A celebratory display to mark Bruce McLean’s 80th birthday opens tomorrow (Saturday 29 June) at Modern One in Edinburgh.
Taking over room 20, Bruce McLean: I Want My Crown traces the Glasgow-born artist’s humorous, provocative and engaging six-decade long inquiry into sculpture. Through works made across a range of media including photography, performance, painting, printmaking, film, and ceramics, the one room display invites you to challenge your thinking about sculpture and expand your ideas of what art can be.
Sparked by childhood curiosity and challenging what he had been taught about sculpture as a student at St Martin’s School of Art in the 1960s, McLean’s artistic career has been characterised by his desire to break the rules. Encompassing both wry satire and an earnest inquiry into the nature of art, his work is known for its intelligence, as much as its humorous and rebellious spirit.
The works in the display question many of our traditional assumptions about what sculpture should be, who it is for, how it is made, and how it is shown. In so doing, McLean is also asking broader questions about the role of art in our everyday lives, and in particular the role of the artist.
An early target of his was the leading British sculptor Henry Moore, who gained international celebrity status in the post-war period of British sculpture.
McLean’s photographic work Fallen Warrior (1969/2011) is an image of the artist ‘falling’ onto a ‘pedestal’, an idea he picks up again in Pose Work for Plinths (1971) in which McLean, as a living sculpture, tries out a number of poses across three plinths, the traditional means of showing sculptural works.
The piece references Moore’s own sculpture Falling Warrior (1956–7), in which a male figure clutching a shield is shown falling, heroically, on the battlefield.
Challenges to hierarchy and status are constant themes of his work. When, aged 27, he was offered a solo exhibition at Tate Gallery, London, he seized on it as an opportunity to make a radically subversive statement about art world systems, conventions, and power structures.
Wryly titling the exhibition King for a Day, it comprised a list of ideas for 1000 prospective artworks, which McLean presented as a one-day ‘retrospective’ in the form of a catalogue.
Multiple copies of this catalogue will be displayed, allowing visitors to pore over McLean’s ‘homages’, ‘studies’, and ‘serial’ works – his parodic take on the contemporary art world’s continual need to define and categorise artworks.
Decades after King for a Day, McLean revisited the theme with I Want My Crown (2013). This video installation, projected large-scale in the gallery, brings the artist into the space and shows him dancing to a 1973 song of the same title by British musician Kevin Coyne as he gestures to a crown sculpture on a shelf above his head.
Another recurrent theme in McLean’s art is that behaviour – both private and public – is a function of the environment around us.
This notion takes centre stage in the architectural projects he has worked on over the years. In 1994, initiated by Glasgow City Council, a brief was set for a redevelopment of Glasgow’s Argyle Street.
McLean’s hyper-real proposal to turn the street into a bustling interactive ‘theatre’ won the competition in 1996, though the project was never realised. Visitors to I Want My Crown can enjoy the paper collages that lay out McLean’s playful vision.
The proposal included an Irn Bru bar, a Tunnocks Tower offering periscope views of the city, and a helium-filled fabric cloud sculpture to shelter those below from the Scottish rain.
Also featured is Constructed Painting (2024), comprised of six paintings made between 1990 and 2014, each stacked and propped against the gallery wall like the components of a large-scale collage.
The paintings reference sculptures by well-known artists of the past and present. Enlarging photocopied images of their sculptures, McLean made cardboard cutouts, their huge scale signalling their overbearing influence on his early work and art school training.
Staging different groupings in his studio, McLean photographed the cutouts, then made paintings after the photographs. The result is a hybrid between sculpture, performance, photography and painting. Testament to McLean’s dynamic creative energy, the configuration of these paintings will change multiple times during the display’s run.
Ever the innovator, McLean continues at 80 to question and expand the meaning and resonance of sculpture, allowing it to remain as vital and relevant for another generation.
Bruce McLean said: “I’d like to thank Leila Riszko, Simon Groom, and all the staff at the National Galleries of Scotland for putting together this show with great care, sensitivity and patience. Good work!
“My next project will be Passing a Law Sculpture. The law will be that every 17 year old person in Britain goes to art school for a one year foundation course focusing on drawing in all its many aspects. Everything in the world is drawn before it is created.”
Leila Riszko, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “We’re really excited about this fantastic opportunity to bring the creative energy of Bruce’s work to the attention and admiration of a new generation.
“It has been an absolute pleasure to collaborate with him on such a dynamic presentation of his work – as befits a celebratory exhibition in honour of the artist’s 80th birthday!”
Bruce McLean: I Want My Crown is yours to discover at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One from Saturday 29 June 2024. Find out more online Bruce McLean | I Want My Crown | National Galleries of Scotland