- Venue
- New Art Gallery Walsall
- Location
- West Midlands
The chip on Bruce McLean’s shoulder is often found to take the form of a wedge of cheese, but it is one that should give us all gustatory pleasure. For, as a recent show at The New Art Gallery Walsall demonstrates, his thematic repertoire of social invective and artistic irreverence contains ingredients which we can all recognise.
You are guaranteed a laugh, however vicarious, when viewing work by McLean, and the latest piece in this exhibition displays his keen script writing skills. Soup. A Concept Consommé is a short film which presents us with a couple dining at what may be taken to be an upmarket restaurant, though the focus is entirely on the diners, the dinner table and the somewhat aloof waiter, there being no indication of the room itself. This accentuates the ‘theatre’ of restaurant-going and parallels the self-importance manifested by the male of the couple. His initial demands, for a “nice, simple lunch”, and then his increasing frustration when presented with items that don’t match his request, provide McLean with seasoned artistic targets. For a Henri Laurens is greeted with indifference, a Brancusi head might be preferable if it were turned upside down so as to more resemble an early Jeff Koons (basketball), and a succession of seated figures by Henry Moore, doubling in number and increasing in size encompass the final insult. McLean’s choice of Moore as an indigestible dish of the day has allusions to one of his earliest notable performance pieces, Pose Work for Plinths (1971), and the humour here is just as incisive, if a little gentler. The diner is eventually gratified with a bowl of soup, despite the fact that someone has written “c**t” in this “concept consommé”.
The occasion for these choice cuts of McLean’s oeuvre is a revisit to From Spaghetti alle Vongole Twice, a large carved plaster head dating from 1994 and in the collection of the New Art Gallery. The head, flat in profile and elongated, lies on its side, supported by two orange painted metal girders, which remind one of nothing so much than severed portions of a sculpture by Anthony Caro, another of McLean’s sacred cows, here comprehensively butchered. The face has the apparent simplicity of a Matisse musician, and the air of a Cocteau naïf, its mass belied by the permeability of the plaster. Its mouth is open seemingly in the act of speaking, but any utterances remain silent.
In contrast the approach to the exhibition has a wall on which a plethora of ungrammaticised continual sentences and phrases shout at the viewer in painted bold capitals. One statement is followed by another idea running into a surreal image. Full comprehension is denied, if only because the text is obscured by four framed mixed media works, incorporating print, collage, paint and handwriting. Flashes of meaning are readable in the block of text, such as,
…..THE SIGNAL OF THE TORTOISE THE NEED TO RETURN TO SUPERFICIALITY AND STYLE….
…..A HOSE OF ART A HOUSE OF HATS A HOUSE OF TRANQUILIT[framed print hung here]
…..NO PROJECTS NO IDEAS PLACES FOR IDEAS TO DEVELOP DRAWINGS AND TEXTS DISCUSS THE IDEA OF BUILDINGS….
…..A TRAFFIC JAM WITH REAL CARS A TRAFFIC JAM THEME PARK….
The whole spiel has kinship with the energetic and unrestrained manner in which McLean tackles much of the two dimensional work here on view. Flying Cup, c.1996, a silkscreen print, has a dark, black background over which various striking contrasted colours of random shape have been strewn, surrounding a blue monochrome photograph of a seated nude. The figure is cropped so as to deny any possible identification, but it is clear that the flying cup of the title – green, instantaneously brushed to appear as painted – is about to connect with its head.
The silkscreen print Spaghetti alle Vongole Twice, 1995, from which the plaster head is perhaps derived, suggests half-glimpsed linear faces on plain coloured backgrounds. Lying in front of these is the roughly outlined ovoid face of almond shaped eyes and sketched nose, remaining silent amongst the tittle-tattle of fellow diners. These faces are seen with varying similarity in many of the artist’s works.
A slightly later screenprint, Facade Park of 1998, reiterates the stream of consciousness thought in a way akin to the wall text, describing the design for a theme park:
…..to the side and down we have a slope /play place for serious and seminal slipping, sliding, strolling, skiing, sledging. At the bottom a track for sloping, loping and post-modern perambulating, walk way works, pre-war walking modernist stalking…..
The accompaniment to this assertively typed text is an image of equal freneticism, a vividly coloured design for the ‘Facade Park’, directional arrows and rapidly made notes allowing no rest in maintaining this semblance of pretence.
Also included in the exhibition are poster designs, preparatory drawings, collages and samples for (drinking) bars, and works published in book form. Along with the extensive selection of geometric, glazed, slab-built jugs, the range and productivity of McLean’s output is amply indicated.
A photographic inkject print of 2010 exemplifies McLean’s enterprise. Having a direct relation to the film it shows a couple dining at a small square table, their movements blurred and semi-transparent through multiple exposure. The woman’s dress is affixed with white squares perhaps suggesting the points at which a film camera would pick up the body’s movement against a blue screen, and the whole image is one of animated gesture. In the overlaid succession of bodily positions there is possibly a reference to Muybridge, who gets checked in the wall text referred to above, but the title alone gives the tenor of the artist’s objective: Waiter, waiter there’s a sculpture in my soup; a Henry Moore seated warrior in yours and a Julio Gonzalez Cactus Man in mine, hhmm.
Even in works requiring such deliberation as this computerised print McLean cannot relinquish the activity and energy so obviously inherent in his drawings and paintings. Although the objects of his disparagement are the complacency and unquestioning acceptance of social conventions and artistic canon, he utilises these situations with a bravura that reflects back their conceit. Neither is he unaware of the counter criticism which his work might easily invite; an early performance piece of 1971 was entitled There’s A Sculpture on My Shoulder – before the wedge of cheese became such a staple of his artistic diet. This small but representative exhibition offers a pertinent juncture to consider the customs and dictates by which so much of our society is permeated. One looks out of the fourth floor gallery window where the exhibition is situated, down to the retail park and bargain outlet at street level below, and, despite the fact that you’re presently in an emporium of art, you think how convenient it would be to pop in there and buy something on your way home.
