Boyle Family. Rock and Scree Series, 1977. British pavilion, Venice Biennale 1978
Part of the Boyle Family Manual for the Journey to the Surface of the Earth: 'The objective of this Journey will be to make multi-sensual presentations of 1000 sites selected at random from the surface of the earth. Between August 1968 and July 1968 blindfolded members of the public selected these sites' [by throwing darts at ever larger-scaled maps until a 6' square was found].
1. Take the actual surface coating of earth, dust, sand, mud, stone, pebbles, snow, moss, grass or whatever hold it in the shape it was in on the site. Fix it. Make it permanent.
The rest of the instructions, 6' core sample, film pan from the centre and a 100-frame film of the site, and a study of 'the effect of elemental forces' on the site were always less captivating than the casts of the site itself. This was done with frames and plaster lifting the surface material with it when the cast was removed.
There were more instructions for dealing with plants, animals, people, filming them, taking samples, but it was the cast that was the enduring gallery material. Accompanying texts found on the Boyle Family website are impenetrable streams of consciousness, a barrage of words working their way into description. There is a review by J L Locher, which one suspects was written by Mark Boyle himself as it is so similar to all the other writings on this site. But what of it, this is a body of work that started in the 1960s and continues still, this recording of the world.
Such a conceptually simple frame produces simple objects: 6' squares of ground and it is these themselves that invite speculation, rather than the process. They are notes from the earth, unconnected to any discernible narrative. The squares of ground are not linked by resource-extraction, climate, cost or beauty; nationalism, history, productivity or location. They are microscopically complex, conceptually reflexive and this is what is so interesting, that this work shared the unemotional approach to process of Sol Lewitt, in Boyle's case with the complicity of the earth, and that makes all the difference.