The Boyle Family

Boyle Family is a group of collaborative artists based in London. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills met in Harrogate, Yorkshire in 1957. Joan had studied art and architecture and was bringing up her first son Cameron whilst running her own business. Mark was in the army, writing poetry. After a period of working separately on visual art pieces, they incrementally moved into a natural collaboration - agreeing that art should not exclude anything as a potential subject.

Wherever Mark and Joan lived became their studio, so it seemed natural and necessary that friends and family be co-opted to help whenever there was a big show going off or an event to put on. From very early on, Mark and Joan’s children, Sebastian and Georgia, went around the studio, doing bits here and there, gradually getting more deeply involved: going on working trips, expeditions, helping to finalise and hang exhibitions. This co-creational approach also was applied to the evolution of the work itself and led to innovative and collaborative partnerships with many artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers and dancers, notably Jimi Hendrix and the psychedelic jazz-rock pioneers Soft Machine.

Originally the work went under Mark Boyle's name, largely because Mark and Joan were more concerned with making their work than attempting to fight the stereotype that artists were solo and usually male. Labels never mattered to them - it was the work that was important, not the marketing, image or personal recognition. Taking the view that if the art world wanted to believe in obsessed, lone male artists starving in their studios, they could present their work in a way that would fit. However, as their work became widely known, and at the same time the artistic stereotype began to broaden, they began to exhibit as Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. As adults, Sebastian and Georgia both opted to remain part of the team and since 1985 the four of them have exhibited as Boyle Family. Following the death of Mark Boyle in May 2005, Boyle Family continues to work and exhibit internationally, and to progress the execution of their best known work, the huge global World Series.

Boyle Family aims to make art that does not exclude anything as a potential subject. Over the years, subjects have included: earth, air, fire and water; animals, vegetables, minerals; insects, reptiles, water creatures; human beings and societies; physical elements and fluids from the human body. The media used have included performances and events; films and projections; sound recordings; photography; electron-microphotography; drawing; assemblage; painting; sculpture and installation.

Boyle Family is best known for the earth studies: three dimensional casts of the surface of the earth which record and document random sites with great accuracy. These works combine real material from the site (stones, dust, twigs etc) with paint and resins, preserving the form of the ground to make unique one-off pieces that suggest and offer new interpretations of the environment, combining a powerful conceptual framework with a strong and haunting physical and visual presence.

These ideas are strongly enshrined in the major Boyle Family work, World Series, initiated in 1968 as part of the exhibition Journey to the Surface of the Earth at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. The World Series has been developed over the past forty years alongside a number of parallel and related series and projects including: the London Series; Tidal Series; Thaw Series; Japan Series. Each of these groups of work has involved various random selection techniques to isolate a rectangle of the Earth's surface. In the case of the World Series 1000 sites were chosen at random by visitors to the artists’ studio and the ICA exhibition. Participants were blindfolded and either threw a dart or fired an air rifle at an unseen wall-sized map of the world, which now forms part of the work itself.

This random selection serves several purposes: nothing is excluded as a potential subject; the particular is chosen to serve as a representative of the whole; the subjective role of the artists and creators is re-designated to that of ‘presenters’. Boyle Family seeks to present a version of reality as objectively and truthfully as possible, calling this process ‘motiveless appraisal’.

Once the random selection of subject has been made, the artists recreate the site in a fixed and permanent form as a painted fibreglass relief. They recognise that each work is in some respect necessarily flawed because the selections can never be truly random and that it is impossible to eliminate themselves and their own subjective influences. They attempt to present a slice of reality as they found it at the moment of selection, but no matter how good the re-creation, it is still a re-creation and only an approximation of reality. Boyle Family know that it is impossible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but in their work they try to isolate and reduce randomly chosen elements to as truthful an approximation as is within their power.

Their search is to find out if it is possible for an individual to free him/herself from conditioning and prejudice. To see if it is possible to look at the world, or a small part of it, without being reminded consciously or unconsciously of myths and legends, art of the past or present, art and myths of other cultures. ‘We also want to be able to look at anything without discovering in it our mothers' womb, our lovers' thighs, the possibility of handsome profit or even the makings of an effective work of art. We don't want to find in it memories of places where we suffered joy and anguish or tenderness or laughter. We want to see without motive and without reminiscence this cliff, this street, this field, this rock, this earth.’(1)

Cyprien Gaillard - Pruitt Igoe Falls

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YiQPVvSD7M


Between iconoclasm and minimal aesthetics, romanticism and Land Art, the work of Cyprien GAILLARD (born in 1980 in Paris, lives and works in Berlin) questions man's traces in nature. Through sculpture, painting, etching, photography, video, performance and large scale interventions in public space, GAILLARD has established himself as a major emerging artist on the international art scene.

