IT’S a bright morning and I’m on Oxford Street (the other one) near the Clyde where Dundee-born artist Scott Myles has his studio.

He’s talking to me about gifts. Gifts and what they imply, gifts as a means of exchange and participation in a finer society, perhaps one envisaged by Alasdair Gray when he asked that we “work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”.

Or as Myles wonders: How might we tend kinship?

Art asks questions, asks us what is our place in the world, and the one we’re asking today is: Why should we never look a gift horse in the mouth? I doubt you’re in the habit of staring into horses’ mouths unless you’re a vet, so why do we persist in saying this?

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The phrase suggests we shouldn’t criticise a gift – even if you don’t like it, even if it’s a horse with rotten teeth or the guitar shaped CD holder my dad bought me from TK Maxx as a surprise and I went, “WTF!”. Don’t do that. Embrace the horse, the gift.

Anthropologists argue that indigenous peoples of the Pacific north-west got there first in thinking about gifts and their meaning with their tradition of potlatch, a feast of gift-giving with its rituals of communal generosity – these inspire Myles. Theirs was a society that asked insistently: How can we support one another?

All of which has a startlingly contemporary relevance when we consider the difficulties of arts funding in Scotland.

Myles tells me about the recent challenges Creative Scotland has had in sourcing money.

The £6.6 million Open Fund For Individuals was closed but then reopened after an outcry.

I’m shocked when Myles tells me the number of applicants. Many will be left sorely disappointed. As one of the more successful Scottish artists, Myles knows how important it is to secure shows.

Currently he has work on display at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow until February 2025 and he kindly goes through the works with me and their import, their resonance, their gift.

The exhibition is called Head In A Bell which gives an immediate hint to one of its major themes – music.

We begin with Instrument For The People Of Glasgow, a synthesiser rig made from gifted modules that in turn will be gifted back to GLOSS – the Glasgow Library Of Synthesized Sound, a community-based organisation which aims to improve access to electronic instruments.

This, one hopes, will continue to inspire young musicians, and extend the city’s globally recognised contributions to pop music.

Created in collaboration with Oscar Prentice-Middleton, the instrument channels a live sound feed called Air Is Moving from GoMA’s plant room and so visitors are listening to a modified version of Glasgow itself, the shifts in ambient sonics.

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There's also a large painting of GoMA’s air conditioning unit, neatly called Able Inhaled, an anagram of the show’s title.

Again, Myles’s work talks about circulation, and the gift that keeps giving …

There’s a stack of free posters referencing the gadgetry. The city’s guitars and amps, drums and wires, now exchanged for knobs and switches. The posters are another gift that pleased the tourists no end the day I visited, many leaving with several rolled under the arm.

Elsewhere there’s humour with a video work called Revolving Upside Down (VAG) where Myles is seen doing an inverted break dance in the Vancouver Art Gallery as if he’s on the ceiling, seemingly above a portrait of an upright tree.

Art being about questions. What we’re asked here is: which way is up? Our retinal images are inverted back by our brains begging the jokey query – might we live in an antipodal world?

Another work, Grey Box, references the main historical influence on Glasgow’s music scene – the Velvet Underground. Allan Massie once said something to the effect that Glasgow is America’s Eastern-most city and musically there’s truth in this. Just consider the impact the band New York City had on Glasgow punks, and how the scene sustained itself.

Grey Box, with its red and blue ribbon-like straps, recalls the Velvets song The Gift, in which John Cale tells us about a who man parcels himself up and sends himself to his girlfriend with unforeseen results. Presents are not always welcome.

Lastly Myles talks to me about Hill Street, a found object, a ballet barre coated in gold leaf. The work has personal resonances – Hill Street in the city centre has long been the address for many Glaswegian artists.

I dare to suggest it might reference an aid, a banister, for climbing the steep hill from Sauchiehall Street to the Glasgow School of Art. But then I’m ageing and wonder, more and more as Warhol did, about how I’ll get from A to B and back again.

Head In A Bell is a super generous show. Accept the gift.