STUDY: EYES, MARTIN BOYCE

STUDY IS THE GENERIC NAME for a series of focused case-studies of works from the collection.

Each involves a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery. The work is studied in depth: from its

techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Each

Study is made available in a booklet.

AN ARTWORK IS A SYSTEM that cannot be reduced only to an object or an index (certificate,

instructions, etc.). It also includes the histories (material and conceptual), the trajectories (physical

or virtual) and the narratives (past or to come) generated by the artwork: this is what this programme

will research.

TO STUDY IS TO DEVOTE TIME and attention to a particular subject, to acquire knowledge. It can also

refer to a piece of work done for practice or as an experiment. It is this latter sense that we would like

to pursue –not the transmission of knowledge or an act of contemplation, but rather as an invitation

to act.

STUDY IS NOT AN ATTEMPT to capture or seize but a methodology of encounter and the insistence on

the provisional as both form and content within the process of research. It is an exercise in responding

to the infinite demands of the work, not meant to bring forth any historical truth but rather to enter

into a true dialogue with the work.

IN THIS SENSE THE STUDY IS NOT FINITE, but demands the reader to take up multiple positions and

viewpoints. More than anything, it asks the viewer to engage with the artwork by, at the very least,

spending some time with it.

THE FOURTH STUDY IS: EYES, MARTIN BOYCE. For the first time an external critic, Steven Cairns,

has been commissioned to write a text for the booklet.

STEVEN CAIRNS is Associate Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image at the Institute of Contemporary

Arts, London. He recently coordinated the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images 2012, curated

Alma Mater (2011/12) a LUX annual touring programme of recent Moving Image from the UK and

has contributed to numerous screening programmes and panel discussions. He is also a regular

contributor to Artforum and Frieze among other publications.

MARTIN BOYCE was born in 1967 in Glasgow, where lives and works.

EYES is a work by MARTIN BOYCE (b.1967) from 2012. It is composed of a panel that has three

sculptural elements made of steel on its surface: a series of letters in an angular typeface, a mask

and a custom-built steel bracket. The letters are sprawled across the surface of the jesmonite panel.

They are made of steel, and due to the roughness of the metal they have acquired a brownish colour.

The sequence of characters at the top comprises the word “absent” and at the bottom “eyes”. In the

centre of the panel is the mask; it is made of laminated metal and painted an aquamarine blue, which

the artist has selectively applied to reveal rust at the edges. The work was produced in 2012 and first

exhibited in June of the same year at Art Basel 43, where it was purchased.

THE PANEL is made with a shuttering process: it is a procedure that appeared with the development of

reinforced concrete panels and it allowed concrete to be manufactured on site – wood panels were

created with planks that were then formed into a box mould into which the liquid material and

normally reinforcing rods of steel were placed. When the concrete was set the wood was removed, and

often reused. This process left the imprint of the grain of wood and structure of the mould visible on

the surface of the panels.

THE LETTERS are the result of research that Boyce started in 2002 while working on his exhibition for

Tramway in Glasgow. For this occasion he wanted to create a work based around the form of an

urban park. While thinking of the basic elements that constituted such a space, he thought about

a tree. This research led the artist to a book of Modernist French Gardens where he found a black-

and-white photograph of four, five metre high concrete trees created by Joël and Jan Martel for

the Robert Mallet-Stevens garden which was part of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts

Décoratifs et Industriels in Paris. These trees, according to the artist, represent a perfect collapse of

architecture and nature. In 2005, when he moved to Berlin, he revisited the Martel concrete trees in

order to further understand their system of construction. In fact, while making models for the Martel

trees, he cut out components of the trees and laid them flat on his desk. Then he began to arrange

these cut-outs to see if they could repeat, and from there he developed a linear pattern based on the

trees’ central structure. Within the lines of the repeat, Boyce began to see the letters of the alphabet

emerging. Over a period of time, numerous letters appeared until he had a complete alphabet. They

became emblematic of his ongoing exploration of the oppositional elements of contemporary urban

existence: the natural versus the constructed, the popular versus the uninhabited, and the old versus

the new.1

IN EYES, the folded, metal mask is made of an arrangement from the Martel trees’ silhouettes. Boyce’s

masks amplify a primacy of vision: as with the modernists, the eye supersedes any other sense or

way of perceiving reality as an imposition of order. ‘A way of seeing’ in Boyce’s practice also becomes

revelatory for a hidden alphabetical order.

