A Luxury of Failure: An Interview with Bruce McLean

“Failure is not a condemnation! … Failure is an accident: art has tripped on the rug… In my view, the accident is positive. Why? Because it reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive. In this respect, it is a profane miracle.” Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art

In 1971 Richard Cork said, ‘Art, it is still felt, should always reflect the seriousness of its practitioners’ underlying intentions and any attempt to inject it with wit must surely lead to damaging accusations of frivolity. This is precisely the kind of criticism which Bruce McLean lays himself open to and yet he rides it willingly and with puckish delight.’ McLean has always been more interested in what art could be, rather than what art should be. Within the intergenerational dialectic that played out between artists as well as critics in the 1960s and 70s, McLean’s art practice was uncommon for the way in which it harnessed humour.¹ Perennially committed to equal parts intellectual inquiry and comedy, McLean’s multi-decade oeuvre spans diverse media including sculpture, painting, photography, film and video projection as well as dance, writing, architecture and performance.  From McLean’s first exhibition in the group show When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeeman at the Kunsthalle Bern, to his interview antics in 1969 with Gilbert and George at the Royal College of Art, to forming Nice Style, ‘the world’s first pose band’ with colleagues Paul Richards, Ron Carr, Garry Chitty and Robin Fletcher in 1971, McLean has demonstrated a desire to interrogate the establishment with his humour. For example, in 1972, as a relatively young artist, when he was offered an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London he chose to do a retrospective. Entitled King for a Day, it consisted of a 1,000 typed propositions and catalogue entries for tongue-in-cheek works such as The Society for Making Art Deadly Serious, piece and There’s no business like the Art Business piece (sung).  True to its name, the retrospective lasted for one day only. I met Bruce McLean in November 2011 when I was writer in residence during the exhibition A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE, at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee. His sense of humour was ubiquitous. Described as ‘a comic opera in three parts’, A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE was a collaboration between McLean, Sam Belinfante and David Barnett. It also featured the renowned mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg, performance artist Adeline Bourret, along with sixty musicians from three local choirs and the Dundee Drum Academy, as well as the city at large. From the beginning, failure was a recurring theme of the salons that took place every afternoon throughout the exhibition. On the first day, curator Sophia Hao announced, ‘Remember Bruce, you have permission to fail.’  McLean publicly responded the next day at the second salon, ‘We have been invited here and we have the luxury of failure. We cannot fail. Most places you have to behave properly in order to not fail.’ Later in the public performance/rehearsal, time and again, McLean would interrupt saying, ‘Can we do this again?…Can we stop and do this again?…Hang on, that is crap can we do it again?’ This protean and repetitious ‘rehearsal’ of failure, in light of forty-plus years of success, caused me to question how failure informs McLean’s practice. I went to his studio and home in February and March 2012 to interview him regarding what he referred to as a ‘luxury’.  His overarching response was that failure, in all its nuances, is an artistic necessity. This seems poignant in the context of a cultural climate where funding for the arts is decreasing and fees for art courses are on the rise. Today, the potential consequences of failing seem especially acute. For, after all, failure, as we commonly understand it, is infused with the inimical. The word ‘to fail’ comes from the early French word ‘falir’ – ‘to be lacking, miss, not succeed’ invoking mental images of humiliation at the worst and redundancy at the least.  The very fear of failure can be enough to inculcate in an individual the desire to avoid any path that might lead in its direction. Yet artists have long understood that failure (as impossible to consciously achieve as success) is useful in taking a project beyond preconceived ideas.  Failure often enlarges the scope of what is possible, rather than the contrary.² It was in this vein that McLean told me that the possibility to experiment and fail was the best part of the exhibition for him. While A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE earned a four star review in The Times, McLean was not entirely convinced. He laughed when he said, ‘The thing we were trying to do wasn’t a success but it wasn’t altogether a failure either.’  For McLean, failure is more of an artistic process than a lack of achievement. The risk of failure-as-judgment has been removed and the nuances of failure’s uncertainty and unknowing have become useful in themselves. ‘I have to actually do something, in order to do something. If you asked me what I was doing before I did it, I could lie to you, but I couldn’t actually tell you unless I had actually done it. I made a 3 by 4 meter photograph today. What’s going to happen? I don’t know. I might throw it away. I’ll see tomorrow.  – But it’s not that I’m just fiddling around. It’s only by a kind of playing, really, that you don’t lose out.’ In the past McLean has said, ‘I continually find that the more you play, mess around and don’t take things seriously, the more you end up with something.’