Whether he commissions a traditional landscape painter to paint colourful views of housing projects in Swiss suburbs, surrounded by their luxurious natural environment (Swiss Ruins, 2005), or introduces a view of a tower-block into a 17th Century Dutch landscape etching (Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005), GAILLARD shows contemporary architecture as a modern ruin on the verge of being taken over by nature. Just like 18th century French 'ruiniste' painter Hubert ROBERT did when he painted the Louvre as an imaginary ruin, GAILLARD follows French philosopher Denis DIDEROT's advice according to which 'One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest'.

In The New Picturesque series (from 2007), Cyprien GAILLARD questions the representation of nature through the notion of 'picturesque', literally 'what is worth being painted': originally, in the 18th century, rough or rugged landscapes, far from the 'beautiful' landscapes the notion later designated. Intervening either with white paint on 18th or 19th century landscape paintings or with torn white paper on old postcards of castles, GAILLARD covers all narrative elements and decorative details, thus revealing their truly 'picturesque' quality.

These series echo in a minimal gesture GAILLARD's seminal Real Remnants of Fictive Wars series (2003-2008), short-lived Land Art performances documented on videos and photos, where the artist activates industrial fire extinguishers in carefully chosen landscapes (amongst which Robert SMITHSON's iconic Spiral Jetty), stressing their beauty at the same time he vandalises them.

Confronting Robert SMITHSON's theory of entropy to issues such as urbanism, vandalism and the decay of modernists utopias, GAILLARD's ruined architectures and disappearing landscapes, just like Hubert ROBERT's paintings, romantically embody man's ineluctable fate through the passing of time. In the video The Lake Arches (2007), for instance, a young man breaks his nose after diving in the moat-like pond surrounding a ghostly post-modern tower block, thus making it look like a castle impenetrable by the youth.

GAILLARD's vision for an 'archaeology of the future' is brought together in his Geographical Analogies series (2006-2008): in wooden boxes recalling display cabinets in natural history museums, nine Polaroid photographs, shot by GAILLARD in locations around the globe, all baring some sense of entropy, are carefully arranged, according to analogies sometimes obvious to the viewer, sometimes personal to the artist.

Tatham and O'Sullivan

'We consider our work as being in a tradition of conceptual art; its about questioning the parameters of art, what contemporary art is, whats allowed and whats not allowed. We're interested in making art that is very public; art that has a physical and intellectual effect on the viewer - whether you like it or not, you have to engage with it.'
(Tatham & O'Sullivan interviewed by Will Bradley, Berlin 2001).

Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan have worked collaboratively since 1995 creating work that is concerned with the mythic potential of art, and how art can exist as an event in a particular space and time. Their installations are often a re-staging of a vocabulary of images, phrases and forms which are part of a common history, though these reference rather than directly quote specific artists and artworks or reveal the origin of a motif: 'There's always more than one meaning. The pink lights in 'The Glamour' are Dan Flavin, but then theyre too camp, a backdrop for a seedy strip club, and in a way they refer to a whole genre of bad art.' (1)

Employing theatricality, Brechtian absurdity and Wittgensteinian word-play, the viewer is playfully complicit in the construction of meaning. Both 'HK' (2001) and 'The Slapstick Mysticks' (2002) use words as found things that can misdirect or mislead a viewer; 'The Blacks' (2002), a sculptural work commissioned by Cubitt, London, is both the title of the work and the work itself: 'a title, a label, a reading, a social indicator, a presentation, a construction a description of the letters themselves and a theatrical design: an absurdly flamboyant non-sculpture sculpture'. (Cubitt, London, 2002)

Helen Hirsch writes, 'Tatham & O'Sullivan proceed to the brink of intelligibility with their work, in as much as they play with the viewer's expectations and irritate them by means of technically diversionary manoeuvres. The title 'Think Thingamajig and Other Things' is symptomatic of the artists' complex rapport with form and speech. This installation begins with a tiny, enigmatic sculpture placed under glass on a made-to-measure wooden pedestal, standing almost unnoticed in the entrance corridor of the Glarus Kunsthaus. Whoever engages with it will irritably have to search for clues, since coded messages belong programmatically to Tatham and O'Sullivan's strategical thinking.' (2)

''Think Thingamajig' [is] a ceramic cube decorated with pink diamonds on a black background that the artists have described as an esoteric object, a thing for thinking. Thinking about what, though? About the artists straw-and black paint-plastered monolith 'This Has Reached the Limit Conditions of Its Own Rhetoric?' About their drawing 'This Is the Thing That Has Reached the Limit Conditions of Its Own Rhetoric', in which the monolith reappears, this time as a chess piece manoeuvred by a suave, top-hatted gentleman? About their recent sculptural work 'That is the Way, it is, it is, that is', in which the 'The Glamour', 'HK' and 'This Has Reached...' projects are smooshed together in what is at once a caricature of the artists oeuvre, a mini-retrospective and, quite possibly, an endgame in which each element cancels the other elements out?

