1 June – 12 July 2009
On the 40th anniversary of the exhibition that launched the World Series, construction presents Boyle Family’s The Barcelona Site.
June 2009 will see the first UK showing of a World Series project in its entirety. Alongside the main study, visitors will see a vertical study from a bank at the edge of the site, as well as electron microphotographs, both of insects and plant material found on the site and of samples of the artists’ hairs.
The Barcelona site is one of 1000 sites chosen at random between August 1968 and summer1969 by visitors to the artists’ studio and to the exhibition that launched the project, Journey to the Surface of the Earth at London’s ICA. Participants were blindfolded and either threw a dart or fired an air rifle at an unseen wall-sized map of the World. At each site Boyle Family use larger scale maps to pinpoint the random location where they then attempt to record and document the site, including making a three dimensional earth study.
Mark Boyle and Joan Hills made their first earth studies in 1964 as they developed their concept of ‘contemporary archaeology’, aiming to look at the contemporary world as if they were artist archaeologists. The 1000 sites are the random sample a scientist might choose to study the world. Each earth piece records the site with great accuracy, seeming to preserve it at the moment the artists started work, whilst other elements of the project include documenting animal and plant life. Studies of the artists themselves are also made, acknowledging the effect that the act of looking and recording the site may have upon it.
The first World Series site was undertaken in 1970 in the Hague and exhibited that year at the Gemeentemuseum. Subsequent projects have included sites and museum exhibitions in Denmark, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The Sardinian project was the main focus of their British Pavillion exhibition at the 1978 Venice Biennale. Over the years Boyle and Hills worked increasingly with their children Sebastian and Georgia in a family practice that would become unique in contemporary art. Boyle Family have long been associated with developments in visual art that questioned concepts of reality and knowledge in the 1960s and 70s, raising fundamental issues concerning how we perceive and understand the world around us.
The Barcelona site is the first World Series project undertaken in Spain and will take up the entire gallery. Although the original dart landed on the black dot representing Barcelona on the map, subsequent analysis proved the site was just outside the city to the north-west, on land cleared to make way for new industrial buildings. The red ochre earth of the main study records the actions of the sun and rain on the site, with stone and pebble deposits around dried out pools, whilst fragments of terracotta tiles and other building materials are becoming embedded and breaking down to dust. Traces of animal and plant activity can also be seen in the cracked mud.
The completed project includes: a vertical study from a bank at the edge of the site showing the earth deeply eroded by water erosion, revealing green and red sandstone rocks; electron microphotographs of insects and plant material found on the site; electron microphotographs of samples of the artists’ hairs. The Barcelona project was begun in 2000 and completed this year. Mark Boyle died in 2005.
Major Boyle Family exhibitions have included the Sao Paulo Bienal, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hayward Gallery, London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Their work is represented in many public collections including the Tate; Stuttgart Staatsgalerie; Kunstmuseum Luzern; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and the Museum Moderna Kunst Vienna.
Gallery hours: Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm and by appointment.
construction 24a Calvin Street, London E1 6NW
