Mark Boyle; Boyle family artist (Fascinating)
Hyfler/Rosner
Another great obit from The Independent ~
Paterfamilias of Boyle Family - makers of art that 'was not
going to exclude anything'
07 May 2005
http://www.boylefamily.co.uk/boyle/texts/journey4.html
http://www.boylefamily.co.uk/boyle/document/main.html
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/boyle-hill/biography/
In 2003 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art held an
exhibition of the work of Boyle Family. It was the first
retrospective of the artist group - Mark Boyle, Joan Hills,
Sebastian Boyle and Georgia Boyle - in four decades of
collaboration.
Fifty years earlier, Mark Boyle, the handsome young son of a
Scottish lawyer, was at Glasgow University, studying Law; in
1953 he left to join the Scots Guards. Joan Little had just
left her course in architecture at the Edinburgh College of
Art to get married, set up a beauty parlour and paint
part-time. When the Hills split up, Joan moved to Harrogate
to a small flat above a café, where the young Mark, in
charge of organising supplies for the Ordnance Corps, went
to write poetry. Introduced by the owner, they talked for
hours, "went for a walk, came back, had another coffee, went
to a Chinese restaurant and had two dinners for 5s 6d". By
the end of the evening they had agreed that, although this
was not quite love at first sight, they would work with each
other for the rest of their lives on making a kind of art
that "was not going to exclude anything".
They moved in together after six weeks and Joan carried on
painting, while Mark wrote. He began to borrow her paints to
create work inspired by the demolition site behind their
flat, although he had had no formal training. A local
businessman saw what he was doing and asked him if he was an
artist. He replied that he was. This was the first time he
had made such a public declaration. This was 1959. Boyle and
Hills bought some paint from Woolworths and painted
furiously for a week, hanging the work in their flat. They
sold eight or nine works at £5 each. Although most of the
paintings were initially done by Hills, it was the birth of
an artistic collaboration that was to last a lifetime, and
involve both their children.
In his first published statement in 1965 Boyle announced,
"My ultimate object is to include everything in a single
work. In the end the only medium in which it will be
possible to say everything will be reality." This was the
egalitarian 1960s, a decade in which all the conservative
mores of post-war Britain were being overthrown. Work that
included "everything" very much reflected the
anti-hierarchical mood of the times.
Boyle and Hills became part of the glamorous
counter-culture, moving in the same circles as John Lennon,
Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and creating light shows
for Jimi Hendrix and the Soft Machine. They were also among
the pioneers of that archetypal 1960s event the "happening".
In 1963 Boyle was threatened with prosecution when a nude
model appeared on stage on the final day of the
International Drama Conference at the Edinburgh Festival.
The conference turned into a spontaneously anarchic event
where a real drama had been created and the "actual"
material of the world was presented as "art". Such
subversive action grew out of Dadaist philosophy that saw
the world as being without purpose. This "total action" was
to become very much part of the Boyle aesthetic.
After a period in Paris in the early 1960s, when they ran
out of money and had to be repatriated by the British
embassy, Boyle and Hills began to make a series of
assemblages. With little cash they pillaged demolition
sites, still common in London as a result of bomb damage.
This anti-art use of detritus owed much to Kurt Schwitters'
junk constructions and those that Picasso made of wood and
scrap metal just after the First World War. There were also
echoes of the Arte Povera movement in Italy and the work of
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in America.
In 1964 the Boyles chanced upon a discarded grey television
surround, which was radically to alter their working
methods. They decided they would throw it like dice and
whatever portion of the ground it framed would become the
subject of their next work, even if that spot was a patch of
bare earth. Resin would then be used and detritus pressed
into its surface. Chance, so beloved by the Dadaists and
Surrealists, was to become a major component of their work.
Four years later they embarked upon a project entitled
"Journey to the Surface of the Earth". Their aim was to
duplicate 1,000 randomly selected portions of the earth's
surface. Darts were thrown blindfold into a map of the world
to select the sites. Then they would travel to each location
and throw a T-square into the air and make an exact
duplicate - usually a six-foot by six-foot square - of the
spot where it had landed; the process of making these
simulacra, which involved materials such as sand, mud and
ice, remained a closely guarded secret. Any autobiographical
or authorial element, so central to art of the past, was
conspicuously absent in the Boyles' work. As Mark Boyle once
said, "As far as I can be sure, there is nothing of me in
there."
From their early childhood the Boyle offspring, Sebastian
(born 1962) and Georgia (born 1963), were involved in the
making of work and accompanied their parents on all their
trips. Who was responsible for making what has never been
clear and something they have never chosen to clarify. They
have made snow pieces in Norway, worked in a German coal
mine and the deserts of Israel and Australia.
What they made is in fact closer to painting than sculpture.
Their works are primarily about surface; the surface as
earth, the surface as skin, the surface of a mundane object
which was once horizontal but is then hung on the wall. They
have replicated potato fields and paths (the sort of
intricate mosaics that lead to countless London houses);
they have fabricated gutters and pavements where the yellow
road stripes made implicit reference to Barnett Newman's
paintings; they have recreated slabs of concrete sidewalk
that evoke something of the minimalist sculptures of Carl
Andre. They also used Mark's skin, which was magnified to
look like cracked mud or a lunar landscape.
Boyle Family have perhaps never been quite as well known as
one might have expected, though they did represent Britain
at the 1978 Venice Biennale - the only Scottish artists to
have had a solo exhibition in the British pavilion. In 1986
a major exhibition was held at the Hayward Gallery, London,
followed by the very successful retrospective in 2003.
