Boyle Family

Boyle Family (Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, and their children, Georgia and Sebastian) have been working together as a unit since 1963. Their art has taken many forms—performance theatre, light shows for rock bands including the Soft Machine, electron microscope photographs of Mark Boyle’s skin—but they’re probably best known for their 3-dimensional replications of surfaces, in which they recreate a randomly chosen piece of land using real material, resin and fibreglass. The largest of these projects, the World Series, aims to recreate 1000 pieces of terrain chosen by throwing darts at a world map. We talked to Sebastian Boyle on the opening day of a 40-year Boyle Family retrospective at Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the first show of this kind that Boyle Family have mounted.

So, tell me about this exhibition, and the reasons behind doing things this way.

One of the things about us is that working with Mark and Joan, and with this exhibition marking forty years of an exhibiting career, we’ve been very aware of the ups and downs that Mark and Joan have had in their career. We’ve had a number of big successful shows: representing Britain at the Venice Biennale—that was a huge honour—to our show at the Hayward, which I think set a record for attendance for living British artists. But we’ve also been aware that we’ve been very good at disappearing between shows, and that’s partly because we’re not represented by a gallery, so we’ve not had a D’Offay or a Lisson behind us, promoting us, and so we don’t have those shows between times which kind of fill the gaps as it were. And we’re not part of any international dealer network, you know, [that thing where] you’re in Edinburgh this month and you’re in New York next month. We’re kind of, much more independent, [it’s probably] more of a typical experience for most artists, which is you have a show and then you don’t have a show for quite a while.

Is one of the other reasons just the sheer time and effort it takes to make each piece?

There’s a bit of that. It varies, how long it takes, and we work on 3 or 4 at the same time. And some can take months, others take years, partly [because] we might hit a technical problem. There’s enthusiasm as well, there’s other things crop up that we get excited about, different projects, or somebody says they’ll pay for something a bit sooner, you know, so therefore you finish [that piece] a bit quicker. We’re very aware of real life, and how it actually affects what we do, and that’s true for all artists. That whole discussion about separating the life of the artist from the work, I think that’s almost impossible to do. That’s, people like to separate, [people] argue for separating the life of the artist from the work when the artist has been a complete shit, or has fascist tendencies, or whatever.

When people want to separate those two strands, it’s all about the lone tortured genius, who, by virtue of his great talent, is allowed to be a total shit. It’s not just visual art; it’s literature and music as well. You know, it’s okay for Bob Dylan to be a bastard because, well, he’s Bob Dylan.

Yeah, which is completely wrong. We almost feel that we’ve suffered, because we come across as this nice-guy family that work together, and are not complete shits, so we don’t fit that stereotype. I think the commercial galleries find it easier to sell something [if they can] make it fit certain stereotypes, and that maybe some rich collectors feel that they’re unrecognised geniuses themselves, that they’re recognising… they’ve made it by being a bastard, in international finance or whatever. I mean that’s one of the really sad things about a large aspect of the art world, is that the people at the top end, who collect, are rich, they’ve got the power to buy more work, so they get more influence, and by and large they’ve probably made that money by being pretty unscrupulous. So, partly, like politics, what makes art so fascinating is that there are so many different facets and angles to it. It’s not something that we get involved in, and one of those aspects is that there are people who see it as buying stocks and shares.

Art as investment.

Yeah, and almost, by working as a family, we’re outisde that, because they want, they quite like it if it’s the single artist. They might die, to put it horribly brutally, and then the rarity or value goes up. It’s a bit awkward if there’s 4 of you, and Georgia or I might suddenly have kids, and then it might go on, and the rarity value will [plummet]. Oh, that’s probably not the sort of thing that I’m supposed to say, ha ha.

In terms of working as a family, was there ever any question of you and Georgia doing something else? Or was it always going to be this way?

I’d love to be able to say, ‘Listen it was all our ideas and Mark and Joan joined us, the bastards.’ Um, no, whether it was… whether we were indoctrinated at an early age, like little seagulls… What was that great experiment, the first thing they saw when they were born, they tried focusing on that as their mother and father? Maybe at a very early age we just focused in on these pictures, in a deeply uncritical way. I’m being flippant, I shouldn’t say that… Once you’ve been working at something for 10 years, and it’s very exciting, and enjoyable and everything, and that’s what you do, and that was the state we were in by the time we were 18… By the time it became a question of whether we were going to go to art school, we’d already spent 10 years training and mixing colours and making sculptures and working with fibreglass, you know? The idea that we were going to stop doing that and go and spend three years going to artschool was just… nonexistent. And it’s gone on and on and on, and now we’ve got a 20, 30 year career, whatever it is, I’m now 42, so I’ve been doing this for…

