by Johanna Siegler // Oct. 28, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Weird.
Bruce McLean’s artistic career effectively began with a grand act of noncompliance. In 1972, at just 27, the Glaswegian artist was offered a solo exhibition at the Tate. McLean, to whom an exhibition at the anointed art institution equated to the canonization of and thus the death of an artist’s career, decided to stage a one-day “retrospective” titled ‘King for a Day and 999 other pieces, works, things, etc.’ and promptly declared himself done. The show consisted of a tongue-in-cheek catalogue listing 1,000 fictional prospective artworks in a conceptual ambush against the museum’s aura of importance. Arranged in a grid on the gallery’s floor, each of the thousand editions was available for purchase by visitors. In a twistedly dialectical movement, the artist’s presence within the space would soon vanish in conjunction with the dissemination of the small, black volumes. This intermittent exit from the art world canon, crowning oneself “king” for a day, then vanishing for the moment, set the tone for a career spent puncturing art’s pretensions with sharp wit. Edinburgh’s Modern One retrospective ‘Bruce McLean: I Want My Crown’–organized on occasion of the artist’s 80th birthday–pointedly picks up from this founding wink. Rather than attempting to smoothe McLean into the pantheon, the exhibition sets out to frame him as the perennial saboteur of the art world discourse’s common sense, poking fun at materials, display protocols and the social and institutional hierarchies that keep the score. The show celebrates McLean’s entertaining and eccentric practice by bringing together works across his multi-medial praxis within a single, partitioned room, but in doing so it paradoxically risks neutralizing the distinct and often subtle critical poignancy that made it notable in postwar Britain’s art world.
From the late 1960s onward, McLean’s work has consistently challenged the definitions and material expectations of traditional sculpture. Training at Glasgow and St. Martin’s Schools of Art during the early 1960s, he sought to escape the perceived academicism of his contemporaries and teachers. Rather than welding steel or casting bronze like many celebrated postwar sculptors, the young artist started constructing makeshift arrangements out of everyday materials to spawn visual phenomena, and then casually disposing of them once a photograph had been taken, ensuring that the image or idea outlived the object. Consider ‘Landscape Painting’ (1968), a work that exists now as a color photograph with text, recording a quasi-performative action on a Scottish shoreline: In a typically deadpan fashion, the artist exhibited a “landscape painting” by dripping watercolor onto long strips of paper spread across the rocks. In Edinburgh’s Modern One, a single color photograph shows the painted strip of paper snaking through the craggy Arran landscape, emblazoned with its own title as if mocking the earnest tradition of romantic plein-air painting. Via the stark photographic documentation that reads as characteristically ostensible, setting the white paper serpent against the saturated, rust-brown terrain, the work, moreover, addressed the solemn machismo of 1960s Land Art. While performing a meager antithesis to the often sumptuous earthworks or theatrical site-specific arrangements of the time, McLean did, however, not cheap out on the photographic document that, as he was greatly aware, would later become operative in an artwork’s eventual mythologization.
In subsequent works, McLean probed artistic authorship and the (im)materiality of the modern artwork using the landscape as a stage, often turning sculptures and their afterlifes into a kind of visual tautology or joke. ‘Glass on Glass on Glass on Grass’ (1969), epitomizes McLean’s often sardonic use of photography. Three layers of glass resting on a lawn is hardly the stuff of traditional sculpture, and that is exactly the mischief. The only solid form that the work ultimately takes is the photographic print presented (ironically) in a proper frame, encasing it under yet more glazing, and demonstrating that the grand rituals of exhibition and conservation are perhaps a bit ridiculous when your sculpture might just be a patch of wet paper or a pane of glass on the lawn.
Another through-line of McLean’s oeuvre is an explicit assault on the perceivedly sacrosanct champions of modern sculpture, most notably Henry Moore. In the late 1960s, Moore’s monumental bronzes dominated public art. They enshrined the artist as the great patriarch of British sculpture, internationally celebrated and virtually untouchable. To the young McLean, they epitomized an art establishment ripe for ridicule. His early conceptual works are pointed send-ups of Moore’s legacy. ‘Waiter, Waiter, There’s a Sculpture in My Soup’ (1969-70) features McLean cheekily inserting a photograph of Moore’s ‘Locking Piece’ (1963-4) into a soup bowl. In the series ‘Pose Work for Plinths’ (1971), captured in a grid of 15 black-and-white photographs, McLean, dapper in a suit and tie, adopts a variety of exaggerated reclining poses across three plinths of different heights. Each photo shows him in a new configuration of limbs and ennui, parodying the poised grace of Henry Moore’s famous reclining figures and the self-importance of academic sculpture displays. ‘Fallen Warrior’ (1969) takes the joke into outright farce. In this photograph (shot in Barnes, the artist’s longtime stomping ground), McLean appears supine on his back atop a chunk of plinth by the edge of a pond. The image is a direct parody of Moore’s ‘Falling Warrior’ (1956-57), which depicted a dying hero figure sprawling across a base, clutching a shield. By reduplicating Moore’s composition with a real body and a leftover pedestal (borrowed from the Tate and never returned), McLean makes the “monumental” suddenly human, comic and a bit pathetic, turning a symbol of heroism into an awkward pratfall.
