What’s under Your Hat

by Lola Barrera and Inaki Penafiel
The Cinema Guild, NY, NY, 2006
DVD, 75 min., col.
Sales: $99.95
Distributor’s website: http://www.cinemaguild.com

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jzilberg@illinois.edu

What’s Under Your Hat? is a film about outsider art and the mystery of the creative quest. Above all it is the story of the late Judy Scott, of the love between her and her twin sister and the remarkable work at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. It is a profound film that raises all manner of questions about art and creativity.

Judy Scott was born with Down’s syndrome, deaf and mute. She was institutionalized at the age of 6 with devastating emotional consequences for her mother and suffering for her sister Joyce who later in life resolved to be united again so as to heal the pain of that separation. That love and this unfolding goal is the thread and the plot from whence this remarkable story found itself unwittingly woven.

Silences within. In silence she weaves, methodically collecting found objects and tying them meticulously together with threads into marvelously textured and colored packages. Strange inverted bird nest like forms, the most peculiar fetish-like cocoons, wondrous in all. We cannot ever know what she might have been trying to say if anything, whether these forms are expressive of ideas or feelings that she was working out or rather more simply the exercise of control and repetitive creative action with a therapeutic result. What we can tell is that she was clearly aware of her sense of purpose and of her identity as an artist in the meticulous and focused attention immanent in her work and the process itself, no less in the way she presented herself increasingly as an artist through the symbolic act of wrapping her head - almost ritually tying it and then wearing a hat - thus the title: “What’s Under Your Hat?"

There are particular aspects of the way in which Judy Scott worked that stand out in this film - the sense of complete absorption, the highly organized and meticulous approach in the calm absoluteness of each action, the finality, and above all - the silence within. With a sense of exquisite economy, she cuts and wraps producing an extraordinary balance between bulk and delicacy, embroidered masses of strange beauty. Through the repetitive act of wrapping found objects, shoes, Christmas lights, folded blankets, records, CD’s, and dish racks, boxes and pieces of card board, a grocery cart, a bag of potato chips, through the meditative act of cutting and tying and weaving, the most acutely original forms emerge. And when the final knot is tied, it is done, the process complete. She moves on.

What is there to say but appreciate the beauty, the mystery, the love from which all this sprung, the debt to the sensitivity of those who work in partnership with such artists at the Creative Growth Art Center overseen by Tom di Maria, the thoughtful and nurturing Executive Director. There is within him and those he works with a gentle and qualified wisdom, gestures towards our uncontainable urge to make sense of the ineffable that our capacity for speech and writing impel. Roger Cardinal, art critic, Jack Fischer, art dealer, John Cooke, spider expert, Stan Peterson, artist and teacher, Sylvia Seventy, Judy’s angel. For the scientist, her loving brother in law, her silence and her art was that of the underwater spider that weaves an underwater dome and fills it with air bubbles to live within. For Roger Cardinal, her art seemed quest-like, a means for creating stability, not a struggle but an expression of certainty, perhaps even of the bond between her and her twin.

She gathers, she hides. When the time comes, she gently with complete certainty begins to weave. When she is done, she moves on. As Tom di Maria relates, what makes Judy Fisher’s work so interesting is its enigmatic quality. It embodies her determination to collect and keep and it speaks of an entirely unpretentious process, perhaps spiritual. But one should also note though that there may be more than meets the eye in terms of how conscious she may have been about the creative process for see how carefully she looks through art books and magazines. And note there too how this methodical nature, her systematic sense of careful and measured organization, is expressed in her every motion, from the way she places her books below her chair to peeling a banana, to wrapping her head, to folding and placing objects, to cutting each thread and tying each knot.

