Art - Richard Cork on the Boyles' lifetime project to "include everything", rubbish and all
Almost 40 years ago, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills sent out invitations to an extraordinary event. People who accepted found themselves led down Pottery Lane in west London to the rear entrance of a building marked "Theatre". Seated on chairs ranged in front of a curtain, they waited for the happening to begin. But when Boyle and Hills drew back the curtain, the startled audience realised that they were gazing out of a shop window. The street beyond was the event, and passers-by staring in compounded the confusion by making the audience feel like performers.
Full of mischievous humour, Street was nevertheless powered by a profoundly serious motive. Even at this early stage, Boyle and Hills saw no reason to exclude anything from their exploration of the world. They believed that rubbish on a demolition site deserved their attention. And their scant conventional art training helped them to defy predictable ways of seeing. Boyle had briefly studied law in Glasgow before joining the Scots Guards. Hills, who started out studying building construction and then architecture in Edinburgh, enrolled on a painting course, but only in tandem with beauty classes. She even opened her own salon in 1957, but when she met Boyle in a coffee bar they decided to work together, making a new kind of art where "nothing would be rejected". Now, after pursuing that goal with their daughter Georgia and son Sebastian, the Boyle family has been given an impressive retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
For Boyle and Hills, both born in Scotland, it is a homecoming of sorts. But the show is in no sense confined to their native land. For one thing, Georgia and Sebastian were born in London. For another, the Boyle family has always been instinctively international in outlook. During the 1960s, Boyle and Hills's involvement with theatre, performance art and rock music took them to Europe and the US. Whether working with film, slide and light projects in their own Sensual Laboratory, or producing light shows for Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine, they set no geographical limits to their activities. The assemblages they also produced in that formative decade likewise owe nothing to older Scottish art. They are more indebted to the junk constructions made by Kurt Schwitters, who shared their sharp-eyed appetite for the lowliest scraps he could scavenge from the detritus of everyday life.
The first room at the Edinburgh show brings together prime examples of these early assemblages. Rusty fragments of metal are joined to battered piping, bent wire-netting and a discarded London street sign, forming a makeshift yet oddly moving elegy to the inevitability of urban decay. A photograph of Baudelaire peers out from the centre of another work, implying that Boyle and Hills shared his critical commitment to an art of modern life. But melancholy predominates, above all in an assemblage where an empty window frame tries unsuccessfully to shield a pummelled girl doll, a fractured clock-face and a shabby auctioneers' announcement of a property for sale.
The most prophetic works concentrate on Norland Road in Shepherd's Bush, west London, where Boyle and Hills discovered a grey plastic surround that had once framed a TV screen. Abandoned on waste ground in 1964, it focused their attention on an accidental cluster of discarded objects - strips of red lino, a white stiletto and a blue bag - lying within the surround. The potency of chance discoveries became clear to them both, and they soon developed a method of fixing the surface of a patch of ground with resin and fibreglass. The precise technique that they employed has stayed a family secret. We can be certain that casting is only one part of a complex method that also involves filler and paint.
In August 1968, Boyle and Hills decided to stop concentrating on London sites. Purchasing the largest map of the world available, they invited friends to a party and asked all of them, blindfolded, to throw darts at the map. About 230 sites were targeted, and Boyle declared that making permanent works from them would be "a lifetime project. It could take 25 years." In reality, the family's self-styled Earthprobe is even now far from complete, and may well continue for decades to come. Boyle announced as early as 1965 that "my ultimate object is to include everything", and this remains the Boyle family's central preoccupation today.
Such a programme might easily have led to overreaching bluster, muddle and bathos. But the overriding quality of this show is one of focus and finality. Guided throughout by the innate feeling for materials that distinguished the early assemblages, the Boyles make us look with refreshed senses at the most diverse range of locations. They still concentrate on quintessentially urban subjects - a gritty patch of sand and bricks, a grubby pavement or a section of partially eroded cobbles in a lorry park. The outcome is sometimes as austere as a minimal sculpture, such as some simple concrete steps in Liverpool. But the Boyles are equally adept at tackling the rugged brown scarp sticking out with seismic force from the side of a Sardinian mountain. Nothing appears to defeat their determination to grasp the essential character of a particular site. It may have been selected with a random dart, but they seem to know how to handle any chance subject, whether it is a snow-scape in Norway or a patch of Australian desert worn bare with camel-tracks.
One of the most absorbing rooms in the exhibition is devoted to a Tidal Series, made at Camber Sands on the south coast of England. The rhythms of the ribbed seashore are interrupted, here and there, by brilliant white shells as minuscule as fingernails. Taken as a whole, the Tidal Series makes us imagine that the sand has been modelled by the shaping hands of some restless, superhuman sculptor.
Occasionally, we fear for the Boyles' safety on location. How did they make Chalk Cliff Study, in which the brittle, particle-spattered surface seems about to slide downwards? Rather than descending into chaos, a broken path of scattered Victorian tiles makes this one of their most imposing works. So do the tall, brooding and elemental studies of Caribbean landslip in the final room, where cascading stretches of cracked mud and rock have been arrested. Even this unstable and potentially catastrophic expanse of earth achieves a kind of grandeur. Against all the odds, "Boyle Family" finds cause for hope in the most stricken and degraded corners of our inexhaustible planet.
"Boyle Family" is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh EH4 (0131 624 6200) until 9 November
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