Submit to Love artist Chris Miller reviews the William Scott retrospective exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London

Chris Miller is an artist and MA student, who attends Submit to Love, a supported studio in London. Art et al. asked Chris to go along to Studio Voltaire in London, to check out the major exhibition of William Scott, who attends the Creative Growth Art Center in California. The exhibition is the first significant survey of the artist’s prolific 30–year practice, including over 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures, from the early 1990s to the present.

Scott, in the blurb, is categorised as an untrained artist and is included in at least one book on outsider art. But some of the most expensive modern art by the likes of Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francis Bacon didn’t go to art school either. To split art into categories of untrained outsider art and ‘proper’ art seems to make no sense.

At Scott’s exhibition at the Studio Voltaire Gallery in Clapham, you are greeted by a sea of smiling happy black faces with Afro hairdos. With his paintings and objects, you enter his unique curious vision of how this broken world can and will be reborn. It is entirely appropriate that the gallery is a “converted” Methodist chapel, as is Stanley Spencer’s gallery in Cookham. As with Spencer, (and Christianity for that matter), the rebirth and resurrection of those seen as saints is central. Many of the saints Scott paints are living ones like Diana Ross, gospel singers, Kamala Harris, Barak Obama, and people from the Baptist church he has attended since birth. Some though have died, like Prince, George Floyd and Martin Luther King, but, through his paintings of them, he believes that they will be brought back to life and bring into being a better world for all.

William Scott, 2021, Installation view, Studio Voltaire. Photo Mark Blower

In Scott’s mind this rebirth is brought about by beings from outer space, the Skyline Friendly Organisation. Star Wars, the Afro-futurist musicians Sun Ra, and the band Earth Wind and Fire, and the beliefs of Scientology come to my mind. At this point, you may dismiss this as all too weird. But remember, you are entering into a fiercely individual private world, not a cult-like one. Before entering the exhibition, for a very short while, park your prejudices at the door and enter Scott’s mythical world, however strange it might be. And before you so quickly dismiss it as nonsense, think about the beliefs that you have that make your world a brighter more optimistic place - love, hope, health, the NHS or wellness. Aren’t these mythologies too?

The rebirth Scott seeks is of places as well as people. He regularly writes to the mayor of San Francisco in favour of building flats with balconies, without penthouses, and he builds models of them. Scott envisages a future music event called Praise Frisco. This is much more than just a gospel concert. Through it he believes that Frisco will miraculously emerge as a reborn city. He likes to describe himself not as an artist, but as an architect. His vision is of a reborn America, Africa and world. His letters, maps, and a globe form part of the exhibition, as does his Darth Vader mask and a video of Scott himself wearing it and walking about and talking. In my view, there isn’t a present-day figure that embodies irredeemable evil “better” than that of Vader. But in Scott’s overwhelmingly optimistic world, even Darth Vader is transformed into a figure for good.

One of my abiding images of the show is of smiling black figures with Afro haircuts. These make me think of the hair-styles of members of the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s, like Angela Davis. The Panthers were based in Oakland, California where Scott makes art at the Creative Growth studio. But the photos of the Panthers of that time are not of smiling faces. Their reaction to the racism of their time was one of armed resistance. I started to ponder the differences between the Panthers’ and Scott’s way of bringing about a better world.

As I left Scott’s world, I overheard two people say that the show was very humorous. But, for me, Scott is not at all being funny here. To be an architect of a reborn joyous world is a desperately serious task, not a humorous one. In the words of the song, “what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding”.

See this marvellous exhibition and enter Scott’s wonderful world for a short while, but as you re-enter yours - probably a more difficult and cynical one - I hope you take a little bit of Scott’s optimistic vision with you.

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Chris Miller is a 69-year-old white man, who had been a science teacher and community worker. Nine years ago he had a stroke and started going every week to Headway East London, and their art studio Submit to Love, to see the art people are making, talk about art, and sometimes do art himself.

Banner image (darkened and cropped): Detail of William Scott, 2021, Installation view, Studio Voltaire. Photo Mark Blower

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