35 years…

Yeah, and at what point does one say well actually you should have gone and done something else? This is what we do, you know? And when I’m saying about how life comes in and interferes with, affects [the art] we’re very aware of that every day. Things happen, we might have an argument, we might ruin a picture as a result of an argument, if you’re in a bad mood, or you might make something much better, or a gallery might go bust, or it might turn out that certain curators we don’t get on with so we don’t get certain opportunities, the opportunities that maybe other artists might have, but then we do get other opportunities. And that’s our lives. We’ve got our own show space, project space, in Spitalfields, where I live, kind of like an artist run space, but I’ve not got into showing other people’s work, because we kind of need it all the time. But we’re beginning to see that, having established that, if you have a project space you have to work on projects. So things like the new grass study, that’s something that Georgia and I have worked on, it’s a Boyle Family thing, and we’ve just done a random sound study thing in London, where we got people to—and this was going back to our roots in a way—throw darts at the back of a map, not knowing what it was. It was a big white sheet of paper, and they signed the back of it, and they had to draw something out of a hat, and it was a piece of paper with a time on it, every minute in 24hrs, on the bits of paper. And they then wrote the time on their dart selection, and we’ve been going to each place at that time, and recording one minute of sound, and we’re doing a cd of just random sounds. And that’s fitting in with our thing, the idea that somehow I’m going to go off and be an abstract painter, it’s not on, I mean obviously some artists have had that conversion, I mean maybe I will, [at the] same time I can’t predict the future but I don’t think that it’s going to happen, we’ve always got our various ideas and projects, and wouldn’t it be great to go off and do another World Series site, and they take a lot of organisation. We haven’t got any sponsorship, [and] there’s so many things in Scotland and Britain… How are you going to cobble it together, and obviuosly we always think that the grass is greener on the other side, and one imagines that American artists just have money thrown at them, in Germany all these kunsthallers…

Doesn’t the lack of sponsorship give you far more autonomy?

It does, yes, I mean that’s our thing, the independent spirit that comes out of both Mark and Joan; Mark, had a fiercely independent thing coming out of Glasgow, and Joan also has a very strong independent streak, and both of them left the churches that they were brought up in; Mark the catholic and Joan the protestant. Both left Scotland, maybe to get away from famiies, the small minded thing going on in the 50s, [maybe they] wanted to get away to a place where maybe things were more open minded, and not be told what to think. And there’s always been this independence, which is maybe why we’ve not joined any of the big galleries, [because] we’ve not wanted to be represented by one, we represent ourselves and be independent. It means you don’t have the benefits of the regular, monthly cheque, but you can go and work on the projects you want to work on.

And when it comes to, not method as such, Mark always said that it should be random, no style, but isn’t that in itself a style? No matter what you do, you can never be truly random.

We freely admit to, let’s get this exactly right, we don’t think we’ve achieved what we set out to [achieve]. Yes, you can still identify that it’s a Boyle, and to that extent there is a style, but I think it’s a pretty good attempt at cuttting ourselves out of the work, of trying to present reality just as it is. Um, in the future, people might look at these pieces, if we’re lucky enough that people are looking at them, [and] say how did anybody ever think that this looks like reality at all? It’s obviously just fibreglass and resin, just like we might look at Dutch still life paintings and think of course it’s a painting, it’s a really good painting, but it’s just a painting, it’s not that people thought it was an equivalent of reality.

But aren’t Boyle Family works the ultimate in unreality? They’re meticulous reconstructions of land, which, maybe they don’t “pretend” to be real, but they’re presented as a document of a physical area?

Well that is one of the things that I find addictive about our work. I am still um, hooked on it, after all these years, because of questions like that, and you can look at it from both sides. There is the real in there; at the same time, one and the same time, they’re a representation of reality and a presentation of that reality. There is almost always real material in the piece, as it was on the site, or as near as we can get it to be. Whether it’s just the real stones, or dust, or a layer of sane from the beach, what we aim for is the patina, the surface, and that we then try and, we’ve got various techniques that we use, but the principal behind them all is to try and preserve the patina.

Then the resin gets painted from behind.

