Looming much larger in the background, though, is a broad retrospective of Scott’s work that’s just starting to take shape. Mounted by The Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in Iowa, the show, tentatively scheduled for January 2013, promises to be the largest exhibition of Scott’s work to date.
The Faulconer, with its 7,500 sq. ft. of exhibition space, is a generous venue. With its priorities centred around a significant collection from Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War series, the Faulconer pinpoints artists “who are engaged in social-political commentary,” says Daniel Strong, the gallery’s associate director. Despite its out-there Midwestern location, this ethos has helped put the gallery on the art-world map, producing significant exhibitions of such internationally-renowned artists as South African William Kentridge, among others.
Scott, Strong says, is a perfect fit. “If John didn’t exist, we would have to invent him,” he says. “He seems to have seen the 21st century coming.”
The show will be an opportunity to open the back catalogue on Scott’s long history of art-based dissent. His blackly comic cross-fertilization of industrial economies and military aggression has proved both fruitful, and long-lived; his first-ever work, an ominous, indistinct silhouette of an SR-71 spy plane (“I loved the lines of it — it was completely black, long and thin, very wicked looking,” Scott says).
