Bruce McLean

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Bruce McLean

Bruce McLean: In the past I was very happy working in art colleges. I am not so happy now because of all the administration and because of all the uncreative bureaucrats that are taking over everywhere. But I get a tremendous amount from working with students because that is a two-way thing. I have made thousands of artworks with students over the last twenty years. They may no longer exist but that does not matter.

PH: Why do you think different art colleges over the years become known for producing good graduates? One year it is the Royal College or Leeds, then it is Glasgow or Goldsmiths, or Belfast. Does it come down to competition, or hype, or healthy rivalry?

BM: It is partly that. But I believe an art school is only as good as the bloke – or woman – who runs it. I don’t run the Slade so I don’t have the freedom to do all the things I would want to do.
Glasgow was a boom school when it was run by that Welsh guy, Tony Jones. I think in the end I will have to take over one and run it myself. Glasgow School of Art is one of the most famous buildings in the world. What was it Venturi said about the west wall, comparing it with Michelangelo? And what have they done to it? If I ran the place I’d take all the administrators out of the building because they are occupying studios that should be used for architects and painters…

BM: Right. I am making a performance piece based on some experiences I have had there. The working title is ‘Who’s Nailing that Dog Kennel onto Guernica?’ If you go to Japan or little towns in Italy and see books and exhibitions about the building, and then you visit the school and there’s workmen putting up partition doors and bits of metal staircase and making all these stupid interventions into the fabric of the building. Why aren’t all these conservators that we’ve got making a fuss about what they are doing? Outside Britain, MacKintosh is looked on as the master. No wonder he died of drink. He must have seen it coming.

PH: Let’s talk about ‘Glasgow City of Culture’. You grew up in this city and then moved to London after two years at the Glasgow School of Art. What opportunities do you think glasgow should be looking for over the coming year? What is it maybe missing out on?

BM: Regarding City of Culture there doesn’t seem to be any director. Nobody seems to be in charge. I’ve made about five or six fairly abortive attempts to do something, and nothing ever happens. Glasgow is a wonderful city, and although I don’t live there now I come from there and would like to contribute something. For a number of years I have wanted to build a ‘Cultural Palace’. We tried one at Mortlake with Watney’s Brewery with Nick serota, myself, and the architect Will Allsop. It nearly came off. I wanted to build something like this for Glasgow. Something that would rival the art school and be full of contemporary art.
I came up with a lot of proposals with Will Allsop and made a lot of drawings. I looked at several sights and they all fell through. Nobody was there to take decisions. Everyone was very helpful and supportive. But there was always trouble with someone called Pat Lally, whoever he is – possibly the Lord Provost. Anyway, he seemed to be Lally by name and Lally by nature. On a smaller scale the new director of Kelvingrove, Julian Spalding, has offered me the possibility of doing something with their tearoom and thinking about it in whatever way I want. It will be a development from the Arnolfini Bar which I made in Bristol.

BM: We haven’t got a new building to house contemporary art in Scotland yet. There’s the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. It is very beautiful, but it is an old building. It would be rather good instead of us all fitting into Edwardian, and Georgian, and Victorian buildings if we could have a new building designed to meet the artists’ needs today and in the future.
My father was a Glasgow architect and was very concerned all his life about the city’s housing problems. He didn’t like the destruction of the Gorbals. He wanted to renovate existing houses which is what is now happening.
He had this idea in the 20s to open the city up. He had one particular idea about Victoria Road which leads straight up the centre of Glasgow right up to Queens Park where it encircles the park. There is a beautiful flat site at the top. He always thought it would be good to build there. From this site you can see right through the centre of the city and out to the Campsie Hills. His idea was basically for a long avenue through the city with shops and arcades surrounded by the countryside.
My idea with Willie Allsop was to take this site and put the museum or pavilion of contemporary culture there. I still want to do it. And even if it were not done in 1990, that could still be the year when the decision was taken.

BM: Absolutely. I mean Glasgow is surrounded by parks. We could put a different cultural event in each park. They don’t have to be big. Not so much a Pompidou, more a Münchengladbach. Everything could be taken in and enjoyed in a morning.

PH: Yes, I’ve often thought the Tate could be broken down into dozens of different small centres across the UK. Leave nothing in storage – the museum’s graveyeard – and have it constantly touring from centre to centre. Different cities and villages could tender for different parts fo the collection and this would be financed by each city.Aberdeen City Art Gallery and the Pier Art Centre in Orkney are two perfect models for this sort of excellence on a human scale. And both are run by artists of course.

