In contemporary Britain, it is difficult to imagine a more evocative symbol of hopes and lost utopias than the destruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s magnificent building, the Glasgow School of Art, by not one but two fires. Every lavish detail of the space expressed the vivid vision of a shared artistic idealism that made it the greatest work of early modernism in the British Isles. In the most unsettling of three very different venues in his extraordinary exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, art school-bound Turner Prize winner Martin Boyce mourns the tragedy and demands answers.
The black-and-white photographs are arranged on a long, padded table with the respectful formality of a forensic laboratory. Who died here? There are no bodies, just soot-stained walls, a ruined roof under a plastic tent, fire-damaged works of art.
These shadowy images were photographed inside the Glasgow School of Art after the fire that devastated the school in 2014 but before the second fire in 2018 that reduced it to a shell. They reveal a wounded but still living structure for detectives to analyze. You can see from this table of evidence that, against all odds, Mackintosh’s masterpiece was clearly salvageable after the initial fire. All its beautiful interiors have now been lost and a largely new structure is being built slowly and controversially from the empty brick shell.
I recommend starting with the Warehouse, the most atmospheric area of the Fruitmarket that Boyce has turned into a deadly graveyard. Because the rest of this rich show is determined to resist cheerfully elusive, abstract and fixed meanings. They collect photographs of the burnt-out art school when you find it behind eerie curtains of white plastic chains in what feels like a melancholy lumber room, with a TV antenna protruding from a Brancusiesque column and dead leaves scattered around concrete seating and a sculptural bin. a revealing punch. If you start from here, in the shadows, the rest of the show will be a gradual ascent from hell to heaven.
Like Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg, Boyce sees beauty in overlooked, everyday trash; But his mediocrity is crueler
Boyce stages a dazzling display of contradiction and unrest in the white gallery on the ground floor. Every moment you think you’re blaming him as an artist, it changes his entire nature. The most reliable works (which I would buy immediately if I were a wealthy art collector) are the abstract “paintings” made from construction site trash. A panel the size and shape of a vertical Rothko canvas, it consists of gray-painted wood floorboards with irregular hexagonal holes containing pink chipboard laid on a grid of bright yellow grooves.
He has the brilliance of Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg. Like them, Boyce sees beauty hidden in overlooked, everyday trash; but its mediocrity is more cruel. He is attracted to unredeemed, soulless nonsense. The space is punctuated by corrugated plastic sheets framed by blue steel rectangles. Another large work consists of two perforated metal sheets painted in dreamy blue and violet grey, with a green plastic phone from the 1980s attached to one of them.
The phone almost parodically evokes hope, even transcendence. I found myself thinking about the phone call Andy Warhol gave to Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, telling him he could talk to God.
But just when you think Boyce has the case figured out, he throws something weird, even stupid, at you. The photo of the shadow of a biomorphic statue that resembles Harp or Miró is actually of one of his own sculptures in the warehouse space. The small photograph of a chair leaning against a door is a reflection of a real wooden chair balanced in front of a real door in the far corner of the gallery. But this chair is a masterful masterpiece, intricately constructed and elegant, reminiscent of Mackintosh’s work.
You think Boyce can do anything. It can capture the true abundance of life, from vast waste and ugliness to ethereal beauty and luxury. Then upstairs, in the gallery’s largest, ceiling-lit space, it looks at first glance like he’s done absolutely nothing. At the top of the stairs you are greeted by a great blank expanse of whiteness, until you notice delicate flag-like shapes of white and pink hanging above, neatly cut from the more perforated construction material. The paneled walls contain frame-like shapes as if they contain paintings. Leaves are scattered around the large ground. They are a beautiful autumn red.
This could be an abandoned ballroom or theatre. A gray fireplace is set into the panels, and in the grate is a small model theater stage with simple, modernist decor that would have been perfect for Ibsen.
Boyce may be telling us that playing with abstract spaces and objects is a way to create moods such as anger, despair, comedy, and prayer. But whatever is playing in the little theater on the stove, you know it is real and serious; A modern tragedy. This exhibition has a delightful beating heart. Each painted litter is an image of the joys and sorrows of our life. The Glasgow School of Art could not have had a more moving elegy.
• Martin Boyce: Before Behind Among Above Below is at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, from 2 March to 9 June.