McLean’s performative provocations soon extended beyond one-off photographs into the realm of time-based art and social satire. Not content to merely imitate statues, he was also keen to expose the “theater” of the art world itself. In 1971-72, with the group Nice Style, he staged mock “art performances” that were closer to comedy skits or rock concerts, except with posing instead of music. Infamously, hardly anyone attended some of their live actions, such as the spoof fashion-show ‘High Up on a Baroque Palazzo,’ (1974) yet the photographic evidence of these happenings traveled widely. Further, the 1978 work ‘The Object of the Exercise’ turns the bourgeois living room into farce about domestic propriety while McLeans artist book ‘Dream Work’ (1985), staged by the curators in a vitrine in front of his photographic works, colorfully satirizes Thatcher-era aspirational leisure-class imagery. That impulse surfaces again in the unrealized ‘Argyle Street Project’ (1994-96), whose collages reimagine Glasgow’s shopping street as a stage that could be vivified by the “sculpture” of urban life. Exhibited as drawings, however, the endeavour remained hypothetical. Bookending this arc are two emblematic video works. In ‘Soup (A Concept Consommé)’ (2010), a haughty couple in an upmarket restaurant are served modernist sculptures from Moore to Brâncuși and in the titular self-portrait ‘I Want My Crown’ (2013), a now 68 year-old McLean dances toward a cartoonish crown just out of reach, performing an artist’s desire for the art worlds accolades, while exposing the accolade as prop.
McLean’s satirical jabs, one learns when reading the short exhibition texts, were always referential, deriving their punch from what and whom they critiqued. In the context of this exhibition, however, these referents risk growing obscure. Half a century on, a younger viewer may, for example, not immediately recognize that McLean’s awkward tumbles parody Moore’s ‘Falling Warrior.’ The curators do provide wall texts that offer contexts on some satirized objects, so the informed jokes survive, often just barely, via didactic aid. But as the referents recede, making postwar art history’s heroic sculptors legible mostly as legend, the satire risks boomeranging. The hazier the target, the more the exhibition rehabilitates precisely the grandeur McLean set out to deflate. McLean’s more recent works reflect on this vexed economy of legacy. In the large painting ‘The Generation Game of Sculpture, a cuddly toy, a… no I’ve said that’ (2010), the artist tackles the pedagogical lineage of sculpture. Across the canvas, cartoonish sculptural forms share the stage with silkscreened images of leaping hares (a direct nod to the late-career bronzes of Barry Flanagan), one of McLean’s contemporaries. The painting’s title invokes ‘The Generation Game,’ a kitschy game show, hinting that academic sculpture training is a repetitious contest of copying one’s elders.
To an informed visitor, it is easily indicated that McLean constantly probed the big conceptual fixtures and central art historical debates of his time, including the “expanded field” of sculpture, the dematerialization of the art object and the increasing emphasis on participation, all while deliberately refusing the posture of the solemn theorist. The result is that his works operate on a comical register that might appear intuitive on contact, yet is contingent on careful contextualization. For all the curatorial good intentions, the show’s brevity and compartmentalization do McLean few favors. Fitted into the gallery’s “Room 20,” a single partitioned space made accessible by two staircases, the selection of greatest hits plucked from a much larger continuum often feel fragmentary and the leaps across media and decades can appear jarring. The viewer is pulled in multiple directions, encountering McLean’s jokes without always catching their setup. Less conceptually ambitious ceramic pieces appear even more muted by their poised presentation in spacious vitrines, while the documentation of ‘King for a Day’ is relegated to a small display. In a sense, this disjointedness mirrors the eclectic nature of McLean’s career, but it also undercuts deeper engagement. Modern One’s structuring of his practice into three acts retrofits a teleology onto a practice that thrived on detours and thematic reprisals. When curatorial emphasis, here, tilts into optics, granting the most eye-catching or weird objects the most real estate, these decisions threaten to jeopardize a flattening of the artist’s “jester” persona.
McLean’s 1969 stunt-retrospective at the Tate, with its list of 1,000 prospective works whose very headings (among them various ‘homages’, ‘studies’, ‘serial works’) parodied the museum’s compulsive nomenclature, exemplifies the artist’s critique of institutional mechanisms of classification. But without them, what exactly, one might ask, is the target of his satire, and does it still matter in the absence of confrontation? In the end, ‘I Want My Crown’ is a thought-provoking, if imperfect, tribute. It is at its best when McLean’s works themselves seize the curatorial reins. At the very end of the retrospective, just before descending the staircase into the main gallery, a strange but ingenious little gesture does exactly that. Tucked away almost in a blind spot, the deceivingly simple 2024 photographic work ‘A Photograph of a Fruit Cake on Top of a Wardrobe Photographed in Someone’s Attic (which doesn’t fit in the vitrine),’ subtly literalizes the gap between art object, document and display apparatus that surfaces as McLean’s most sustained critical operation. The artist, perhaps aware of the show’s predicaments, appears to be getting the last laugh.
Exhibition Info
National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One
Bruce McLean: ‘I Want My Crown’
Exhibition: Sept. 11–Nov. 23, 2025
nationalgalleries.org
75 Belford Rd, Edinburgh EH4 3DR, UK, click here for map
