There's a sculpture on my shoulder: Bruce McLean and the anxiety of influence

Abstract

peopl e Who M A k e A rT i n gl A s s hou s e s is the title of a photographic work made by Bruce McLean in 1969, in which the young artist stands in the proverbial glasshouse (fig. 1). The panes are broken not by stones, but by the protruding remnants of one of McLean’s early abstract sculptures made in 1964 while he was a student at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. There McLean was taught by a number of “New Generation” sculptors including Anthony Caro, William Tucker, and Phillip King. This photograph spells out the terms in which McLean’s generation perceived their relationship to their modernist predecessors. The photograph was published in Studio International alongside a review McLean wrote in 1970 of the exhibition British Sculpture Out of the Sixties, in which he lambasted the contemporary scene for remaining subservient to a modernist vocabulary that had become tired and out of date.1 In his polemical attack on the current state of sculpture McLean declared that the legacy offered by the New Generation sculptors would no longer do. What had seemed a “major breakthrough” in 1960, he wrote, now seemed anything but. “Why don’t they take a few chances,” McLean suggested, “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?”2 Retreading old ground, for McLean, was no longer an option. Anthony Caro, he grudgingly admitted, was the only person making anything that was remotely interesting—the rest, he claimed, should be “slung out.”3 In a similarly provocative performance work There’s a Sculpture on My Shoulder, which took place in 1971 at Situations in London, a series of well-known large-scale New Generation works were projected onto the wall behind McLean, as he knelt on his hands and knees. With each change of image, McLean crumpled and staggered, as if under the weight of the sculpture, wittily illustrating the extent to which his predecessors’ works were an oppressive weight to bear. The antimonumental impulse of the current generaThere’s a Sculpture on My Shoulder: Bruce McLean and the Anxiety of Influence