Circle Dance traces John T. Scott’s creative output for forty years, relies on the art and aesthetics of the artist’s birthplace and a part formalist/part thematic approach for structuring this retrospective. Metaphors abound in the categorizing and designating of this work. One mental picture in particular — the previously referenced Congo Square “circle dance” — alludes to Scott’s performative engagement with three-dimensional object-making and the self-choreographed movements required by the viewer to fully experience his art (themselves gesturally comparable to the “ring dances” or “ring shouts” that were performed by peoples of African ancestry in the Caribbean and southern United States as late as the early twentieth century). But “circle dance” also refers to the city of New Orleans itself — a place whose anthropomorphic aspect routinely conjures in the mind’s eye bodies in motion.
John T. Scott’s passions — brilliant color, fluid movement, linear poetics, sharp commentary, social justice, among others — are the products of a lifetime of discerning and fashioning: pursuits that, in tandem with one’s personal genealogy, comprise an artistic performance of substantial proportions. That John T. Scott is both an artist of and from New Orleans is ideally acknowledged within the concept and meaning of a “circle dance” — artistic perambulations down real city streets and critical gamboling around theories of form and signification.
Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2005.