In fact, it does not help us to think about these objects at all. It, like them, is a prop, a decoy. Its only purpose is to get us to think about thinking, and who might want us to do that thinking, and why. This may seem meagre, but it has its consolations. Thinking doesn't disappoint us or compromise us. Thinking guides us through glamour. Thinking is where compassion lives. (Tom Morton, 'Mirror, Mirror', Frieze, issue 87, November-December 2004, pp. 90-93).

Tatham & OSullivan (b. 1971 & 1967) are based in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Art Basel Statements, 2005, Oh We Will, We Will, Will We, Studio Voltaire, London 2005, That is the Way, it is, that is, Sutton Lane, London, 2004, and Think Thingamajig and Other Things, Kunsthaus Glasus, Switzerland, 2003.

Recent group exhibitions include Sutton Lane in Paris, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, (My private) Heroes, MARTA Museum of Art & Design, Herford, Germany, Reflection part II, Sutton Lane, London, 2005, Aint no love in the heart of the city, Cardiff, 2004, and Zenomap, Venice Biennale, 2003.

Tatham & O'Sullivan are represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow and Sutton Lane, London.

Both artists are Research Fellows at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen.

References

1. Interview with Will Bradley, Berlin Biennale 2, Kunstwerke, Berlin, 2001
2. Helen Hirsch, Kunstbulletin 6, 2003, pp. 36-37

www.suttonlane.com

www.themoderninstitute.com

www.scotlandandvenicebiennale.com

Mark Dion - Thames Dig

In this work Dion takes the Thames River, the heart and vein of London as his starting point in his quest to take on the role of excavator and explorer to discover a deeper understanding of the river, the city and it's inhabitants.

The finds of the excavation are meticulously cleaned, by a group of volunteers in tents outside of the Tate Britain in Millbank, then put on display in a large display cabinet which has echoes the Wunderkammer of the Victorian era in it's design and mode of display.

Alongside sherds of deft pottery sits a Pret a Manger soy sauce bottle. Assorted nails confirm the presence of London's first ship yards whilst a fossilised sea urchin hints at an earlier time and the farther reaches of the river and it's estuaries. Dion shows no reverence for any particular artefact he puts on display. All are of equal significance in building the greater picture of mankind. Like digging a pit in the sand, the present penetrates the past, creating layers of meaning that all go some way towards creating a fuller picture of the whole.

CMcA

Richard Wright- Wall Painting

When you enter a room housing one of his works, for a split second it seems empty. Then you might notice a small patch of coloured pattern near the floor, or running up one edge of a corner. Occasionally you won’t see it until you’ve turned around to leave. Reminiscent of sculpture or, perhaps more accurately, modest pieces of furniture or personal belongings, they occupy the room in a completely original way. Most ‘wall painters’ either use the room’s dominant wall as a substitute for the stretched canvas (Sol LeWitt, Simon Patterson or Jessica Diamond, for example), or they cover each wall from floor to ceiling and corner to corner (Robert Barry, Michael Craig-Martin or Martin Boyce). Essentially, the former strategy derives from the mural; the latter from wallpaper. Wright’s interventions tend to occupy very little of the total available wall space, often electing to work those parts of a gallery which no one in their right mind would choose, such as awkward thoroughfares outside the exhibition spaces themselves - stairwells, corridors, entrances.

When Wright does work in the gallery proper, he riffs off the eccentricities of the space and its door frames, skirting boards, alcoves, exit signs, pipes and shelving. Rooms with Rococo cornices don’t seem to bother him (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 1999); nor does beige floral embossed wallpaper (Belmont Hotel, Glasgow, 1995), stained concrete and scruffy windows (Luxembourg, 1998) or black rubber folding partitioning or views of obscene pink walls (Salon 3 in London’s Elephant and Castle shopping centre, 1998). Sometimes the relationship between Wright’s painting and a certain fixture gels to evoke a new figurative association. At TeclaSala in Barcelona in 1999 he painted four strips of what look like arabesque ironwork in blue and black, starting from just beneath a protruding pipe and ending just above the skirting board. The effect half-suggests a shower curtain, with the pipe standing in for the rail. The odd colour change from blue to black implies that the pipe is casting a slim area of shadow. By bringing the space’s anomalies into play, Wright pulls off a paticularly sly version of institutional critique. While most other interventions tend to require, ironically, the authority of the most immaculate white cubes, Wright’s additions bring out narratives of historical identity lurking beneath the matt emulsion of a given space.

