ABSTRACT
The late sculptor Judith Scott has been consistently branded as an outsider artist by a number of art institutions, critics, and writers. She is considered so outside the conventions of art that art historian John MacGregor insists that Scott possesses no concept of art, no understanding of its meaning or function. Literary critic Tobin Siebers, who helped establish some of the fundamental discursive language in the field known as disability studies, argues that Scott’s cognitive disability puts “pressure on intention as a standard for identifying artists.” Scott’s creative process remains mysterious in that she did not articulate her intentions through language. In The Creative Mind, Bergson presents a discursive approximation of intuition, itself something that can only be approached as a shadow image since intuition is incapable of being analyzed discursively. Artist Claire Falkenstein took up Bergson’s philosophy of intuition while an undergraduate at the University of California.
