Mark Boyle

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.

Mark Boyle, artist: born Glasgow 1934; married 1999 Joan Hills (née Little; one son, one daughter); died London 4 May 2005.

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

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