1. Martin Boyce, catalogue edited by Gateau, Plath, Prince; 2009. P.114

MASKS then come to imply a direct way of seeing that is inescapable because it is present, facing the

audience from a dominant, leading position.

BOYCE has produced a lexicon that questions the relationship between object and ideology, which

recognises the possibility of separating the two. The references from modernist works are extremely

present, the way he reuses each element, however, creates a short circuit between the work and the

beliefs that formed it. Together with Joël and Jan Martel, Arne Jacobsen, Charles and Ray Eames,

Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand are also amongst the mid-century masters whose classic pieces of

furniture and design have interested Boyce.

EYES is in dialogue with three other works by Martin Boyce exhibited at DRAF: a panel, a mask and a

ventilation grille. Each of the three works has a strong link with Eyes and creates a tension between

the main motifs in Boyce practice.

THE VENTILATION GRILLE exhibited at DRAF is part of a work made of four vents entitled Sound

and Silence Wrought into Iron and Air from 2011. The work is also designed with the Martel trees’

silhouettes, from which is possible to draw the letters of the alphabet that Boyce positioned on the

panel works.

THE VENTILATION GRILLES may be read as irregularly located thresholds into the unseen, internal

spaces of museum and gallery architecture. Yet they are also air holes puncturing the exhibition space

and perhaps allowing it to breathe more freely, facilitating an imaginative flow between notion of

inside and outside, as well as the artificial and the organic.2

HANGING ON THE WALL, the sculpture Untitled, from 2011, emerges from yet another important

reference in Boyce’s practice: since 1998 the artist has worked on leg splints designed in 1942 by

Charles and Ray Eames (1907–1978, 1912–1988) that was conceived originally in its peculiar curved

forms and innovative plywood technology for the support of an injured leg. Boyce decomposes and

reconfigures this design piece in a mask to give it the appearance of a three-dimensional biomorphic

form, which recalls an African tribal mask or a futuristic cyborg.

THE EAMES LEG through time loses not only its original function but ultimately its purpose and the

ideology attached to its production. ‘So what is left? The object isn’t dead as such but perhaps undead,

a ghost, a physical presence in limbo.’3

SOME OF THE MASKS that Boyce has been producing in the series are installed on plinths or display

stands, while others, like this one shown at DRAF, are conceived as a wall installation.

2. Martin Boyce, catalogue edited by Gateau, Plath, Prince; 2009. P. 121

IN LIKE WATERFALLS, from 2011, we again find linguistic elements derived from the trees by Martel

where the boundaries between design and art are blurred. The letters are located on a painted panel

and constitute significant presences that oscillate between graphic design and images drowned by

memory. The letters in this work compose the word ‘curtain walls’.

A CURTAIN WALL system is an outer covering of a building in which the outer walls are non-structural,

but merely keep the weather out and the occupants in. As the curtain wall is non-structural, it can

be made of a lightweight material, thereby reducing construction costs. They were introduced in the

20th century in parallel with the widespread use of steel frames. As the steel carried the weight of the

building, for the first time it was possible to make large open plan spaces in which any internal walls

were merely for aesthetic, rather than structural concerns. Curtain walls instead of being built in situ,

were manufactured off-site and often had standardised dimensions and material finishes. Curtain

walls enabled, in part, the modernisation of construction: from skyscrapers to low-cost social houses.

IN BOYCE’S WORKS modernity has become the platform for ambivalent experiences. The artist inquires

to what degree its ideologies and beliefs have to be reassessed with the passing of time. The collapse of

the original values attached to certain objects becomes a stage for a melancholic environment of decay

and solitude.

3. Martin Boyce, Catalogue edited by herausgegeben von; 2012. P.51

EYES

OVER THE LAST DECADE, Glasgow-based artist Martin Boyce has developed a visual language based

on an image of twin sculptors Jan and Joël Martel’s Cubist concrete trees, designed for a garden

in the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Exhibition of Decorative Arts

and Modern Industries) in Paris. The Martel trees were destroyed after the exhibition and are now

only traceable in photographic documentation and a wooden Marquette, held at the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York. Taking his inspiration from the trees angular form, Boyce has revived

their presence, using their likeness as a motif and applying it to a range of his own sculptural outputs.

