Chad Scott: Seven Years in the Desert

Chad Scott, Seven Years in the Desert, installation view

Chad Scott, Seven Years in the Desert at the Studio at the West Sahara Library

By D.K. Sole

I thought I knew what I was getting into with this one because I’d seen Chad Scott’s blue pen pieces before –  Bic lines running across the paper so close-packed and overlapping that they turn the flimsiness to the consistency of leather – but those previous ones were small, about the size of my head, and these works were bigger than I am, and that made a huge difference. I imagine that showing in a family-friendly space like a library must have meant adjustments and possibly guided his decision to make this work rather than other work. He wouldn’t have been able to keep people out with a written test, the way he did in his project at ASAP in 2020, or was it ’21?  OK, 2020. There was a point to Scott’s gesture in How to Explain Electoral Politics Without Splitting Hares; it was a test Louisiana gave to prospective Black voters in the 1960s in order to make them fail, and we were invited to meditate irritably on that unfairness because we wanted to see the mechanical bunny and the fire. But that kind of fuck-off isn’t going to work at The Studio, where people expect to be able to gawp around freely and savour the height of the taxpayer-funded walls.

The pen lines perform the interesting trick of being both painterly and drawerly, completely coating the surface with liquid colour, like paint, but applied like a line drawing. A more usual method, if you’re a drawing artist who wants to cover lots of real estate, is to start shading, but Scott has deliberately chosen a technique that makes it impossible. The artist’s aim is not simply to fill space for you, he has been performing an action for himself. He expands on that in the press release, saying, “the process of making a drawing-object creates a space for me that is introspective and reflexive. They are often a source of relief—a catharsis—from the continuous noise of everyday life. Drawing-objects are much quieter than the majority of my daily experience(s) and my previous work.”

The force of the application is not a quick brushstroke that leaves a smudge sitting up on a flat canvas, but force ground in over and over again across time like a community walking a dented path into the ground day after day. It has warped the paper by giving it nuances: creases, scores, dents that make the buried fibers bend one way and another. The marks catch the light. The surface buckles into puffs. The artist has made a sculptural impact on something. The shape came over time, not precisely planned. Thinking of that,  I can understand his desire to call these “drawing-objects” rather than “drawings.” The word “drawing” in this context takes on the same implications as “cutting” or “moulding.” This evidence of labour makes me think about concrete questions, like “How many lines are there” and “How long did it take.” The difference between normal Bic pen doodling (which frees you to stop at any point without judgement) and the amount of bloody-minded dedication it must have taken to make these huge sheets is part of the immensity of the show; it suggests the ineffable, something your mind has to stretch to imagine, which is a great success on his part. “He had a vision for this,” as someone said near me at the opening reception. (“What’s weird,” they added, “it’s iridescent.”) This emphasis on work puts him at odds with the high ethos of resistant laziness that Maurizio Lazzarato assigns to Duchamp, and makes me think rather of William Morris insisting that “all men, nay, all things too, must labour” and that the essential task is to make that labour creative and therefore enjoyable: “his happiness [should] lie with what must be always with him – his work” (The Art of the People, 1879).

When I think of it this way then the title feels like the expression of a pilgrimage, a penance, or a trek in the service of a duty.* The blue sheets themselves are like deserts from a distance, stretches in which there is nothing except variations: a creosote bush over and over again. On the floor in front of them he has put something utterly different, neon outlines of clouds floating on transparent plexiglass stands a short distance off the dark, shiny surface, which, you realize, is a mirror for their empty haloing – or portal-like – glow. In contrast to the pen drawings they are present without apparent effort. Their tubes look serene and planned.  If that floor is the titular desert then the clouds are hanging low and we are above them, like gods. I considered the nature of actual clouds: their also-ineffability, masses of almost-nothingness although they look so solid. A pen line is nothing, a water drop is nothing, everything is made of little energies. I had the sensation of there being at least two worlds or landscapes in the room with me at different scales.  Seven Years depends on your imaginative belief: the imagination that sees the invisible effort of the line-making, the imaginative effort of creating the desert on the floor, imagining a tiny person walking across it and looking up at these huge clouds. 

*On top of the more straightforward declaration that, “I, the artist, have been living in a desert city for seven years.”

Chad Scott, Seven Years in the Desert
Sahara West Library-the Studio. 9600 W. Sahara Ave. Las Vegas, NV 89117
December 9, 2022 - February 25, 2023

Published by Wendy Kveck on February 5, 2023