Giles Round: The Form of the Book @ SWG3

You move down the line of Vs and say ‘VVVVVVVVVVVV…’ to yourself, trying to form it into a word. Nothing comes of it. Wondering if the italics should be pronounced differently – they're at a more acute angle after all – comes to no avail. The consonant repeats itself, stretching floor to ceiling in black lighting flex. It means nothing – an eviscerated nominalism that belies any hope of meaning. It becomes a vehicle, a sum of its parts that elaborates on those parts, hinting at something beyond its own physicality but stopping short.

Past the long line of Vs is a field of suffixes: letters that give no indication of their intention, signs that refuse to be significant. The INGs and THs scattered around in bronze are monuments to a distant Modernism (still worthy of its capital M) but empty, its depths plumbed, reduced to a lifestyle choice. A Modernist chair sits by the sculptures to remind you of this.

At the exhibition’s heart a sack cloth implores that the work isn’t the problem, it’s you. And it’s right, the forms are there with or without linguistic basis, the baggage brought to it equally enchants and discourages – shapes are put together then meaning refuted. The work hangs on language, but doesn’t rely on it.

Round’s current work uses language as an excuse, playing with the mechanics to arrive at Euclidean conclusions. It is an exhibition based on all the wrong rules for all the right reasons, and it can do without language. That which it reduces makes for terrible literature, but an intelligent, intriguing and very successful exhibition.