In his sculptural, wall-based work, Eyes, 2012, this influence can be seen in his use of text and its

material form. Looking back at key stages in the development of his practice reveals the complex

process he has explored to achieve his unique visual lexicon.

BOYCE’S FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH AN IMAGE OF THE MARTEL TREES was made while

researching for his 2002 solo exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow, titled Our Love is Like the Flowers,

the Rain, the Sea and the Hours. He recalls, “I got hold of a book on French Modernist gardens and

in it there was a picture of the Martel trees, and for whatever reason, out of all the things in the book,

I was really taken by them as objects. I knew I wanted to make a park-like landscape for the show at

Tramway, and the components I needed to make the park were a bin, a bench and a tree in some kind

of configuration. One of my early thoughts was to use the Martel tree, but this idea got put to one side,

as I wanted the trees to produced light and I ended up making trees with fluorescent strip lighting – at

that point the Martel trees were one of those things in a book that I just forgot about”.

IN 2005 Boyce was offered a 9 month fellowship in Berlin. He arrived in March, and with no exhibitions

scheduled until October he had a clear period for research in his studio, which he shared with fellow

artist Simon Starling. “I went to Berlin with very little stuff and took the opportunity to think about

old material – one of the things I returned to was the concrete tree. I didn’t even bring the book with

me, so someone at The Modern Institute (Boyce’s Glasgow gallery) sent it over and I started making

little models of the tree out of cardboard. I was just trying to understand how it functioned and that

was when the whole body of work started. When I was making the models, I would often have some of

the component parts of the tree lying flat on the desk and I began to see that they could almost form a

repeat pattern. I started to trace the pattern on paper until I figured out how I could make it work”.

FROM THIS REPEAT pattern Boyce began to identify letters in its network of straight lines. “I remember

seeing an ‘R’ within the lines of the pattern and then I thought I could almost see an ‘N,’ and because

I could find these letters I wanted to make a phrase or a word and I started looking for all the letters

I would need. This was the first trial, and I slowly honed it down over quite a long period of time. I

eventually found every letter in the alphabet, and they were all more or less the same size. There are

occasions when the ‘R’ is upside down or the ‘E’ is on its side – at first I put all the letters the right way

up, but I felt they lost something. Allowing the letters to follow the pattern looks a bit like they are

tumbling or falling through space – some upside-down, some on their side, makes it more interesting.

If you placed the repeat pattern over the letters as I use them in the work they would disappear, as

each letter is positioned in relation to the pattern – there is a very strict system in place that dictates

how the letters appear in relation to each other”.

IN EYES, 2012, his use of text spells out the words ‘Absent Eyes’ – the words scattered over the surface

of the work. The semi-abstract pattern they create conforms to this system, and is at first difficult

to decipher. Like much of Boyce’s work, closer inspection reveals subtle detail. Resting atop what a

surface that resembles shuttered concrete, bearing a pattern left by the grain of the wood used to form

it, the letters appear to be the product of industrial manufacturing process, and like the shuttered

concrete, refer the primary materials used in our urban environment.

THE PHRASE “ABSENT EYES” also refers the mask-like form that protrudes from the works surface

– a box like structure formed from three flat panels, similarly shaped to the sections of the Martel

trees with two eye holes cut out. Boyce’s first series of mask works began in 1998, when he adapted a

medical splint, designed by Charles and Ray Eames. But it was in 2005 that his interest in a mask’s

exotic appeal and evocative appearance was also influenced by his fascination with the Martel trees.

He recalls, “I was making a model for a large sculpture of a telephone booth based on the trees form,

and it occurred to me that it looked like the back of a mask. When I turned it round I could see it was

head-like or face-like, so I cut two eye holes in it”. These masks now often appear in his work, their

anthropomorphic qualities suggesting both the historical and the futuristic, and like the holes cut into

the mask of Eyes, 2012, the absence of human presence is all the while apparent.

