Martin Boyce at the Modern Institute

Martin Boyce

When I was up in Glasgow last weekend I managed to catch the Martin Boyce exhibition at the Modern Institute. Boyce had installed decorative wall mouldings throughout the gallery, a sort of recreation of the typical moulding you would find in a rich bourgeois apartment. His work was framed by these devices, each image  partly a colourfield painting and partly a support for a series of linear frameworks designed to look like antique lamp fittings. Each panel was covered with industrial paint built up in washes and these surfaces were covered with industrially cut out circle patterns. On each painting, Boyce positioned linear elements which were made of metal armatures and hanging chains. These were sprayed black and worked as 3D drawing elements that played off against the painting surface. Throughout the gallery space there were free standing linear forms, very like standard lamps, providing a human like presence. 

Martin Boyce

I thought the exhibition was very interesting as it took the idea of paintings in a domestic space and twisted it so that the various elements were and were not acting out their traditional roles. The paintings were of course hanging on walls, but the moulding was put in by the artist as part of the exhibition, so that the decorative feature is now on exhibition, as well as being a frame for the paintings. In a domestic space we usually see paintings hung next to various light fittings, but in this case the paintings become the support for these fake fittings. In the room stand more objects that look like standard lamps that have lost their light shades and bulbs, which are of course not really light fittings, as they are metal sculptures, bronze casts and so unusable as supports for lights. This room is asking us questions as to the role of rooms and how we think of them in relation to paintings. Do we isolate paintings and other art from the rooms we see them in, or should we see the work as part of the 'furniture'. Perhaps in many rooms paintings and other pieces of art are indeed seen as 'part of the furniture'. Boyce's work reminds us of the way that art can be 'domesticated' and that it has often been seen as just a classier interior decoration. 

Martin Boyce

Boyce's standard lamps lean against the walls and in doing so they work as a classic case of the rhetoric of metonymy. Standing for human beings, they both people the space and make us aware of how we design objects that in effect work as replacements for other people in the spaces that we live in. The overly designed interior is often cold and soulless, people are too messy, and Boyce's work touches on these difficulties. I wondered if he had in the past been to some rich person's house and looked at his own work on some expensively patterned wall and thought to himself, "what am I doing providing work for spaces like these? 

As far as drawing students are concerned the thing of interest here is 3D drawing in relation to flat images. Boyce opens out a dialogue with domestic spaces and in doing so asks us to think about what is and what is not a drawing. The 3D fittings are very easy to read as linear (drawn) objects, but could you also read the moulding as a type of drawing? These are hand-made objects, made in such a way that they look like manufactured things. Again Boyce asks us to think about the status of these objects, are they designed or thought of as art works? 

Overall a very interesting exhibition and one that reminded me of the importance of not accepting where work is exhibited and eventually displayed as being neutral things, and using an exhibition opportunity to question the very nature of what it is to hang work in a room.