Last
week I attended the Preview of ‘Knife Edge Press: The Complete Works (So Far)’.
The event and exhibition were part of ‘Impact 8 International Printmaking Conference’ held in Dundee, bringing printmakers from across the world together
to discuss the historical and creative importance of printmaking as a medium.
‘Knife Edge Press…’ is a collaboration between art writer Mel Gooding and
artist Bruce McLean, together they create artists’ books. I previously worked
with Bruce in 2011, as part of the Exhibitions DJCAD team, on a large-scale
project ‘a comic opera in three-parts’ entitled
‘A Cut A Scratch A Score’ and was
intrigued to discover another facet to Bruce’s creative repertoire in a
partnership which has spanned nearly three decades.
Knife Edge Press Christmas Card (1985)
An
In-Conversation between Mel and Bruce
during the preview lured the ‘Impact 8’ delegates from the Prosecco… I mean
refreshments into, as reviewer Alex Hetherington puts; ‘a handsome, theatrical and precisely arranged installation’ of the
duo’s books and prints in the
Cooper Gallery. The two spoke of how this partnership came into being, their
meeting in a pub and their continual meetings in a pub, seeming a neutral and
apt situation for “enthusing” each other’s ideas. During ‘A Cut A Scratch A Score’ I observed Bruce’s interaction and
insistence on discussion with his collaborators in the form of Artist Sam
Belinfante, Digital Scenographer David Barnett, Mezzo Soprano Lore Lixenberg
and Artist-cum-Dancer Adeline Bourett. Exchanges at times felt fraught, as Bruce’s
visual language, combined with three other artists to form a performing,
sculptural opera. It was “premiered” across three venues involving local
musicians and singers. The Culminating Performance perhaps adhering to the ‘So
Far’ quality which the ‘Knife Edge Press’ exhibition represents – an on-going
process-led activity weighted by collaborative relationship.
Bruce’s
works and collaborations have an air of confidence, punctuated by his
iconographic style. I like to think of Bruce as the “original poser”, with no
connoted negativities attached, when thinking back to such celebrated works as ‘Pose Work for Plinths 3’. Bruce’s
visual expressions breakdown historical art practices such as sculpture,
performance, printmaking, bookmaking, as well as art history, however, his
interpretations of these retain a sense of familiarity, through the
incorporation of domesticated motifs and humour which also through colour and shape feel
nostalgically synonymous with the decade in which Bruce and Mel’s ‘Knife Edge
Press’ was conceived. During this time, as critical practitioners Bruce and Mel
were both feeling jaded from the bureaucracy surrounding arts education. The
conception of their collaboration was cemented by the de-construction of the
publication, viewing it broadly, within the genre of sculpture, disseminating
original works of art, for nominal amounts, with democratic style questioning
the structuring of institutes.
Sophia Hao, the Cooper Gallery Curator, and another collaborator of Bruce's since 1997, interviewed the pair in the lead-up to the exhibition, Mel describes how their work came to be identified, explaining how they felt they were on a
‘Knife Edge’. That the creation of publications – systems of folding and
splicing for all that it is a historical practice, felt as though through their
reorientation with it, was the cusp of something new. The book could envelope
their irregular thoughts, correspondence and narratives with the familiarity
and verve of Bruce’s iconography whilst acknowledging the need to critique what
was happening within the network in which they worked. This is expressed in the
work the ‘Invisible Academy 1992’. A school or perhaps better thought of as a call
for a school-of-thought, which could be based anywhere perhaps even a “call box
on the Edgeware Road”. It would be the stimulus for conversations out-with the
structured confinements of an arts education, celebrating self-validation
through creativity not through curriculum nor convention. The idea of a
prospectus is reformatted into framed, large-scale prints punctuated by erratic
use of language, perhaps purposely expressing the irritation which Mel and
Bruce were and maybe still are feeling. The use of colour, style and reformatting
add, however, a sense of value, that this is not just an urgent means of
expression but something which will be re-investigated in the future.
'Invisible Academy 1992'
In-Conversation Bruce voiced his difficulty in
accepting the definition of an artist, the reclusiveness of the activity.
Expressing that collaboration made his role much easier - the trajectory course
ideas and work take naturally through the “explosive goings-ons” that take
place when critical creatives, aware of each other’s presence, incidentally get
chatting in a pub and decide to develop this occurrence into a series of
on-going works. At times, the work, the collaboration, feel tenuous, however,
this echoes the Knife’s ‘Edge’ on which their ‘Press’ was founded. This is no
more reflected in the ‘Invisible Residency’, with the Residency reduced to a
daily email exchange between Mel and Bruce of visual and textual correspondence
projected in the Gallery staircase. A re-examination of their experimental
collaboration and carefully showcased exhibition, an artwork in itself, ‘The
secret of these little works…’ as Mel states in one correspondence, ‘… is that
they might go on forever.’
'Invisible Residency' Correspondence: 04-09-2013
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