From the mid-1960s until his death forty years later, Mark Boyle (1934–2005) was a central, vital force on the British and European art scene. He began his career in the arts as a lyric poet. Inspired by Surrealism and Dadaism, he composed his poems as “chance structures”, in which the impulsive and the accidental took precedence. After a while his focus changed, and he decided to concentrate on visual art rather than poetry. At the beginning of the 1960s he was working with assemblage and collage made from scrap materials and objects he came across accidentally. These were exhibited with titles that underlined the chance aspect of their provenance, which gave them a surreal undertone. Such work by Mark Boyle and other contemporary British artists of the time, for example Richard Hamilton, clearly showed a Dadaist influence. They in turn became a source of inspiration and forerunners for similar forms of expression used by the Fluxus movement and by artists such as Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell.
These assemblages were followed by his so-called Random Studies, a series of works based on randomly chosen demolition sites in Shepherds Bush in London. A pattern began to emerge in Mark Boyle’s work. From assemblages, made from found objects and materials, he began to transfer sections of the surface of the earth to boards, which, after treatment, became images themselves, mounted on the wall. As the technique developed, the artist himself became a medium, whose task it was to draw our attention to the reality surrounding us – all its nuances and forms.
During the 1960s, Mark Boyle was also involved in a number of events and happenings, together with (amongst others) his partner, Joan Hills, whom he had met in 1956. Together they embodied the 1960s spirit of experimentation, creating their Son et Lumière events and The Sensual Laboratory, setting up events using sound and light to accompany a microscopic examination of bodily fluids and functions. This led to psychedelic light shows and collaborations with Jimi Hendrix and avant-garde jazz-rock group Soft Machine.
In 1969, as a natural continuation of their multitudinous activities over the course of ten years, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills launched their ambitious Journey to the Surface of the Earth project. The point of departure was a map of the world, which, between 1968 and 1969, was pierced by a thousand holes, made by darts thrown by blindfolded participants. Boyle, Hills, their two children Sebastian and Georgia, and other team members then visited these places one after another, and took “prints”, which, after treatment and finishing in the studio, were exhibited.
The techniques they used for this reconstruction continued to develop, allowing for increasingly advanced “prints” of some very out of the way locations and materials. The aim remained the same:
to reconstruct and render a piece of nature as exactly as possible. Boyle’s own body was treated in the same way for the project Bodily Fluids and Functions. For Mark Boyle, each of these renderings of reality were sensual experiences. It became a kind of all-encompassing artwork that embodied and summed up all his former activities and experiences. These works do not share much with Land Art, or any of the other contemporary artworks of the time that were connected with nature. Although the project had an almost scientific character, it had little to do with Photorealism and Hyperrealism either. In concept, it was far closer to Impressionism and Romanticism, as the aim was to give a true, and as accurate as possible, account of nature. For Mark Boyle, however, the main point was unity, and the mystery that surrounds our whole existence. Through his art he sought to present the concrete reality we live in as a fascinating theatrical performance.
John Ruskin’s words ring true of Boyle’s work:
The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, or any of the emotions which they are
capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record… The work of his life is to be twofold only: to see, to feel… The more a painter accepts nature as he finds it, the more unexpected beauty he discovers in what he first despised.
Quoted by Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today, London: John Murray, 1964, pp. 142, 143, 148 (John
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1853, vol. III; Modern Painters, 1856, vol. III).
Mark Boyle’s life and work were very tightly linked to his partner, Joan Hills, and their children also became very active in his work. From 1971 onwards, all four family members collaborated in the World Series project. Several other contemporary artists, such as Christo, Oldenburg and Kabakov, have also chosen to include their partners in the production and signing of their work, and with this involvement, Mark Boyle signaled the importance of each family member’s input. Although each played a different role in the process, their separate efforts were of equal value, and little by little the work they produced was signed “Boyle Family”.
The whole family was to establish a close, “familiar” relationship with Høvikodden during the early 1970s. The director of the Art Centre at the time, Ole Henrik Moe, first encountered Mark Boyle’s work when he saw it at the Biennial for Young Artists in Paris in 1967, and invited the artist to show his work in Norway. This led to several more exhibitions, and the Henie Onstad Art Centre became one of the first museums to acquire his work. In the mid-1980s, a donation by the Boyle family made it possible to create the “Boyle Family Archives” at the Art Centre.
It is a comprehensive archive which, in addition to several larger artworks and documentary material, also includes examples of all Mark Boyle’s work from 1959 to the mid-1980s. Of particular importance is a group of work from the project entitled Dig, from 1966. This was an excavation
project that took place at a site in London that had been demolished by fire. Thirty people were engaged by Boyle to take part, and, for the project, they were named “The Institute of Contemporary Archaeology”.
The Boyle Family Archives is a comprehensive archive that is used for various exhibition and publication purposes. It bears witness to the Henie Onstad Art Centre’s proud history, and is an integral part of its extraordinary range of special collections that also includes work by Joseph Beuys, drawing a parallel to the Fluxus collection.
