Q+A with Timothy Scott
N- What is in between your vision and your execution? How does the work you visualize compare to the final product? What have you found in this space?
Nico! You’ve asked me this before, and this is something I think about sort of absurdly frequently. I think there is a large amount of space between my vision and my execution and I think that quantity of space is very important for me. I take things very seriously at first, with little to no sense of humor, with little to no understanding of how it will be completed or what that completion will even look like. However, after departing from the vision and sailing over to the execution, I find creativity, joy, freedom and my humor again. So in that sense, I think the vision I begin with is very small and compact and hopefully, it can be found in the final product, but not always.
N- If given all the time and money, which of your pieces would you like to develop further? How would you develop it?
Most likely Cat Walk. This might be cheating, because I had a plan to expand it before I even created Cat Walk. The plan originally had not much to do with the cat, the cat was really just a fragment of the entire piece. Although, it’s all in the same style. The idea was to turn it into a little movie, or a theatre piece reminiscent of the memories I have of Cats, which I’ve never seen.
N- Some of my favorite pieces were the drawing/paintings you made. What is your relationship to the visual arts, what part of you finds expression here? Can you talk a little bit about the painter in you?
Well, I love the visual arts and I love thinking about the visual arts. I’ve never really worked with them extensively. Although, I’ve found it exercises a completely different part of my mind. I’m not good at it and I think can really safely say that. Excuse the cheesiness of saying this, but I think through the visual arts I express something very close to my heart because I can’t think too much about it and I can’t plan it out. I have an idea and I do it and I can only give form to that idea in the simplest way possible. There’s a part of it that slows down my brain and that’s enjoyable! I would love to be a painter though, really.
H -I’d like to hear you talk about your influences! Can you name 3 (or 4 or 5 or 6) artists who have had an impact on you and when/how you discovered them and what that discovery was like?
Marcel Duchamp
Edward Albee
Emma Berliner
Jack Smith
M- I’d like to know more about your writing. How do you generate text for yourself? What texts have been particularly influential on you? What’s your process like as a writer?
I don’t really know much about my writing. I never really did very well writing for school, creatively or otherwise. Sometimes I would do well writing academically if I could really boil my thoughts down to being simple and concise. It was through that realization that I started having fun writing creatively. I find it very freeing to let myself write simply, but I think a lot of times it comes across as stream of consciousness, which it kind of is, but not really. I know that’s vague. Generally, I’ll have an idea and think it’s genuinely inspiring, I’ll think about it for a few days and then start writing. What usually happens next is: I get so frustrated about my approach to what I thought would be great that I end up writing about something entirely different. At this point, I will wonder if that’s a cheap, or easy, thing to do. I’ll compare the two and I usually opt for the latter.
EF- I see a lot of visual art in your work. Do you see yourself as a visual artist, painter, sketcher? How do you relate to printed art?
I don’t see myself as a visual artist. I tend to think about making visual art as an extension of performing. As a way to get very subtle. So often you hear this comparison that for an actor, their body is the instrument, or their paintbrush--I think I experience that more conversely if that makes sense. For me, painting allows me to extend my body to a very narrow, concentrated place.
EM- I think of you as an intellectual, whether you agree with that or not. I want to know to what extent the planning of and the intellectualization of affects the execution of your ideas.
I do agree with you. When I first read this, I thought “yeah! all of it is intellectual to me,” only as I kept on thinking I thought “Yeah...none of it is really intellectual to me.” I think it begins very intellectually and with that, very far away from me. I think when I’m thinking at my clearest, I think very objectively and that somehow becomes intellectual. However, as I go to execute my ideas, I lose that. I become very dumb. This excludes me filming things, I don’t like myself when I film things. But when I’m writing, drawing, painting etc, I work like a peon and I don’t really stop until I’m intellectually satisfied. It’s funny though, because I don’t think my work is very emotional, but I won’t finish something until I’m emotionally at rest with it.
C- If you could be a muse for any artist (alive or dead) who would it be? Also, if you could have any muse (alive or dead) who would it be?
1.) Matisse
2.) I don’t think my muse would be human
W- Tim, can you speak about how you decided to pair the music with the footage in 7 minutes? The effect worked extremely well. Over the course of the piece, the sculptures almost come to life and take on movement and even emotion. Did it take a specific kind of music for that to happen, in your opinion?
I knew from seeing the footage I wanted music just like that. I listened to several different kinds of music with the footage. It just moves at the perfect pace! It’s kind of remarkable. I also watched the footage a lot silently and I was in love with the statues-I mean I love those statues. But the music gave itself to them a great deal.
W- Tim, I would love to see you revisit Cat Walk. Have you considered making a follow up piece, or turning it into a series? Why/why not?
Yes I have and as I said before, it’s part of a bigger piece. I just haven’t figured out how to make the whole thing yet!