So what is their legacy? Since the Boyles started out, art
duos such as Gilbert & George, Langlands and Bell and the
Chapman brothers have become more commonplace, but a quartet
that has continued to work over two generations is surely
unique. Looking at their Edinburgh retrospective it was
apparent just how much they anticipated the work of younger
artists, the castings of negative space by Rachel Whiteread,
even Marc Quinn's cast heads, whilst also placing themselves
on a continuum that led from Schwitters and Duchamp.
Comparisons have been made with photography and that eternal
frozen moment held within the frame of the lens; yet their
work is more visceral than that.
Through his madcap projects, fuelled by that particularly
explosive energy of the 1960s, Mark Boyle and his family
created transformations of the mundane into art. The
ordinary became elevated to the extraordinary. As Francis
Bacon, a friend and a fan, once said, "If only people were
free enough to let everything in, something extraordinary
might come of it."
Sue Hubbard
Mark Boyle, artist: born Glasgow 1934; married 1999 Joan
Hills (née Little; one son, one daughter); died London 4 May
2005.
Hyfler/Rosner
Mark Boyle, who died on May 4 aged 70, came to attention
with light shows for Jimi Hendrix and the band Soft Machine
in the 1960s; as part of Boyle Family, now best known for
their meticulous studies of random sections of the earth's
surface, he pushed to extremes the ambition that he and his
wife, Joan Hills, had conceived in the 1950s of creating an
objective examination of reality which would exclude
nothing.
Boyle Family's work, eerily accurate representations of
pavements, squares of desert, fields and seashores, is now
held in many major museums and represented Britain at the
1978 Venice Biennale; major retrospectives were held at the
Hayward in London in 1986 and at the Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Arts in 2003. In an interview with the
novelist Williams Burroughs, Francis Bacon - who was a
friend and admirer - cited Boyle, with Richard Hamilton, as
one of the few modern painters whose work he admired.
Mark Boyle was born on May 11 1934 in Glasgow, the son of a
lawyer, and brought up in Pollokshields, an affluent
district on the south side of the city. He was educated at
St Aloysius, a private Jesuit college, and, with the
intention of following in his father's footsteps, went on to
study Law at the University.
In 1953, however, Boyle decided that the law was not for him
and left to take a three-year short service commission with
the Scots Guards. Posted to supplies with the Ordnance Corps
at Harrogate, his growing recognition that the Army was
equally unsuitable led him to spend much of his time in a
local café writing poetry. There he met Joan Hills, a former
art student: "We sat down and discussed for hours what we
were going to do with the rest of our lives," he said.
"Basically we've stuck with what we were going to do then.
[that] there is no experience, no sensation, no aspect of
reality we would eliminate."
Boyle nonetheless found it tricky to leave the Army, and he
was transferred to the MoD as a clerk to the Joint
Intelligence Chiefs of Staff, where he found life stifling.
Most of his colleagues filled their hours buried in The
Times; Boyle instead ordered Top Secret files (the only
other reading matter allowed), which he found marginally
less boring. Joan Hills aided his efforts to get himself
sacked by writing letters to the MoD claiming that Boyle was
consorting with spies. Eventually he simply stopped going
in, only to find himself offered a job in Intelligence.
Instead he became a waiter, on a pound a week. He and Joan
eventually made their escape to Paris, from which they were
repatriated after running out of money.
At first Boyle continued to think of himself as a poet, but
soon after he had borrowed Joan's paints one day, they began
to collaborate - though for many years they showed and sold
the work under his name, an "aberration" created by the
offer of an exhibition at the Travers Gallery in Edinburgh
while Joan was working as a film editor. Boyle's conversion
to the visual arts came as a moment of epiphany after he and
Joan saw one of Bacon's Figures in a touring Arts Council
exhibition in the north of England, and realised he was
achieving with paint what Boyle had been trying to do in
verse. "Overnight I became a painter."
In London during the 1960s, Boyle began to move amid the
counter-culture, getting to know figures such as John Lennon
and Mick Jagger, and exhibiting at the Indica Gallery. He
was arrested after staging a "happening" featuring a nude
woman at Edinburgh's McEwen Hall (though the judge threw out
the case).
From Suddenly Last Supper (1964), they began to work with
slide projections of everyday objects such as sweet wrappers
and Coca-Cola. They created performances in which,
anticipating Gilbert and George, projections of bodily
fluids were interspersed with collage films. At the
psychedelic nightclub UFO they created light shows for Soft
Machine by throwing acid on zinc slides, and went on to work
with Jimi Hendrix.
By the end of the decade they had begun their continuing
project Journey to the Surface of the Earth, in which 1,000
randomly selected points around the world were duplicated
exactly in mixed media. With their children Sebastian (born
in 1962) and Georgia (1963) - "involved since they could
hold a screwdriver," said Boyle - and at first with Joan's
son Cameron Hills, Boyle Family devised a series of
processes by which resin and fibreglass casts can fix
materials as diverse as grass, sand and tarmac, anticipating
much of the work of artists such as Rachel Whiteread. The
family is continuing to work on perfecting water, but the
results - which more resemble photorealistic, or abstract,
painting, according to the subject, than sculpture - are
extraordinary creations: perfect replicas, but impossible to
view except through the knowledge of the skill and industry
required to create them.
Boyle, who travelled and exhibited around the world with his
family from the 1970s, latterly lived at Greenwich, where
they threw convivial dinner parties. Tall, charming, modest
and gregarious, Boyle remained keenly dedicated to the
vision he had devised with his wife at their first
encounter. "For as long as I remember," he recalled in one
interview, "I had a real need to make things."
Although they had been together for nearly half a century,
he and Joan Hills (née Little) married, without telling
anyone, in a register office, only in 1999. His wife and
children survive him.