What we see here is not only something of how her nature finds its expression in her art but even something of her genesis as an artist. Consider first and foremost, the desire to collect and keep and thus secure a sense of control. As di Maria notes, this is an issue of intense concern to anyone who has ever lived in an institution. Consider also the conceptual need to focus one’s energy on achieving an end. Finally, consider that magical moment of inspiration in which these imperatives and the creative need first found its sudden solution, the immediate self-realization, and thereafter the quest repeated differently, endlessly. Judy Scott leaves us in awe with the most interesting of objects we recognize as enormously aesthetically sophisticated, a quality implicitly recognized both within and without, that is, by herself and by ourselves - we on the other side of the silence.

Genesis. Joyce, during a meditation retreat, arrives at a quiet place within where she realizes there is no reason to be apart from her twin any longer. She resolves to reunite, to be made and to make whole. She brings her sister to live with her and realizes she will need to find a way to look after Judy during the day. Being creative herself, she recognizes that so may her twin be and hence enrolls her in the Creative Growth Art Center. And then there was nothing for the first two years, or was there?

In the film, very little if anything is made of Judy’s first engagement at the art center, that is in her disinterested scribbling phase in which she created “loop de loop” drawings and then quickly bored turned to playing solitaire. However, perhaps there is more to be made of this initial phase in hind sight considering the elemental features of her mature work - methodical repetitive encircling motion including in particular dimension, and finality, that is, in her immediate lack of any further interest in the form after its completion. These features were there in the first stages of her genesis as an “accidental” artist if one re-examines her “scribbles” not dismissively as uncontrolled mechanical activity for the sake of mere minimal compliance but instead as germinal. How so? They were thread-like in the way in which they looped back to repeat the controlled gesture. Most importantly of all, towards dimension, she always covered the whole surface and then turned the page over and continued on the other side. And when she was done. She was done.

Later, in time after she had made friends with Sylvia Seventy, a partner artist in residence, in my mind’s eye, she seems to have extended these expressive tactics, to have found a way to expand her interest in repetitive motion in terms of how it can accumulate form, texture, color and dimension. In a flash of recognition, inherently private but in the sense of an express communication, in the work’s exhibition and reception, in effect dialogic. Over the course of the rest of her public life as an artist, complex aesthetic objects never seen or known before, a new form of woven expressionism was born. She seems to have been most assuredly aware of all of this.

Such peregrinations seem to haunt the minds of those who either knew Judy Scott or appreciated her art and her stubborn determination and self-composure. For instance, for Tom di Maria and Stan Peterson, this raises a slightly sad sense of fascination and wonder, that while outsider art is neither dialogic nor autistic it does presuppose a communicative intent. Judy’s art inspires in Tom’s mind the notion of a “prepared spontaneity” and raises all manner of questions: Did she make objects or art? Was she unraveling and relating things that had been unable to talk about but wanted to express? Does it call into question whether we really know what it means to be creative? Certainly, as they more confidently feel, the creative use of repetitive gesture induces a sense of coherence that can acquire a formal and sophisticated power.

What we learn from the record of the context itself from which her work emerged, is that it and the work of the other artists there, is and was characterized by a special feeling of concentrated, focused energy in which ideas and inspiration move around like the paint dripped by chance from one painter’s work onto another’s. And yet despite Roger Cardinal’s fine grained thoughts on the quality of this experience, we might question his conclusion: Is this an urgent form of essential self-expression which we respond to because we are witnessing someone struggling to find their voice and consolidate themselves? Or is it something far more ineffable and in that - enduringly enigmatic.

Finally, What’s Under Your Hat? provides a deeply moving experience, a remarkable documentary of an artist’s life, of the embodied and externalized expression of the intense physical and emotional bond that exists between twins and of the power of art to heal. “I remember this cold space in the bed and found my mother in the kitchen . . . . I remember her teeth chattering . . . I did not get that she [Judy] would not be back . . . . there was a lot of pain and loss that was never dealt with . . . . it was as if she ceased to exist” - no more. Judy died wrapped in her sister’s arms after dinner one night, a metaphor as fitting as the continual act of wrapping sometimes twinned objects in the soft thread of the “perfect love” unspoken they shared.