist of stature emerging in the context of massively impaired intellectual development?” http://creativegrowth.myshopify.com/products/metamorphosis-the-fiber-art-of-judith-scott

4 Morris (2014, 11). “There are photos that document Scott working in the studio which, while confirming her single-minded devotion to her craft as well as her sense of humor, offer few clues for presenting the completed object beyond the way she chose to have her pieces sit on a table as she worked. We know Scott turned her objects as she worked on them, but did she prefer some vantage point for looking at them? In some cases, it does seem clear that pieces have a front and a back, but if such a work is largely flat, as are several significant examples, can we hang something on the wall that the artist never put there?”

5 For the discussion, McArthur presented this statement with a slide that juxtaposed the image of a discharge record from Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, N.C., which closed a few years ago, and an image from On Kawara’s postcard series. The discharge record is a facsimile from 1978, with headers and stamps of various bureaucratic departments, and includes descriptions of the discharged patient under the following headers, “statistical information,” “brief hospital course,” “condition on discharge,” “physical diagnosis,” “admitting psychiatric diagnoses,” “final primary psychiatric diagnosis,” “secondary diagnosis;” the record includes one direct quotation of the patient: “I have been trying to kill myself.” One of Kawara’s postcards is from 1969, and it too has headers and stamps of various bureaucratic departments; it also includes one direct quotation from the artist, “I got up at 4:28 p.m.”

6 See Karl Marx (1977) on “primitive accumulation.” See also Read (2002). “What ‘primitive accumulation’ reveals is that there is no mode of production without a corresponding mode of subjection, or a production of subjectivity. The ‘economy,’ as something isolated and quantifiable, exists only insofar as it is sustained by its inscription in the state, the law, habits, and desires” (Read 2002, 45). As Read and others question what are the contemporary equivalents of “the commons” that are destroyed and privatized through new and continued forms of primitive accumulation, they emphasize that “it is increasingly the power of life itself, the capacity to reproduce and live, from the genetic code to the basic necessities of existence, that like the feudal commons, is increasingly coming under the rule of ‘absolute private property’” (Read 2002, 46). The need then is for a continued and renewed form of protest in and through where we insist again and again “Art is for life’s sake. Politicizing its preciousness pleases me … ”

7 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840). “If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man's mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”

8 Killian (2014, 44). “KK: … One of the things the general public knows about your sister’s work is that she sometimes stole things to put inside the yarn; JS: And she would have little treasures. One time someone noticed, before it was completely buried, my ex-husband’s paycheck. People would be very careful about their keys. KK: In one of the films an X-ray reveals a wedding ring inside one of the sculptures … ”