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revieWS sCoTT Myles
Scott MyleS: MiSSing WordS
The Modern InsTITuTe aT sadIe Coles hQ, london
1 deCeM ber – 12 January
On one wall of Scott Myles’s first London solo show, Missing Words, a name (aka Sympathy for the Devil, 1968), in which the director attacked
screenprint of the same name (all works 2007) bears the legend ‘WORDS’. civilised values and cinematic norms with anarchic experimentation. What
Literalising its title, only half of each letter has been depicted, though we direction this association might take one in seems intentionally opaque
can easily fill in the blanks. On the opposite wall, the frame of a bay window – Myles’s music culture gambits can feel more like math-rock than rock
has been hung, turned 90 degrees onto its side; while the side panels have ’n’ roll – except perhaps for the fact that the film was, according to its
been covered with ugly grey paint and splodges of yellow, this prosaic director, misunderstood (it was panned on release), reinforcing problems
triptych’s centrepiece is filled by a mirror. Reflecting the self-enclosed of interpretation and perceived value.
world of the gallery, the mirrored window suggests the introspective nature Elsewhere the forms are literally bookish. Twins (2007) comprises
of appreciating contemporary art and, like the screenprint, points to the two triangular bookshelves placed shelf-to-shelf as mirror images of each
importance of the viewer in interpreting work: key issues in a show set up to another – objects stripped of their practical purpose; and a comment
tackle, among other things, how we attribute meaning. on the self-referential nature of contemporary art, perhaps. The shelves
As such there’s much interplay between surface and substance. are painted with a marbling technique reminiscent of that used for the
Flaunting a titular come-on, Hello It’s Me is a rectangular block daubed in endpapers of Victorian novels, and this marbling also ripples incongruously
splashy white paint that looks more like a leftover bit of gallery architecture across two square aluminium planes that extend from the walls, almost
than sculpture, but is, as its labelling tells us, a bronze. Similarly, One Plus One bracketing off one corner of the gallery. Myles has taken the marbling full
appears to be the frame of a heavy hinged window, covered in blackboard circle, tracking its journey from sculptural medium to decoration, then back
paint, but is actually light-as-air cast aluminium. This seeming found object onto sculpture. Evoking formal exchanges and strange visual translations,
has undergone a transformative process, cast and reproduced as art, and as their idiosyncratic mystery feels as jaunty as it is unsolvable. Skye Sherwin
such now invites the viewer to take an imaginative leap through its raggedy-
looking frame into a world of ideas that has currency over and above the
downgraded materials.
While this last work’s title works as a functional description of the
Missing Words, 2007 (installation view, the
double frames of the window, folding together like a hardback book, it is
Modern Institute at sadie Coles hQ, london).
Courtesy the artist and the Modern Institute/
also a reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s Rolling Stones movie of the same Toby Webster ltd, Glasgow
ArtrevieW 156
march_REVIEWS.indd 156 5/2/08 13:50:31
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