Perhaps this strategy accounts for why, as a young artist, McLean was invited to show in landmark exhibitions such as Op Losse Schoeven, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1969 and The British Avant Garde, New York Cultural Center in 1970.  At documenta 6 in 1977 McLean first performed a collaborative piece with William Furlong and Duncan Smith, titled In Terms of An Institutionalised Farce Sculpture and at documenta 7 in 1982 he exhibited a series of paintings titled Going for God. Growing up, McLean developed a relationship between productive failure and humour. During his school years he did not do exams, ‘I wrote ‘SHIT’ all over them. I didn’t fail the exam. I just didn’t do the exam.’ His black humour seems hereditary, ‘My father was a very strange man. Big, tall man. When he left the house every day he used to say, “Goodbye Betty, Good bye Bruce. Oh I wonder who’s gonna be second today?” And off he went. Somebody was going to be second and he thought he was it! ‘Number one!’ He was kind of joking but he sort of believed it really. He felt he was a failure, actually, because there was something he couldn’t do. One, he couldn’t stop them demolishing the Gorbals in Glasgow. He wanted to renovate the communities with modern sanitation etc. rather than see them destroyed but he failed and that really fucked him.  He also failed at not dying. He used to say the only thing that’s killing me is the thought of dying and that’s killing me … He couldn’t stand it! So he ‘failed’. I think he did in his terms but I don’t think he did actually, personally because I think he was quite funny about it…’ Though now McLean’s attitude is one of lighthearted risk-taking and experiment, I asked him if he was frightened by failure, particularly in the beginning of his career. ‘I suppose I never thought about actually failing – what would that mean?’ Ironically this seems to be paramount to his success, which he maintains has never been his goal. I found that hard to believe, asking him to elaborate, he said, ‘No! You see, from the age of six I wanted to be an artist and from the age of nine I wanted to be a sculptor. And that’s what I am!’ I asked if he thought he had failed at any point along the way and McLean answered, ‘I don’t think I’m a failure, I think I got things wrong! (laughing) and you’re gonna get things wrong!’ He tells how a gallerist, when viewing one of his paintings, exclaimed, ‘“Bloody Hell! You’re onto something here. You know you ought to do more of these…” and I said, “You know I can’t just do more of these… it’s not just a case of doing more of these! Because they came out of something which happened by mistake.”’ McLean explained, ‘Everything you do, everything I do, that is of any interest, is caused by an incidental incident which occurs…’ Failure can be a form of persistent resistance to recuperation and commodification.  By 1969 McLean had thrown most of his object-based work away into the River Thames calling them ‘float-away pieces’ such as Floataway Sculpture made in 1967.³ On one occasion, he drew the attention of the local river police when he flung sections of hardboard and large cubes of wood into the Thames from Barnes Bridge.  They were cynical, initially, regarding McLean’s artistic alibi.⁴ Working in the 1970s, artists could expect governmental financial support more than they can today and this was formative for McLean. In the late 1970s and early 80s he developed work at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith at a time when, according to him, artistic success and failure were defined less in commercial terms and more by the creativity expended. ‘Well, I’ve been around for such a long time… in the past, there were situations like Riverside Studios in the 70s, which was funded by the local council and the Arts Council…It was a huge area where a lot of American, German and Polish dance and theatre troops, among others, came and performed. Some things were worked out and some things weren’t but there wasn’t the pressure on anybody at this time to make money from filling the place with people. You could put on a Shakespearean or a Chekhov play and have 10-25 people there for a week every night and nobody would be ashamed if it was great. The Arts Council have helped me in the past by giving me space, a bit of money and time to try some things out, without having any pressure on me to succeed. It didn’t have to be a blockbuster show or a big success in commercial terms or even in public terms. And that is gone to a large extent. I think it’s very sad for a lot of younger artists who haven’t got this luxury, because we had that luxury!’

Dance was an area of experimentation for McLean; He was not interested in narrative, but rather dance as ‘simply body, shape, movement, light, space and form moving through space’. An example of this is Un Danse Contemporaine performed at the Folkwang Museum, Essen in 1982 (first rehearsed at Riverside Studios in 1981) where McLean danced ‘in satire’ around a hat similar to one that Joseph Beuys would wear.⁵ His experience of this was telling, ‘I used to be a good dancer. Sometimes you can really do it and you’re like, Jesus! And sometimes it’s like you’re too drunk, or not drunk enough.’ McLean described his surprise upon discovering that Fred Astaire, through practice and repetition, eliminated the possibility of failure in his filmed dance routines, ‘I didn’t realise this, but he didn’t just go out and do it, he rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.  It was hundreds of takes in some of these films. I didn’t know that.  It had to be absolutely like this, tailored to the cuff…I find that quite weird, I thought he’d just went and did it!’

