The El Dorado Commission is an artist novel that centers around the idea of ‘The Artist as Ethnographic Surrealist’. An extension of Scott Elliott’s visual practice where he has acted as a facilitator for those who have incomplete or abandoned artworks, the text follows the journey of an individual acting as a conduit for one of the dead American romantic painters.
Continuing this idea of the facilitator as a sort of empty factory, through which information enters and exits freely, the novel’s central character adopts the voice of others as the text progresses and he becomes a sponge where something of the other sticks to him. As the novel progresses, through a process of fragmentation and a feeling of this being yet another assignment, it becomes clear that this person is in fact he who is commissioned to write the entire book. This novel is one of his commissions. – Scott Elliott