BM: If Glasgow ever got serious about something like this I would want to work as part of a team of international architects and artists. It wouldn’t be an added extra like the Arnolfini Bar but would be built in consultation with artists right from the beginning.
Instead of starting with a gallery or a foyer or a sculpture on a pedestal or a lightwork in a hole in the ceiling, you would actually start with just a bar, a very particular type of bar. It would be a crazy kind of place that people would want to come to and enjoy being in with good Scottish beer and Glasgow food – no pizzas or quiche or any of that stuff. Then you would gradually build on to the bar, say, a John Bellany room, or a Richjard Long garden, or a Lawrence Wiener corridor. So you don’t sustain it by governement funding – although you can do that as well – but mostly it is pad for through the sale of food and drinks. All the profits are ploughed back in to building the next extension. You see, what happens now is that all these Arts Council places up and down the country have started franchising off their cafes and bars. All the money goes elsewhere and the galleries stay in deficit

PH: And more galleries should open later in the day and stay open in the evening. Lively artists’ bars would be part of the gallery rather than just round the corner. Why can’t the galleries stay open till two in the morning if they want to? But let’s return to Glasgow and the explosion of talent that’s come out of it…

BM: I was always amazed with Glasgow that it was so rough and tough with such a great sense of humour, yet nothing seemed to be coming out. No rock bands, no artists or writers, no dance companies. Now that’s all changed and everything is happening. I think in many ways Stephen Campbell was the instigator of the whole thing – for artists anyway. The success that many others have had would not have happened without him. He said, fuck it, let’s go for it. And he did.

BM: A lot of the work then fulfilled a kind of swashbuckling figurative need. But I don’t think in the end it worked. They could paint better than the Germans, obviously. The Germans never could paint. Most of that Berlin stuff was just a response to punk rock. They played punk, and they painted punk paintings, I suppose.
I liked a lot of Campbell’s early stuff. Not so much Wiszniewski. But it wasn’t like the art of the 20s with Peploe, Hunter, and Cadell.
Some of the newer painters that followed on from Campbell and Wiszniewski are too Glaswegian and have the worst aspects of Glasgow about them.

PH: So how do you feel about the recent Scottish show at the Gallery of Modern Art?

BM: I was very surprised how feeble that show was – compared with how it could have been. I wouldn’t have thrown out any of the artists who were in it, but I would have brought others in and chosen better examples of the ones who were in.

BM: There seemed to be a sort of plot to make it icky-nicky. Know what I mean? It wasn’t the Scottish art I remember as a kid. Where were the big Jack Knoxes? The Alan Fletchers and some big Fred Pollocks?
But to go back to the younger artists. I mean they are still young so it is amazing what could still come out of them. I even consider myself young…so there’s a lot of time to go. But I don’t happen to like that sort of figurative work much. I’m more a minimalist…

BM: No. I’m not much interested in colour. Not really. I’m a minimalist. I really like Alan Charlton’s work. Do you know what he said to me? “I’m an abstract expressionist really. That’s what I paint underneath, and then I paint them all gray.” And it’s probably true, who knows?

BM: I know. I know. But I like to distill the essence of something. That’s the hardest thing to do in art. I can’t do it yet, but I will do it. When I went into a minimal phase as a sculptor I felt I hadn’t yet the sufficient intellectual or ideological or philosophical back-up to justify this kind of activity.

BM: No, I work fast on the surface. But it is quite curious, say, if you look at the work of Frank Auerbach and the illusion that he goes to the studio from seven in the morning until seven at night, which apparently he does. He works those twelve hours but the end result is done quite quickly, on top of all that scumbling. He works quicker than me. In many ways I work quite slowly. But why make everything an end in itself. This interview for ALBA could lead to other things – we’ve already decided to make a silkscreen print with Arthur Watson for all your subscribers. Why shouldn’t the Cathedral of Culture be instigated by an art magazine?

PH: Art and administration can be subverted through fiction. It’s the quickest way to make things happen…

BM: Yes, you lie. That’s what Glasgow city of Culture should have been doing. They should have said “we’ll build the biggest building that ever was”, and maybe it would have happened.

PH: They could have said “We want the biggest “Late Picasso” exhibition. Someone would have been listening. It might have happened. I had magazines from around the world phoning me up months ago to ask what was happening and I couldn’t tell them anything. Of course, by the time the announcements were made they’d missed all the colour separation and editorial deadlines. Something like this must be planned for the media at least eighteen months in advance.

BM: You should always put as many ideas about as possible. You never know who will respond. Fly them in…see what happens.
At school, when I was ten or eleven, someone once said “I wish I could meet Elvis Presley” or something daft like that. Then someone else said, “You know, you are only ever three people away from anyone you want to meet. Let’s try it. You want to meet Elvis Presley, well I’m the first person you’ve asked, so who do I know? Maybe I know someone in the music business and he knows the grandfather of so-and-so who knows Elvis Presley, and there you are.”
So maybe we should go ahead and plan our Cultural Palace in Glasgow, announce that sponsors have been approached, and see what happens. Soon, people will say, why haven’t we been approached, we want to get involved. And before you know it…