Asking McLean if he had any regrets, I was surprised to discover that he considered his return to painting and sculpture, after leaving Nice Style, a mistake. ‘I formed a pose-band, which was kind of a new group outside of art. Art is a three letter word, jazz is a four letter word…and Jazz is still outside ‘the thing’…’ (Nice Style broke up in 1979) ‘So to answer your question about getting things wrong, I drifted back into making sculpture and painting again. I got seduced, you know?…I am always looking for something which challenges me, challenges what we think it could be, to make something which I can’t imagine what it is…I think I went wrong when I went back..  I don’t regret it. I can’t regret it. But I think I went wrong.  I don’t know what would have happened had I not, but I’d be quite curious to find out!’ Nice Style was interested in performing the sculpture of ‘striking a pose’ and looked to the style and theatrics of bands like the Bay City Rollers and T. Rex.  They wore tuxedos as part of their attempts to mimic and mock the celebrity culture both in and outside the art world. On other occasions they wore athletic padding while ‘training’ in gyms and sporting fields, parodying professional athletic teams. In 2012, McLean and fellow band members – Richards, Carr, Chitty and Fletcher, were the focus of the Institution Exhibition Nice Style: The World’s First Pose Band at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. In 1971, Richard Cork said that McLean ‘realises that his ability to amuse is a very rare asset and since his energies are all directed towards questioning the priorities of other contemporary artists, it becomes a tool that suits his purposes.’⁶ In TATE etc., Andrew Wilson reiterated that argument claiming that McLean’s work ‘satirises the achievement of New Generation Sculptors’, which would include McLean’s former tutors Anthony Caro, William Tucker and Phillip King.⁷ Cork argued that McLean also parodied Henry Moore, their tutor and predecessor, such as when in 1969 he recreated Henry Moore’s Falling Warrior, by being photographed while throwing himself onto a plinth, located on the shore of the River Thames, titling it Fallen Warrior.⁸ Similarly, in 2011, Jo Applin argued that in the ‘photographically recorded performance, Poses for Plinth, in 1971 at Situations, McLean once again reconceived Moore’s humanist rendering of the body atop a plinth, this time destabilised and subject to inevitable failure.’⁹ These arguments, particularly in regard to the New Generation Sculptors, were possibly fueled by McLean himself who, in 1970, in regard to the exhibition British Sculpture out of the Sixties, wrote: ‘Why don’t they take a few chances… smash up the little scenes they’ve carefully built up like a military operation for themselves over the last five years and have a go at setting towards making or doing something worthwhile?’¹⁰ It can be argued then that, in a sense, through his humorous iconoclasm and improvisation of their works, McLean identified failure in the work of his predecessors.

Perhaps McLean has been misunderstood or perhaps it is the softening of the years, but when I asked him for his response to these arguments, he suggests that his ongoing interrogation of art stems from a commitment he made at the very beginning of his career during his entrance interview at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1963, ‘Frank Martin and Tony Caro said to me, “We are interested in Modern sculpture, in what it has been, what it is and what it can be. That is what this sculpture department is about.  Are you interested in joining us?”’ McLean still remembers his reply, ‘Yes. You have told me what we will be doing.  I am interested and I am coming!’ And from that point on, he wanted to ‘explore what was possible in regard to sculpture’. He continued, ‘Of course I went there to question sculpture but I also went to St. Martin’s because of the people who were teaching there, King, Caro, Tucker. If they set up the situation for you to question, then you have to question that…and question them and what they do as well.  That’s not bad…I am very respectful of the people who have made me an artist – I only became an artist because of these people… But if you can’t have a bit of a laugh as well asking why Henry Moore’s Falling Warrior is always falling on the plinth? It’s a jokey kind of question, but through the joke – through the humor… sometimes something happens which moves you onto something else.’

