SCOTT HUG
Text by Aimee Walleston
Photography by Adrian Gaut
In Robert Musil’s fin-de-siècle novel The Man Without
Qualities, the protagonist, Ulrich, is a mathematician
whose belief in evaluating human existence
through quantitative information psychically predicts
our culture’s current dependence on statistical data
to define our own needs, interests, and desires.
Musil wrote, “Every answer [Ulrich] gives is only a
partial answer, every feeling only an opinion, and
he never cares what something is, only ‘how’ it is.”
With the current primacy of technology and science
over sociology, philosophy, and non-pharmaceutical
psychology, we have, in essence, become a society
without qualities. Every nuance of individual human
existence—most particularly human happiness—is
calculated as a zero-sum game: one looks at where
one falls on the chart to assess whether one is successful,
healthy, interesting, wealthy, ad infinitum.
This is just the type of zombie groupthink that
begs to be poked at with a large stick, since we are
in essence letting non-human methods of cognition
stand in for honest thought, emotion, and passion.
Enter New York–based artist Scott Hug, carrying said
stick. Raised all-American in rural Missouri, Hug was
trained in painting as a boy by a man he describes
as “Bob Ross–esque,” as well as a traditional Tole
painter. Hug’s artistic proclivities were sweetly
nurtured by his family, and he studied at the Art Institute
of Chicago and worked as a printmaker in Paris
before making his way to New York, where he earned
a master’s degree from Pratt. Here, Hug has, since
the early ’00s, been a man-about-town, producing the
inventive and much-adored magazine K48 and gaining
acclaim in late 2002 for Teenage Rebel: The Bedroom
Show, a lived-in installation the artist created at
John Connelly Presents before taking it to agnès b.’s
Galerie du jour in Paris. He has also curated several
well-received shows, the most recent being a group
show, “Out of Order,” which dealt with themes of disarrangement,
mysticism, and internal logic.
In recent years, Hug has produced a body of work
that repurposes pop culture visuals and texts, inviting
his viewers to look a little more closely at the celebrity-
driven news that consumes print and Internet
media. His Page Six Heads, shown in 2006, are a sly
revamping of Andy Warhol’s well-known celebrity silk
screens. In Hug’s cheeky images, monochrome popcolor
canvases are screened with halftone images of
celebrities and their original accompanying headlines,
all culled from the notorious Post gossip column.
Ripped from their traditional home, the pairings of
words and images (a photo of Jake Gyllenhaal is
matched with the headline “Tight scrutiny”) strike one
as arbitrary and strange. The pieces work together
to push lovers of these mindless gossip columns
to examine their love of celebrity with a little more
conscious thought. What are we doing when we gaze
endlessly at these stars, so much so that images and
information about our media darlings is often more
important than actual news events? Whose life are we
really trying to live when we seek to look at people we
don’t know rather than those we love and hold dear?
In his latest body of work, Million Dollar Spit in the
Ocean, Hug deviates from his earlier focus on celebrity
to take on the formal elegance of the pie chart.
On sheets torn from vintage National Geographic
magazines, the artist paints one single chart, in hues
that offset the found image. The statistics each one
depicts are unclear, bringing to mind an important
ideological query: do statistics even matter? And
what do statistics really tell us? Quantitative analysts
are becoming aesthetic masterminds, and we are
so under their sway that we can barely do anything
autonomous. At times, it seems as though this type
of information is gathered with such fiat and force—
particularly when it relates to individual experience—
solely to make those who don’t fit comfortably in the
biggest slice of the pie feel even more out of place.
The phrase “know thyself” becomes more about
knowing one’s cholesterol level and number of sex
partners than it does about analyzing—or actually
feeling—the things that make you an individual (or the
things that make you want to have sex or eat triplecrème
cheeses). And therefore the artwork that Hug
is making right now, beyond its pleasing aesthetic, is
important because it asks us to question what these
statistical analytics are really telling us. If eighty percent
of people wish for a “better body,” say, what does
that really indicate? Is it our incessant need to find amelioration
in self-loathing, our devotion to the superficial,
our need to define ourselves from the outside in, or the
fact that the quasi-qualitative appellation of “better”
has no real meaning at all? This frustrating obfuscation
is precisely what makes Hug’s repurposing of statistical
data akin to Toto throwing open the curtain on the
Wizard of Oz. Perhaps all those endless percentages
are really nothing more than another roadmap toward
a life less known and less knowing.