Steven Cairns

*All quotes taken from an interview held between the author and Martin Boyce in February 2012.

SELECTED IMAGES

Martin Boyce, Of Kisses, 2009.Courtesy the artist and Modern Institute.

Martin Boyce, (of fallen petals on a table top), 2012.Courtesy the artist and Modern Institute.

Exhibition view. Martin Boyce. Turner Prize, 2011.Courtesy the artist.

Exhibition view. Martin Boyce. Turner Prize, 2011.Courtesy the artist.

Martin Boyce, Untitled, 2009.Tate Modern, London

Martin Boyce, Painted Tears, 2011.Courtesy the artist.

Martin Boyce See Through Soul,2007.Courtesy of the artist,The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.Photo: Fabian Birgfield

Martin Boyce, Staring Into the Surface of Things, 2007.Courtesy of the artist and The Mod-ern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow.Photo: Ruth Clark

Ray and Charles Eames, Leg splint, 1942

Le Corbusier, Cité radieuse, Marseille, 1945 -1952

Le Corbusier, Cité radieuse, Marseille, 1945 -1952

Jan and Joël Martel, Cubist concrete trees for Robert Mallet-Stevens’ Pavilion of Transports, 1925, Exhibition of Decora-tive Arts and Modern Industries, Paris

Martin Boyce, Installation view, We Are Shipwrecked and Landlocked, RMIT University Alumni Courtyard, Melbourne, with Kaldor Art Projects, 2008, Queensland Art Gallery Collection,photo: Adam Free

PLEASE COMPLETE THE RE-EXAMINATION SECTION (LAST PAGE) ON ARRIVAL AND BEFORE DEPARTURE. ANY CHANGE OF CONDITION, DAMAGE OR DETERIORATION (WORK OR/AND FRAME) MUST BE REPORTED IMMEDIATELY. PLEASE INCLUDE PICTURE OF THE WORK LOCATING ALL REMARKS, CHANGES IN CONDITION AND/OR DAMAGES Number of documents/photographs enclosed : 5

Cat. No. : BOMA-2012-03 Artist : MARTIN BOYCE Title of the work, year : Eyes, 2012

PLEASE RETURN REPORT AT THE END OF THE EXHIBITION PERIOD

Condition Report for

Loan/Transfer of Sculptures

SUPPORT : Material: Describe components (Please fill out and attached a seperate sheet of page 2 for every individual component) : 1. Jesmanite panel – steel framed. Two custom-made steel hanging brackets. 2. Mask stand – This is bolted through the panel at two points with flat-head botls, two washers and one nut per fixing. 3. Steel, painted mesh Mask.

Appearance : Good x Scratched Localised only General brittle fracture network Cracks Discolouration Old restorations Notes : 1. On edges of steel frame there are small, localised rust spots – (see images). Jesmonite panel has manufacturing marks – evidence of shuttering imprints and deposits of material – possibly epoxy type filler. The steel letters are in good condition – surface dent on the ‘E’ of ‘Absent’, Small crack to Jesmonite panel lower left : monitor for flaking risk. Brown mark – possibly rust mark on jesmonite lower left. 2. All in good condition. 3. Good condition – Though original, the rust should be monitored to assess impact on metal and paint finish.

Bas du formulaire

Other damages : None apparent x None recent Yes : Packing requirements : Haut du formulaire Do NOT tape glass Do not remove from transit frame until immediatly before hanging Always set on foam blocks ✓ Use plastic gloves for carrying and hanging ✓ Other : Display requirements : Hanging fixtures : Yes ✓ No Describe : 2 x custom made steel brackets – each with 5 x screw / coach bolt holes. Plinth : Yes No ✓ Describe : Display Case Yes No ✓ Describe : Other :

Barrier needed : Yes No ✓ Max light level : N/A ✓ Lux Other environment condition:

Title of the Exhibition : Study : Eyes – Martin Boyce Exhibition’s venue : David Roberts Art Foundation. Exhibition’s dates : 15th March – 11th May 2013. Examiner : Nicoletta Lambertucci, Assistant Curator DRAF. Date : 1/ 3/ 2013 Bas du formulaire RE-EXAMINATION :

DATE VENUE EXAMINER + STATUS

CHANGES IN CONDITION