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Press 33Selected Essays and Reviews |
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An Act of Balancing (extract from review which included Clare Barclay at Doggerfisher, Edinburgh and Henri Cartier Bresson at The Dean Gallery, Edinburgh) Catriona Black Aug 05 "...The world of formal balance comes crashing down in Teaming at the artist-run Embassy gallery, not least in a previously unseen work by the Boyle Family. In 1965 Joan and Mark Boyle organized a performance at ICA which instructed the audience to make their own entertainment. Their video documents the ensuing chaos, including the smashing up of a piano. "Owing to the overwhelming success of the first event", the ICA announced, "the rest of the series has been cancelled". Teaming brings together 10 diverse works, all made in collaboration. Christo Wallers and Mat Fleming's 16mm film is lovingly presented in a miniature cinema, complete with plush seats, projectionist and curtained screen. Boat Action shows the two rowing a canoe down the Tyne , and is as much about collaboration as the result of one. Almost all the way through, we see each man only through the eyes of the other, and when the final shots show both from a third point of view, the intrusion comes as a shock. John Mullen and Lee O'Connor's typically raw 46-minute video, The Smartest Artists, greets you at the door. Badgered by O'Connor about the meaning of his paintings, Mullen's incoherent mutters become a defensive rant. Eventually the pair is seen smashing and burying Mullen's paintings on a slag-heap. "The smartest artist saves face by leaving no trace" declares O'Connor's drawing, exhibited alongside. The scathing moral of the story is that performance artists, leaving no objects behind them for scrutiny, are conveniently immune to critical attack. The Embassy's show is, as always, irreverent, but there's substance in that cheekiness. That Mark and Joan Boyle's 40 year old video sits comfortably among the products of the current generation, is surely proof. "
Catriona Black
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