Still from I Want My Crown, 2024 video pojection
We saw several exhibitions, however, one stood out for us at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Modern One. I Want My Crown, amounts to a mini-retrospective of the work by internationally acclaimed Scottish artist Bruce McLean. For those not familiar with Bruce's work, it is a well-selected capsule exhibition picking out highlights from his long career. We were visiting the museum after the exhibition had been due to close on 1 October 2024, so it had been extended. And has now been extended still further to close on 23 November later this year.
Photographic sequence documenting a Pose Work for Plinths, an early ‘live action sculpture’
Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in the early 60s Bruce Mclean has worked consistently over six decades, producing his own solo projects, as well as numerous collaborations over this period. The exhibition coincides with his 80th birthday. He has helped re-define the role of the artist, and how an artist might inhabit what they do in the later half of the twentieth century. He was among an influential group of younger artists who came out of St Martin's in the mid 60s who turned to music and popular culture as they realised that fine art and particularly sculpture required a new kind of response across different media.
What unites Bruce’s work over the intervening six decades is a deadpan self-deprecating humour. He uses his humour critically to gently skewer the conventions of the art world that he is both a part of and yet as a Scot, also slightly separated from. His early solo performance and group work with the Nice Style Pose Band is represented in the exhibition. This involved Bruce and his collaborators dressed in diner jackets, posing among a stage full of plinths, striking stances that mimicked those adopted by smart people in social situations- using the vigour and performance moves of pop idols.
I first came across Bruce's work in one of the contemporary galleries I worked in during the 80s and 90s. At that stage he had worked across a broad selection of media – including photography, performance, painting, printmaking, film, and ceramics. Equally at home with all these creative outcomes, he was producing a lot of drawings while working on built commissions for architectural projects. These tended to be high-end developments providing components for interiors like a cocktail bar or café, or external features like a social space in a public square or a portico for an office block or restaurant.
Bruce McLean installation at Modern One
These purpose built and unapologetically sculptural interventions employed his breezy, visual vocabulary developed in his distinctive, calligraphic paintings. Do take a look at his paintings in the Scottish National Collection. If you don't know them, they are generous and lively with poured paint and drawn elements, drawn directly into the painted surface. There are only one or two in this exhibition. His architectural pieces were made by collaborating with top-flight fabricators using high quality finishes in steel and richly coloured terrazzo. The installations had a performative, theatrical presence. The images he embedded within the materials lent a humane, colourful elegance to what would otherwise have been chilly, prestigious social spaces. This work revealed Bruce’s fascination with human behaviour and the strange things people say or do.
Bruce McLean installation at Modern One
From the trivial to the outright silly, his visual language has exploited exaggerated gestures, conventions and inexplicable manners, and how we loose sense of ourselves, desperately wanting to be living an 'enviable life'. His work is strongest when encompassing the ‘theatre’ of social interaction, and the style and posturing of those who are intent on impressing people. So his work really is strangely apposite to the age of Instagram and TikTok.
Bruce McLean installation at Modern One
One of the more recent works, and a centre-piece to the show, is a film made with Suffolk-based artist and filmmaker Eileen Haring Woods. Its title 'I want my crown' is the title of the exhibition. It shows Bruce engaged in a solipsistic, shuffling dance, while gesturing toward the crown positioned on a shelf above head, just out of reach. The film was made during his exhibition at The Cut Halesworth, Suffolk in September 2023.
Visitors to the exhibition hear the soundtrack of the film echoing through the galleries as they approach the area where the exhibition is installed on one of the upper floors of the museum. It is gentle, witty and memorable. The I Want My Crown film neatly encapsulates McLean’s boundary-pushing work and confirms him as one of the most interesting and influential artists of his generation.
Bruce McLean has exhibited in many important exhibitions worldwide including When Attitudes become Form, Berne, New Spirit in Painting, RA London, Zeitgeist Berlin, and Documentas 6,7 and 8 and in the International Pavilion Venice Biennale. His work is in private and public collections all over the world, including Tate Gallery, Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, The V&A London and Dundee, The Arnolfini Gallery, The National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Arts Council and British Council collections.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Modern One, Edinburgh
About the author
Paul Barratt
Paul Barratt started working in contemporary art galleries in 1989, having graduated in Fine Art from Goldmsith’s, London University. He initially worked at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, one of the contemporary art dealers, who dominated the London art market in the 80s and 90s. He was approached by the Lisson Gallery to be gallery manager for the influential art dealer Nicholas Logsdail. This was followed by a short period in New York at Gladstone Gallery, to work for visionary art dealer Barbara Gladstone, working with the artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.
On his return to London, Paul secured a place on the postgraduate curatorial course at the Royal College of Art, to complete an MA. After graduation in 2001, he worked as an independent curator on several projects in Oslo, London, Brighton and Basel, before joining Paul Vater at his design agency Sugarfree in 2004. He has worked with Paul ever since.