Hannah Sawtell

Sawtell's videos and installations investigate the ways in which form and image are disseminated, interpreted and used. Interrogating how we categorize and respond to the barrage of homogenous and repeated imagery they generate relationships between objects, creating playful but critical dialectical encounters.

Clunie Reid - physical awkwardness & absurdity

I Need You To Behave shows the Oval Office inset with a news clipping of guide dogs trained to operate ATMs. Adorned with a sticker and marker pen drawing, Reid’s photo-collage dissembles notions of power and corruption to ridiculously abject proportions. “The text is like a psychotic voice addressing the image,” says Reid. “There’s an imperative in the way that the text works in relation to the image. The drawing is a continuity of the photograph. It’s all organised quite formally and done very quickly. There’s not a lot of time spent considering, and I do more than I use, make and edit later. Each work is developed from a bank of association. It’s informed, but the connections come from the habit of making. Most of my work deals with the idea of absurdity – things like ‘Homer’s finger’s too fat’, cultural things that enter parlance, things that get picked up amongst friends: they’re like symptoms or a currency. This ties in with physical awkwardness; it’s related to our physical relation to things, like making art.”

Steven Claydon

The Thingness of Things- Heideggers exploration of what differentiates an ordinary object from one which is inbued with cultural significance.

The Thingliness of Things I (Potatoes In The Cellar) takes its inspiration from Heidegger’s writings on art. One of Heidegger’s philosophical problems was what exactly is it that gives art its special value? At what point does art become art and not just an ordinary object? Heidegger explored this question via a comparison between a stored work of art and potatoes kept in a cellar. Claydon’s own position in relation to this is “I see it as a more complex situation with subtle variations between the realms of material baseness and balanced subjectivity.” In The Thingliness of Things I (Potatoes In The Cellar) Claydon offers an assemblage incorporating domestic and institutional forms that reference both the everyday and the power systems that assign cultural worth.

Daniel Buren & Sol Le Witt

Patterned plinths holding nothing. The wall as the canvas.

Nick Evans

Figurative Objects and Patterns. Interesting modes of display

Investigations of a Dog, Deste Foundation, Hydra

Investigations of a Dog – Works from the FACE Collections
Athens, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art
June 22 – October 30, 2011

The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Investigations of a Dog – Works from the FACE Collections, the first exhibition organized and curated by the FACE group that features works from the collections of the five partner institutions.

Investigations of a Dog takes its title from the short story by Franz Kafka (1922), whose main character, a dog, questions the limits of his canine existence, or rather, the sense of the community to which he belongs. This constant questioning distances the dog from the others and forces him into the position of the outsider. Nonetheless, in his solitude the dog expresses his most intense form of interest for the community and his compatriots.

http://www.deste.gr/en/index.html

Kippenberger's Wonky Street Lights

In the absence of human life Kippenberger's street lamp takes on the character of the old drunk leaning against it. The inanimate becomes animate. The scene is lit by two real interior wall lights, transferring the light of the cosy interior out into the cold and blue outside of Kippenbergers deserted street. CMcA

Urs Fischer at The New Museum, NYC

Comparisons may be odious, but Fischer's art betrays all kinds of influences and careless correspondences. A pink cast of a Beaux-Arts ornamental street lamp has gone all droopy, like a wilting guest at a Salvador Dali theme night. It reminds me of Martin Kippenberger's wonky streetlights, but they were funny. This is just rhetorical. Kippenberger's tempestuous spirit is one of several hanging over Fischer's work. In 2007 Fischer had a crew excavate a hole, eight feet deep, beneath the ground floor of Gavin Brown's New York gallery, while deliberately omitting to inform the landlord. He called the work You. It was a sort of grave; a belated continuation of an already familiar artistic gambit, but audacious and raw. Fischer has also cast heads in the manner of Bruce Nauman, and perpetrated a bewildering variety of works in his career, which began in the mid-90s. Some of what Fischer does may be unoriginal, but unoriginality is something all artists have to deal with. His art has always had a lot of spirit, even when he reprises the familiar.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/09/urs-fischer-review

The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika

Martin Kippenberger

Although most of Kippenberger’s oeuvre tends toward the creation of a vast, interconnected artwork, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ (1994) is unique in that it might be considered his masterwork and the culmination of his achievement. Based on Kafka’s novel Amerika, the installation re-imagines a section of the book when the protagonist Karl Rossmann, having travelled across America, applies for a job at the ‘biggest theatre in the world’. ‘Everybody is welcome!’ proclaims the call for employment, ‘Whoever wants to become an artist should sign up!’. Kafka never completed the novel, which he abandoned writing over ten years before it was posthumously published in 1927, and Kippenberger claimed that he never finished reading it, hearing the story second-hand from a friend. The unfinished condition of the book leaves open the possibility, unusual in Kafka’s fiction, for a ‘happy ending’.