BEFORE BEHIND BETWEEN ABOVE BELOW: Martin Boyce at Fruitmarket
By Matilda Kay
This month, Glasgow-based, Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Boyce’s exhibition Before Behind Between Above Below opened at Fruitmarket Edinburgh. Having previously exhibited at the gallery in 1999 for ‘Visions for the Future’, this collection of works marks a glorious return, with Boyce interrogating the textural forms of urban environments. An exhibition in three parts, each space is a remarkable new world imbued with its own pulsating energy. This is an exhibition in flux. Each space is punctuated by works that seem to drag you around by the scruff of your neck – magnetic with their persuasion yet frustratingly enigmatic. As soon as you reach the supposed core of the work it transmogrifies into another. You reside in Boyce’s own manufactured limbo.
Boyce’s first curated world begins in the lower gallery: a spacious room, delicate and airy, yet still retaining a sense of materiality through the skeleton of steel girders that encase the space. The works feel at home, fused into the room as if they have been there forever. The space has an inexplicable pull, a swirling of energy, created in part by the prints that nestle into the room’s corners.
[Figure 1] Martin Boyce, Disappear Here (Around), 2001, photographic print, 32.4 x 42.6 cm framed.
Boyce’s Disappear Here (2001) [Fig. 1] makes you uncomfortably aware of the space’s confines. Corners and walls lear at you, wrapping you up in the lay lines between Boyce’s work. The prints are instructive - one tells you ‘around’, but ‘around where?’ you ask yourself. In this dreamworld there is no discernible culmination or destination. Everything has a dual view point. Barricaded in by the corrugated semi-sheer sheets that stretch from the girders down to the floor, these architectural interventions stagger and inform your movement. The sheets are hazy. You look back at what you’ve just seen but the perspective has changed. The space is the same; it houses the same objects, and yet everything feels skewed and things are not where they should be. You may wish to leave, to move onto the next room, but something weighs you down. You stay.
[Figure 2] Martin Boyce, Interiors, 1992, four framed C-Prints, installation view L-R clockwise: 42.2 x 54.4 cm, 48.8 x 58.8 cm, 48.8 x 58.8 cm, 42.2 x 42.2 cm.
Interiors (1992) [Fig. 2] are a collection of stills from the film Jagged Edge. Each shows an interior scene when the actor had just left or was about to arrive. Printed from a colour copier, they are imbuied with a grainy surveillance-like quality – the spectre of feeling watched weighs heavily. It is an homage to the space as a locus of ‘happening’. This momentarily desolate space, through our imagination, is no longer empty, but injected with action – be it romantic, nefarious, or adventurous. This is the beauty of the exhibition – Boyce leaves spaces momentarily empty, allowing your imagination free reign.
[Figure 3] Martin Boyce, Future Blossom (for Yokeno Residence), 2022, powder coated steel, dimensions variable.
You ascend the stairs into the upper gallery and it feels as though you are dancing on the very air that fills the space. Walking into the great chasm of whiteness you may at first think that nothing has been done, but a remarkable change in energy says otherwise. The ceiling has been replaced by Future Blossom (2022) [Fig. 3], a canopy of pink and white geometric cherry blossoms that seems to churn and flow like a murmuration of starlings. The steel from which they are made moves and flits in your peripheral vision. There is a sense of rhythm, like ballet dancers twirling or submerged memories resurfacing.
[Figure 4] Martin Boyce, Ventilation Grills for an Apartment Building, 2003, acid-etched brass.
Boyce also speaks in the vernacular of urbanism, having grown up in tenement blocks for most of his life. Spotted around the space are the Ventilation Grills for an Apartment Building (2003) [Fig. 4] with the the words ‘before’, ‘behind’, ‘between’, ‘above’, ‘and below’ etched with acid into the brass. These grills interrogate the confines of space. They ask how can sculpture show the threshold between seen and unseen spaces, becoming gateways to hidden conduits and urban guts.
The downstairs warehouse is a sleepy alien terrain – a space where the obejcts housed inside seem to be alive. Boyce often asks whether his sculptures dream and I believe they do. Toy Story-esque, you can imagine them stirring from their abandoned slumber, enacting their own narrative when you turn your eye. Most art spends its life in transit or in its own storage limbo. The downstairs warehouse toys with the language of story and memory. A River in the Trees (2009) [Fig. 5] are cement stepping stones, monolithic and powerful. They were originally deisgned as stepping stones over the entrance hall of a Palazzo in Venice for the 2009 Biennale. Here they lie in wait, stacked on top of one another, housing the memory of thousands of footsteps.
[Figure 5] Martin Boyce, A River in the Trees, 2009, ciment fondu, variable dimension.
Transient ghosts appear through the curtains made of industrial netting that hang from the beams, glimmers of light wink at you through them – time begins to feel thin and strange. Again, Boyce is able to make you feel unsure of where you really are. The warehouse alone is a space of great presence – hard by nature – as it is already sculptural. It’s a truly impressive feat of Boyce to place his pieces in conversation with the space rather than in conflict. They are at home here, patiently waiting. Sitting on top of these structures is a banal cardboard box that is labelled as containing paraffin paper leaves made by Boyce. Despite not being visible, we imagine them lying crisp beneath our feet, as they once did for a multitude of others in Venice. Boyce’s work is empathetic, inserting life into his sleeping objects.
[Figure 6] Martin Boyce, Long Distance Sleep Talking, 2022, painted wood, painted steel, bronze, acrylic on aluminium, brass, painted silicone-moulded vacuum cast resin, coiled telephone cable, 210 x 160 x 343 cm.
Hiding in wait behind a curtain is Long Distance Sleep Talking (2022) [Fig. 6], a semi-surrealist sculpture which tackles the idea of suspension. This is a sculpture reliant on itself. Remove one element – the door, the phone – and the whole thing collapses. This mobile is all about balance, signalling coexistence. The door is in conversation with the telephone, as though one is listening to the other. Each represents dreaming, the movement of the mind, the body, or the soul. The door, a symbol of limbo, becomes under Boyce’s hand a bed. Sleep represents that elusive state of vertigo, the liminality between dreams and consciousness.
The landline telephone seems to be a point of fascination for Boyce. Landlines are fixed in place, evoking a city phoning another city, allowing you to be in two places simultaneously. When the phone is taken off the hook, it becomes an inanimate object, only being active when dialling or ringing. Having it forever suspended, at once falling and rising, implies a level of constant expectation and untapped potential. The viewer waits for it to ring, but who is phoning? Well, that’s up to you.
Boyce and his works are elusive, characterised by a constant state of metamorphosis. Sculptural spectres loom in and out of the seen and unseen, taking on a life of their own, moving beyond their materiality and into our imagination. Boyce gives life to dormant objects and revitalises the overlooked. This is the work of a man with a gentle authority and the deepest empathy. You may think that as you leave Fruitmarket, you leave Boyce’s architectural world behind – that you can simply shrug it off. You don’t and you can’t. It lingers on. You stay permenantly altered, still suspended, still in his limbo.
Images taken during private tour with the artist and courtesy of Fruitmarket.
PR packet, list of works, and exhibition pamphlet courtesy of Fruitmarket.