Visual Jazz - an interview with and portfolio of paintings by John Scott - Black South Fiction, Art, Culture - Interview

African American Review, Summer, 1993 by Kalamu ya Salaam

John Scott was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on June 30, 1940. He has a B.A. from Xavier University and an M.F.A. from Michigan State University, along with an Honorary Doctor of Huminities from Madonna College in Michigan. Since 1965 he has been a Professor of Fine Arts at Xavier University.

John Scott has mentored generations of fine artists, many of whom are professionally active as both artists and instructors. A prolific artist, he made his national mark as a scupltor. His teaching areas are: sculpture, modeling, carving (wood and stone), casting (bronze and aluminum), printmaking (relief, screenprinting, etching, and stone lithography), design (two - and three-dimensional), drawing, paper-making and calligraphy.

John Scott has exhibited widely, and frequently receives commissions for public art pieces. He is a 1992 recipient of the John D. MacArthur Fellowship, which is widely referred to as a "genius grant." This interview was conducted in the summer of 1992 as John Scott was in the midst of working on his new paintings which are featured on the cover and in the portfolio on pages 265-272.

ya Salaam: What do you define as art?

Scott: To me, art is life. I don't have a more specific definition. I think it's a way of recording whatever vignette of life struck you so hard that it's worth keeping. Whatever the medium is or whatever the language is, you have to be fluid in that language, and you have to use it eloquently. When you see a brother or sister dancing for example, the ones that you remember are the ones that do it eloquently, effortlessly; they make it look easy. To me that's art. Art's not going to a store and buying some brushes and paint, or going to school to learn technique. That's really paying your dues, like a griot does, in order to be able to the a story. It's not being able to read the music, but playing the music. I think that art is the marriage of the eloquence of the language and the content of the story.

ya Salaam: For a long time, you've been trying to get your art to move, to dance. At one point you began to use primal colors, but also you did a lot of reading of physics and began using kinetics. What was the impetus for that?

Scott: I've always wanted to make art that moved ... well, maybe not always, but twenty years before I started doing it, I wanted to do it. The thing that made me want that more than anything else in the world is that my people move. Black people are not static. They don't just talk to you like a militaristic person. Instead they move and they dance with their eyes and their hands. You see them in the street. We say more about who we are with the way that we walk than almost any other people.

Western sculpture - object making - is static. I wanted to somehow or another incorporate the life I found in my people into sculpture. Kinetic sculpture is that dance that's permanent; it's always there, but it never stops dancing. That was the idea, but I didn't know how to do it.

ya Salaam: So where did the physics come from?

Scott: Well actually the two things hooked up at the same time. In 1983, when we were working on "I've Known Rivers" [the African American exhibition at the New Orleans World's Fair], I got this invite from George Ricky to come up to New York and work out of his studios. George Ricky is an internationally known kinetic sculptor who established a foundation in upstate New York especially for sculptors. Ricky would invite sixteen people each year. So I went, and while working on sculpture I read a small piece of mythology. To this day, I don't know where that piece is, but it simply says that, when early African hunters would kill something, there would be a sense of remorse. The hunter would take his bow, turn it over, change the tension, turn the arrows toward himself and play. He would give a libational sound to the spirit of the animal who gives its flesh to feed his people. That hit me so hard, it was so beautiful, that I started making bow-shaped sculptures. As soon as I did that, it dawned on me that any line between two points was wave physics; it has length, frequency, amplitude - whether it's a banjo or guitar, telephone wires or my sculpture. All I would have to do was connect something to the wire, and it would dance.

If I did nothing else with my sculpture, I believed I had discovered an African American vocabulary: African mythology and Western technology put together. That started it, and ever since that time I have been mining that concept. I had the movement of our people. I had the celebratory color of our people and a visual vocabulary.

yo Solaam: What do you mean by celebratory color?

Scott: Well, colors that, when you see them, your soul feels good inside. They are not all gravy and mud - depressing neutral tones. Even when I use neutral tones, they're like spices and seasonings in the gumbo. I wanted colors that had flavor to them and moved, the same way a piece of music moves. That's what I wanted. So I had the color, I had the movement, and the minute I started putting the forms together, life started.