Yes, and we use resin and fibreglass to make it look solid and hold the shape. But for us, definitely we want to present that reality, rather than doing some kind of Disney-esque kind of, um, version of it. We’re not interested in the theme park kind of thing, because that is actually the opposite of what we’re doing, because they’re providing a fake perfect reality, even if they’re trying to do… There was a kind of home interiors style you saw in magazines a few years ago where there was distressed interiors, so you would have half the plaster missing, that kind of distressed look, but that’s more sort of set dressing, and the BBC did a fake Boyle once, and they kind of had the idea, but it was fake: doing something that looks like a Boyle, and here we’re into another level of reality. An advertising agency did the same thing, they did a campaign for Marlboro, someone had been to the Hayward show or something, and they did the whole darts on the map, they did a whole thing about “somewhere in Marlboro country” [where] you’d see a photograph with a billboard advertising it, there would be a road with a car on it, and then the next shot was zooming in on the dashboard of the car, and there was the pack of Marlboro. But all those things, they’re set dressing, to match what people think reality is like, so that yes, in a gutter you’d have a fag packet or a cigarette butt. Whereas our idea is ‘No, let’s not do what we think it should look like,’ which is kind of what some painters do… It’s the crucial difference really, good artists want to actually see what the world looks like, even if they go off and do abstract painting, they actually still go and look at the world, and say that this is… they usually look at politics in the same way. And the not so good artists assume they know. We’re trying to take ourselves out of the work. Ultimately it’s something that’s unreal, because it’s fibreglass and resin, but it’s still an attempt to try and present reality.

But can you ever really take yourselves out of the work?

We can’t, ever. But I think it’s worth trying to. We all know that our own experiences are our own experiences, but you can try and be aware of the fact that these are your own experiences, rather than thinking that you know universal truths because you know absolutely for sure that you are right. Which ties in with that study they’ve just done in America, this research paper on the mentality of neoconservatives, on Bush and the Republicans, saying that they had a mental approach that was insecure, and they wanted definites and absolutes, they beileve in absolutes.

Because that’s easier, isn’t it?

Yes, it’s easier, you can shy away from shades of grey, and that’s the problem when you’ve got not much of an awareness of other people, which is why they’re not particularly sympathetic to the poor, the less priveliged, and they feel that they can go round telling us how to lead our lives. And again, that was the thing that Mark and Joan were getting away from all that time ago, people telling us how to lead our lives.

Something else: a lot of Boyle family stuff takes a six foot square of somewhere, and forces you to look at it in the way that you wouldn’t normally look at a random bit of ground. It strikes me that there’s something democratic about that: here’s a presentation of a random bit of the world. Look at this in as much detail as you would any other piece of art.

Well, we, just like we don’t want to be preached to and told what to do, we’re not preaching or telling anyone else what to do, so we wouldn’t for a minute say that everybody’s got to stop, the world’s flashing by too quickly, go and look at the world intensely, and suddenly great truths will be revealed to you. What we think is that over thousands of years, for perfectly good and right reasons, the human brain has developed so that we’re constantly filtering the good from the bad, the relevant from the irrelevant, in our lives, because there is just so much sensory information coming to us: sound, sight, smell, touch, etcetera, that we would… Our brains, which are pretty amazing things, would be totally overblown, if we were really having that total level of concentration. And we have to do that. That’s what makes us rational developed beings, because we’ve got this capacity, otherwise we’d just be wobbling jellies, or bunches of plasma, just going ”wooaaaaahhh.” It’s good for us to try and concentrate on selective things, to try and get a more focused attention span, because you don’t want to go through life having it be a nice MTV experience, right? And then maybe get to 70 years old and say what the fuck was that all about? Who was it said that the unobserved life is not worth living? And so we’ve combined this with a physical need to actually make something. It’s not our style to go out and draw a line on the ground, which one artist from New York [who] was influenced by our ideas was doing, in the early 70s. That is a bit cute for us; we’re very much influenced by Kurt Schwitters, getting physical and making something. There’s a slight thing about being slightly depressed, and you get to lift your spirits a bit by actually doing something, and feeling like you’re making a contribution, the brain endorphins are getting released. We get a great physical thing out of making a three dimensional something, out of making a 3-D something that hangs on the wall. We get a buzz out of looking at them, and if we’re lucky enough to get asked to put on an exhibition… We’d probably get a bit of a kick if other people came and think they’re worth looking at, it’s nice to think that maybe we’ve made some little contribution to something. Maybe somebody will get inspired to go and do something. But those filters are really important. Yeah, if all of us in our own different ways sometimes get to lift the filters and you get to see something, imagine, to get some kind of sensory thing where you’re totally concentrating on one thing. And unfortunately it usually happens in, the clearest examples are in times of great danger, like car accidents.

Where time slows down…

Exactly, time slows down, the kid runs off the pavement and on to the street and you’re slamming on the brakes, time slows down and suddenly you’re no longer having that inner dialogue of am I going to get to the train on time, what am I having for dinner tonight, it would be really nice to see that show, or the dj on the radio’s an arsehole, etcetera. It’s all totally focused on that one thing. And that’s pretty amazing, and I think when you find something that you’re really into doing, your writing for example, you could be writing and trying to get it right, and you know that sometimes you’re going through the motions, and other times you’re on song, you feel the words are just there, and other times you’re maybe working at it, and you can feel it coming together. And I think everybody’s got to find that thing in life.

