- Venue
- Cooper Gallery Dundee
- Location
- Scotland
Knife Edge Press, a handsome, theatrical and precisely arranged installation on the print work and artists’ book collaborations of art critic Mel Gooding and artist Bruce McLean forms a continuum to the exhibition of artists print and ephemera “a book is a performance” at Dundee’s Visual Research Centre presented over the course of April and May 2013. That show, co curated by Sophia Hao and the Centre for Artists’ Books, revealed the engagement artists have with books as a form of display, as a mode of distribution, and experimentation while it employed the title extract from a Bruce McLean’s work – Notes Toward a Global Opera, 1998. This couplet of shows, a general overview on print in the context of a very specific examination, reinforces curator Hao’s interests in meaning, adaptation and transformation: artists materials and their choreography across spaces, pages, screens, copies, time and objects.
On view are two projects: the Knife Edge Press imprint and Invisible Residency which traces a daily conversation, seen as a giant projection and photocopies, on process, reference, function and conversation by email between Gooding and McLean. The first dialogue here discusses paintings as sculptures, an arrangement of paintings as an installation, the works as a theatrical cast and a suggestion of the idea that a “sculpture is a studio”. A bridging third space is dedicated to an audio interview and further ephemera, personal pieces, press reviews (interestingly one that positions McLean between texts on painter Ian Davenport and Pablo Picasso), Polaroids and poetry.
Connecting all these spaces and displays is the artists hand, marks, blobs and notes, and the artists’ sense of humour, jokes, laughter, and a call, repeated, for socialising, drinking, eating, talking, learning, seen most vividly through the work Invisible Academy, 1992. A free school on open attitudes, process and punch line, a manifesto that has insistent questions about “What makes something funny?”and “What makes something art?”
Throughout this entire examination is a striking connection between text and colour: “dream” is green, “ladder” is purple, “jug” is mauve, a “scone” is yellow, “library” is ivy. Present then is a kind of synesthesia, a perceptual mix of sensations, a conjoining of the senses: a blob of red ink takes on the form of a Japanese flag, a leaf and the veins of a heart, while notations on music, particularly improvisation and jazz, are set close by.
Knife Edge Press is a time piece. It is shaped by an extraordinary career, and their are hints of entrances and exits, beginnings and endings, and stopping and age. Along the way are allusions to Lawrence Weiner texts (seen in the piece Shadows, 2002, on the formless, architecture, dimension and categorising, most of which you obliterate with your presence as you stand in front of the work’s video projector), Gilbert and George performance and posing, George Wylie’s ideas on humour, inquiry and labour, Alasdair Gray’s elsewhere of words, stories, illustrations and fantasy, and the “creativity of the everyday” everyone-is-an-artist dictations of Joseph Beuys, even the absurdity of Ivor Cutler and Spike Milligan.
This project is rooted in history but isn’t historical, rather it depicts the activities of an artist and his collaborations, his method and persona, that flagged up the conditions for a new generation of artists, particularly the YBAs.
