Art review: Boyle family/Kate Downie

Published on Monday 19 October 2009 19:10

BOYLE FAMILY: WORKS FROM THE 1960s TO 1970s **** BOURNE FINE ART, EDINBURGH KATE DOWNIE: THE COAST ROAD DIARIES **** SCOTTISH GALLERY, EDINBURGH

EXACTLY 100 years ago, Braque and Picasso took the steps in their painting that led the following year to Cubism and the final break-up – or, from a conservative point of view, the breakdown – of the conventional pictorial world of representation. In place of a single image, they put bits assembled into a coherent unity, not by the laws of perspective, nor by any of the traditional formulae of representation, but only by the artist's imagination and so, by extension, the spectator's.

This has rightly been seen as one of the most dramatic revolutions in the history of art. Nevertheless, if you look at it another way, you might find that the artists, far from being radical leaders, were actually only catching up with others who had gone before. More than 150 years before Braque and Picasso abandoned representation as the basis of coherence in art, Hume had observed trenchantly that our experience is "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions."

In other words, for Hume it was already clear that there was no fixed reality that a painter could hope to paint. It is only the imagination, he concludes, that can stitch the random bits of experience together to make sense of them and, when it does, it reflects not some autonomous outer order but an order we endeavour to create in our heads.

This is exactly what the Cubists tried to do and much of the subsequent history of art can be seen as an attempt to adapt to the consequences of the irruption into art of the sceptical theory of perception: to accommodate the random, disjointed and subjective nature of experience and still come up with something that makes some kind of sense.

Lots of things have been tried. Duchamp reduced this conundrum to the simple statement of "I am" and a good many have followed him, but that approach is ultimately fruitless. It spirals down into the closed vortex of self, abandoning any attempt to answer the question that Hume left us: how do we connect with others and the world beyond ourselves?

A little more than 40 years ago, Mark Boyle came up not with an answer exactly, for perhaps there is none, but with an ingenious formula that manages to give expression both to our understanding of the random flux of experience and to our nevertheless unshakeable conviction of its indissolubly concrete particularity.

The principle was that he took a random piece of the Earth's surface and endeavoured to reproduce it precisely to scale and as accurately as he could. The result is at once both perfectly arbitrary and abstract and perfectly particular and concrete; subjective in choice and objective in execution, it is a neat synthesis of irreconcilables.

His wife, Joan Hills, joined him in this enterprise and then later their children, Sebastian and Georgia, also joined in. It became a family firm. As such it has continued to operate since Mark's death four years ago and hence, also, is the title of the exhibition at Bourne Fine Art, Boyle Family. The subtitle is 'Works from the 1960s to 1970s' and the show is focused on their early work.

The Boyles' first experiments were made in Shepherd's Bush in the mid-1960s and the first attempt to put an actual bit of the world into a frame, as it were, was undertaken using the box of an old television set. Then they used a right-angled piece of metal which, when thrown at random, established the first corner of a square of ground.

There is a bit of mystery about the techniques they developed to reproduce what they found, but the basic unit is a square of fibreglass, usually but not always with a six-foot side and moulded to the contour of the ground. The rest seems to be a combination of actual bits of the surface stuck to the fibreglass – pebbles, sand, bits of broken glass – and extremely clever reproduction. Their techniques evolved, nevertheless one of the most convincing pieces here is also the earliest, an oily square of cobbled street in Shepherd's Bush done in 1966. This was part of a series dedicated to Shepherd's Bush.

Thereafter they often worked in series. A year or two later, for example, they embarked on a Tidal Series made on a beach in East Sussex and there is a fine study here of the sand at low tide. In the 1970s they did a London Series and one of the most austere works here is just a patch of concrete slabs, their grid at a slight angle to the square format.

But working in this way introduced an element of choice. To be truly arbitrary, the selection should be unlimited and so, in 1968, 1,000 blindfolded volunteers threw darts at a map of the world and the Boyles embarked on their own World Series. It is still ongoing, but an impressive example from it here is a piece of ground from a huge open-cast coal mine in Germany. Looking at a work like this here, however, it is striking how easily it and all these other once radical works sit in the formal context of the gallery. They even look rather classical.

Before you leave Bourne Fine Art, in the Dundas Gallery downstairs, some of David Grossart's thoughtful works offer an apposite commentary on the still valid formal language of Cubism and its ability to create a poetic world that invites imaginative exploration.

The title of Kate Downie's show at the Scottish Gallery is The Coast Road Diaries. It suggests that, for her, place is as important as it is for the Boyles, but there the similarity ends. For the former, place is random; for Downie it is chosen for its meaning to her.

The Boyles' art deals ultimately with the absurd, with the futility of trying to be objective. Downie's deals with the meaning with which the subjective can endow the ordinary: with the imaginative processes by which we make sense of the world. Her show records a journey around Scotland and some of the individual images are stunning.

Sometimes in the past her abundant energy overtook her and pushed her drawing to the edge of coherence. Here in works like The Quarry Path, Gardenstown, or Cullykhan, she has reached a kind of luminous calm. Much of this has to do with her use of areas of clean paper perhaps, but you feel it is deeper than that too; that this is not just a voyage around Scotland; it is a voyage around herself.

Born in North Carolina, Downie came to Scotland as a child. Perhaps she is still feeling for the edges of her new/old environment. But also, touchingly, she has taken other artists with her for companionship on her journey. Generously acknowledging her debts, she has included their work in her show. Thus she places herself in the community they represent but also broadens our understanding of it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the current Turner and the Masters show at Tate Britain and I talked about the collective nature of art. Downie demonstrates it. Among the artists she cites, Marian Leven is her immediate contemporary. Frances Walker and Sylvia Wishart taught her at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen.

Ranging more widely, Joan Eardley is perhaps an obvious choice, but it is good to see such unsung heroes and fine artists of place as Bet Low and Archie Sutter Watt given a billing alongside her here.

&#149 Both exhibitions run until 31 October.