Andrew Graham-dixon on Bruce McLean's furniture, painting and performance art

LAST SATURDAY Bruce McLean wrapped a nude model in clingfilm and, armed with pots of thick 'acrylic paint, daubed her into decency. McLean himself was rather more decorously dressed. Dapper in a nattily baggy grey suit, crisp white shirt, red tie and matching braces, only his footwear — tasseled tigerskin brothel-creepers — hinted at subversion.

Britain's best known performance artist was opening his new exhibition "The Floor the Fence the Fireplace" — it confirms him in his role as a modern Fool, self-appointed court jester to the British artistocracy. But it also suggests that McLean has given up performance art for greener (dollar-bill green) pastures.

First he took up painting; now he has, as they say, diversified. The wares on display in his new show — Bruce McLean vases and tables, Bruce McLean fireplaces, drinks cabinets and wallpaper, even Bruce McLean walls (a knockdown, if that's the right word, at £4000) — are all exquisitely tasteful. They are all, also, exquisitely vacu¬ous. The whole thing looks less like an art exhibition than a designer fantasy: postconceptual modernism meets the Ideal Home Exhibition.

McLean has decorated his consumer du-rables with the stylised human faces, hands and lips that have become his stock in trade as a painter: they are part Matisse, part stick-people, washed down with elegant Martini-ad overtones.
The opening ceremony was a nostalgic — almost painfully nostalgic — affair, a "happening" that replaced Sixties zaniness with Eighties cool. A good time failed to be had by all. The clingfilmed model shivered aloofly in corners, the designer drinks cabinet was unstocked, and the congregated art world worthies circled McLean's objets de luxe in subdued unease. But then McLean is not celebrating the promised Disneyland of consumerism, as Pop Artists like...

To read the full article please either login or register .