Tate Channel

We recently visited the studio of Scottish performance artist and painter Bruce McLean, as he put finishing touches to work for an exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson gallery, London. His 1971 performance Pose Work for Plinths, photographs of which are currently on show at Tate Liverpool, is regarded as an iconic artwork; an expression of the rebellion McLean and his contemporaries staged during his time at art school in the 1960s. In this video Bruce explains how he regarded the Pose Work as ‘kind of a joke’, and describes why he believes art and artists have the power to change the world. He even shows us his design for an alternative to the Houses of Parliament.

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Cultural commentator and exhibition co-curator Michael Bracewell welcomes us to Tate St Ives for The Dark Monarch, a show that explores the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on art in Britain. In this film, Bracewell introduces the major themes of the exhibition by looking at eerie landscape photographs by Paul Nash, a complex painting by contemporary artist Clare Woods, and a haunting film by Derek Jarman.

The Dark Monarch, until 10 January 2010, Tate St Ives

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Currently showing at Tate Liverpool, the exhibition Joyous Machines focuses on the connection between the work of Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), and British artist Michael Landy, who has been significantly influenced by Tinguely and his constructive and destructive tendencies. Tinguely is perhaps most famous for the ambitious and influential Homage to New York, an auto-destructive work that failed spectacularly to destroy itself in 1960. In 2001 Michael Landy successfully destroyed all of his worldly possessions for Break Down, a project he presented in an abandoned department store in London’s Oxford Street. For this film, we took Michael, accompanied by Tate Liverpool’s Laurence Sillars, to a waste recycling depot in Camden. Here they talked about the exhibition, the artists’ shared interest in scrap materials, and Landy’s ambition to one day recreate Homage to New York.

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FYI, Joyous Machines is Laurence’s last exhibition at Tate Liverpool, as he has just been made Chief Curator at BALTIC in Gateshead. We wish him all the best.

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