Bruce McLean-Process Progress Project Archive 1966-2006 (rolling exhibition incorporating 1000 artworks over a six week period)

Process Progress Project Archive is part of a series of curatorial investigations utilising archives, research materials, and re-presented art works. These materials are used to stimulate the creation of new works and events made in situ which become integral elements of evolving, discursive exhibitions.

The show was proposed as a dialogue between Bruce McLean and myself on how to present his work from across forty years. An audio visual record of the processes from discussions, installations, and events was made and shown in the exhibiting space as an unfolding new work. In his web blog Philip Sanderson noted that this recorded dialogue “should be compulsory listening to all would be curators”

The exhibiting space contained packing cases, wrapped work, and files. Across a six week period works were unpacked, installed, de-installed, projected, and performed in a constantly changing display which also elicited a series of discussions with contributors including Will Alsop, Mel Gooding, Liam Gillick, Richard Wentworth, and William Furlong.

Reviews in Time Out, Frieze, LCC News, Brut Smog web blog, and a feature article in Wonderland magazine were published. The show subsequently moved to Galerie Fortlaan 17 in Ghent, Belgium (05.05.06 – 24.06.06). A related book was published by Chelsea space (ISBN 1 870540 344).

As part of the self-reflexive curation, we ended on the anniversary of McLean’s ‘King For a Day-a one day retrospective’ held at Tate Gallery on 11th March 1972. A day-long closing event took place including a performance in Tate Britain and a discussion in Chelsea space.

Questions concerning activities and attitudes within the context of an exhibition, and the ‘retrospective’ were examined. McLean coined the phrase ‘process-spective’ for this show and Belinda Bowring wrote in Frieze “By literalizing the activity of exhibition-making Process Progress Project Archive became a work of art in its own right”.