ISSUES IN RELATION TO BOYLE FAMILY

Issues surrounding 'representation' in relation to Boyle Family



Issues surrounding 'representation' in relation to Boyle Family

Boyle had temporarily transformed an empty store into a small theatre where the performance that was offered was whatever happened beyond the shop window at the moment when the curtain was opened. The group looked through the shop window into the street. What happened on the street, what occurred there of itself was presented as a fascinating spectacle; we can also say: as an aesthetically charged event.

In his well-known book The Great Chain of Being, Lovejoy says in the chapter on 'Romanticism and Plenitude' that in Romanticism the aim of art was '. . . neither the attainment of some single ideal perfection of form in a small number of fixed genres nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic susceptibility which is shared by all mankind in all ages, but rather the fullest possible expression of the abundance of differentness that there is, actually or potentially, in nature and human nature . . .' An interpretation of reality as a multiplicity of unique phenomena became one of the main themes of art after the radical changes around 1800. This interpretation manifested itself in a concentration on all facets of our life - 'human nature' - including the multiplicity of our environment - 'nature', which for the visual arts means: the concrete visual phenomena among which we live(Boyle Family, 2009).

Throughout the nineteenth century an impassioned attempt was made to grasp concrete visual phenomena. New techniques were developed, such as photography and filming, but efforts were also made to adapt existing techniques for this purpose. The new interpretation even penetrated into the tradition-dominated painting of the French Salons. In his review of the Salon of 1863 the French critic Castagnary referred to a new movement in which the painters were concerned with '. . . s'attaquer au paysage; prendre pour objet de son art les aspects changeants de la terre et du ciel . . .' The changing appearance of the earth and the sky was also the subject of an impressionist like Monet. At the very end of the century, in the 1890s, Monet tried to use the traditional painting technique to show that every part of our surroundings has a different appearance at different times of the day and under different weather conditions. To this end he made series of paintings of the same view of a row of poplars, a cathedral, or the Thames, in an attempt to record a different moment in each painting(Philpot, 2000).

In the twentieth century, too, the passion for the multiform visual phenomena around us continued to be one of the main themes of art. We see this in the further development of photography and filming, but we also see it in a new technique like that of the 'ready-made': the transformation of ordinary everyday objects into art, not by depicting them but by detaching them from their normal context and function and ...