McLean recalled another jokey art experiment that he had, with the late Joseph Beuys.  ‘He was a kind of energy! If he walked in the room you got ‘something’.’ Remembering with laughter, McLean continued, ‘I said to him once in London, “Will you give us one of your hats and sign it for an auction for us?” And he said, “Sure. Go and get one.” The shop was by St. James’s, so I got a taxi down there and said, “Oh good morning, I have come to buy a hat for Joseph Beuys.” I said, “He sent me down with a taxi to have one, he’s waiting for me to come now.” And because this is the age that it is, they said, “You mean Professor Joseph Beuys?” So I repeated myself, “Good Morning, could I buy a hat for Professor Joseph Beuys?” And a man went into a backroom… disappeared and came out with a polished wood tray with two brass handles on it and three hats: a dark grey, a light grey and a middle grey! So I said, “The middle grey one, please,” and they said, “The usual tan sir?” and I said, “No, the unusual one!”  He gave me a hat, I paid for it, got in the taxi and I whisked back out of there. In the meantime he (Beuys) had bought six packs of butter. He slammed them onto the hat, cut a bit of the brim off and then gave it to me. I said, “Thank you very much!”  We gave it to the auction and it was sold for a lot of money.  He was a really good bloke! Such a funny day… Joseph Beuys’s hat…’ Having said that, McLean had a bit of fun with one of Beuys’ famous projects, 7000 Oaks at documenta 7, Kassel in 1982. Beuys was driven by his theory of ‘social sculpture’, which claimed that art in general and sculpture in particular could change society in profound and imminent ways.  For the 7,000 Oaks project, his (grandiose) intention was ‘…to go more and more outside, to be among the problems of nature and problems of human beings in their working places. This will be a regenerative activity; it will be a therapy for all of the problems we are standing before… I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context.’¹¹ Trading upon the environmentalist terms he asserted, ‘…that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness – raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.’¹² Ever the jester, McLean responds with sardonic humour, ‘You know, Beuys planted these oak trees in the summer. Now everybody who knows anything knows that you don’t plant trees in the summer! (He makes the sign of the trees wilting to the ground in the summer heat.)  It exposed him as not being completely truthful about being ecological and all those green things that he was on about. But it was kind of all right in a way.  Maybe he didn’t have the technology or the knowledge (like he implied) but the spirit was there. The trees died! – This meant that the work didn’t fail. If he had just taken several trees and planted them at the right time, maybe we wouldn’t remember it!’ For McLean, failure creates a space to try things anew and something unexpected always emerges. The space creates a story and according to McLean, ‘The story is ‘the thing’.  The reason that most people are artists is so that they can tell a story.’ McLean’s success, like that of Fred Astaire, is a product of repetitive rehearsals and attempts to perform again, rehearse again, dance again, paint again and make sculpture again. Imagined on a map, failure runs along the lines of latitude, which guarantee a continuum of creativity.  In failed attempts or creative death, there lies the redemption of an afterlife.   Christina Manning Lebek

1. Cork, R. (2003) Everything seemed possible: art in the 1970s, Yale University Press, 2-34 and 36-38.
2. Recent publications on this theme include: Feuvre, L.L. (2010) Failure, MIT Press and ‘Failure issue’, Cabinet Magazine, (7) (2002).
3. Wood, J. (2008) ‘Fallen warriors and a sculpture in my soup: Bruce McLean on Henry Moore’, Sculpture Journal, 17(2), 116–124.
4. Gooding, M. (1990) Bruce McLean, Phaidon, 43.
5. Wood, J. (2008) ‘Fallen warriors and a sculpture in my soup: Bruce McLean on Henry Moore’, Sculpture Journal, 17(2), 116–124, 128
6. Cork, R. (2003) Everything seemed possible: art in the 1970s, Yale University Press, 36.
7. Wilson, A. (2011) ‘Andrew Wilson on Bruce McLean’s Nice Style’, Tate Etc, (22), 2, 66–67.
8. Cork, R. (2003) Everything seemed possible: art in the 1970s, Yale University Press, 3.
9. Applin, J. (2011) ‘There’s a Sculpture on My Shoulder: Bruce McLean and the Anxiety of Influence’, Anglo-America Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945-1975. Getty Publications, 79.
10. McLean, B. (1981) ‘Not Even a Crimble Crumble’ Exhibition Catalogue Kunsthalle Basel. Whitechapel Art Gallery and Stedeljik van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 22–23.
11. Scholz, N. (1986) ‘Joseph Beuys – 7000 Oaks in Kassel’, Anthos (Switzerland), 3, 32.
12. Stütgen, J. (1982) Beschreibung eines Kunstwerks: Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen: ein Arbeitspapier der Free International University, Düsseldorf: Free International University, 1.