I think the times things like that happen most often is with live music; you know, you get that physical reaction to things, you can tell that somehow they’re all connecting with each other, in an almost telepathic sort of way.

Music has a great ability to do that, there have been all sorts of ideas and theories as to why that might be, such as when we’re in the womb we can hear, that’s the first sense that develops, and you can make connections with the outside world and certainly you get that frisson. For us as visual artists, it’s great doing small shows, you plan it out over two years to try and get a bit of a frisson, and you have to work with curators; with a big institution like this [the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art], there’s the conservation department and the hanging team and the press dept. and then there’s the health and safety people who want the barriers. And then of course when most people come and see it there’s a lot of other people, and so on. I hope that some people get the chance to come round, and maybe they’ll get a few surprises and think wow, that’s not bad, they’ll get a certain level of excitement. We certainly have it, putting the show on, and we aim to try and get each room a little different in a way that’s still relevant to the work.

Mark and Joan did a lot of projection work for the Soft Machine, and at UFO, just as the club was becoming the hub around which the psychedelic scene was coalescing; it struck me as a nice coincidence that there was this nuclear family at the heart of the 60s counterculture.

Mark and Joan said that a lot of what our ideas are of the 60s are the spin that’s been put on it since, so when you’re actually there, at UFO or wherever, or just prior to that, a lot of people who were cutting edge or whatever were still [wearing] twinset and pearls. That was what it was like; the whole counterculture thing came slightly later, in ’68. Yes there were communes and so on, but the vast majority of people were getting in and out of relationships and having kids and doing what people have always been doing; it just so happened that they had long hair. And I’m sure you have friends from university who were kind of, who might have been considered drop outs or whatever, but who are in loving relationships. Mark and Joan were great in that they didn’t want to exclude us from their lives, and that was the big difference; the idea that you get on and you didn’t have to have your teeth out when you were 21, you didn’t have to go into a profession, you could be self employed, be something you’re not. So many people like Mark and Joan just didn’t want to be told what to do, and suddenly they were in a majority. And so they didn’t exclude us from their life and work, and we got increasingly involved, and not being excluded meant that we were aware of the problems that they were facing as well as the good times, and it was warts and all.

So it wasn’t an idyllic ‘60s hippy childhood then?

No, because we would be aware that they were completely stony broke, and that there wasn’t the money to get the resin to finish the picture, and that we had to do deals, maybe let things go for cheaper than we wanted to, in order to survive, or just to pay the rent, or we’d have to sell the house when we didn’t want to sell the house, because the overdraft was too big. But yeah, at the heart of that was a nuclear family. But an extended nuclear family, because there were also people like the Soft Machine, hanging around, other artists. I think the experience of doing Requiem For An Unknown Citizen—which was Mark and Joan’s big, whole thing… It was going to be done in Berlin, an exhibition of pieces, projection pieces and stuff for the Soft Machine, and then there was Requiem… which involved filming people in random situations and having a theatre group acting out what they were doing. It was almost a total art, the Dutch were playing total football, they were trying to make total art, and it was going to be a huge thing. They had a nightmare with promoters and curators and it all fell apart. Eventually they put it on in Rotterdam, and the whole mental and physical energy of doing that burnt Mark and Joan out a bit. They had an amazing kind of 5 or 6 years, since doing the first projection pieces, and being on fire as it were. In ’71, having done that and having a group of 20 actors and people they picked up off the street, living together and rehearsing in Oslo, and taking the whole thing to Berlin… To do all of that without any sponsorship or government money, and have it all go wrong in Berlin before getting it together in Rotterdam, they realised that they couldn’t do it physically, and after that the larger collaborations ended, and it came down to Boyle Family, the four of us, five including my brother. That was the only thing that funded anything: selling the pictures, so that was the point that it became a nuclear family. Maybe if they didn’t have such an independent streak and they’d been able to get involved with raising funds and so on, maybe we could have continued at that level, some kind of Peter Brook thing combining art and theatre, but knowing friends who have gone down the road of getting by on grants and so on, you end up spending so much time filling in forms and using so much mental energy and anger when you don’t get the grant, that I think it’s better we stayed independent. Maybe we could have got more of the World Series made, maybe we wouldn’t have done. I think maybe we’d have done more regular exhibitions, but that’s our story.

from Tidal Series, 1969

Addison Crescent Study, from the London Series, 1969

Posted at 4pm on 30/08/03 by Leon McDermott to the art, interviews category.
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