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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