by It is hard to imagine a more striking symbol of false hope and lost utopias in contemporary Britain than the destruction of the magnificent Charles Rennie Mackintosh Glasgow School of Art building by not one but two fires. Every generous detail of the place reflected a vibrant vision of a shared artistic idealism that made it the greatest work of early British modernism. In the most disturbing of three very different spaces in his amazing exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Martin Boyce, winner of the Turner prize, who attended art school, mourns this tragedy and asks for answers.
Black and white photographs are laid out on a long padded table with the respectable formality of a forensic laboratory. Who died here? There is no body, just soot-stained walls, a ruined roof under a plastic tent, fire-damaged artwork.
These shadowy images were taken inside the Glasgow School of Art after the fire that destroyed it in 2014, but before a second fire reduced it to a husk in 2018. They show an injured but still alive creation for detectives to analyse. It is clear from this table of evidence that Mackintosh’s masterpiece was after the first fire despite their hardships. Now all of its beautiful interior has been lost and a mostly new structure is being slowly and controversially built out of the empty brick shell.
I recommend starting here in the Warehouse, the Fruitmarket’s most atmospheric space, which Boyce has turned into a death knell. For the rest of this rich show it is invisible, abstract and determined to resist fixed meanings. When you find the photos of the burned-out art school behind eerie curtains of white plastic chain amid a gloomy lumber room, with a television aerial sprouting from a Brancusiesque column and dead leaves scattered around concrete seats and a sculpted litter box, they pack an enlightening punch. If you start here, in the shadows, the rest of the show will gradually ascend from hell to heaven.
Like Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg, Boyce sees beauty in overlooked quotidian trash – but his method is more brutal.
In the white gallery on the ground floor Boyce makes a brilliant display of contradiction and agitation. Every time you think you have it pinned down as an artist, it changes its entire nature. The most authoritative works – the ones, if I were a rich art collector, I would buy on the spot – are abstract “paintings” made from construction site rubbish. A panel about the size and shape of a Rothko vertical canvas is composed of gray painted wooden floorboards, with an irregular hexagonal hole containing a very dark pink flood and is set over a bright yellow corrugated grid.
He has the brilliance of Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg. Like them, Boyce sees the hidden beauty in the quotidian trash that is being looked at; but their normality is more brutal. Soulless, unredeemable crap attracts him. The space is pierced by corrugated plastic sheets framed in blue steel rectangles. Another large work consists of two perforated metal sheets painted a dreamy blue and grey-green with a green plastic phone from the 1980s stuck to one of them.
The phone almost parodically suggests hope, even transcendence. I found myself thinking about the phone that Andy Warhol offers to Jim Morrison in the film The Doors by Oliver Stone, telling him that he can talk to God with it.
Just when you think you’ve got Boyce figured out, though, he throws something even weirder at you. There is a photo of a biomorphic sculptural shadow, which looks like Harp or Miró, is actually one of his own sculptures in the warehouse space. A small photograph of a chair positioned against a door is shown with an actual wooden chair level with a real door in the far corner of the gallery. Except that this chair is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, built closely and elegantly, reminiscent of Mackintosh’s own work.
Boyce can do it all, you’d think. It can capture the true totality of life, from waste and ugliness to ethereal beauty and luxury. Then upstairs, in the largest skylight space in the gallery it seems at first glance that he did nothing. A vast empty whiteness greets you at the top of the stairs, until you notice delicate flag-like shapes of white and pink, neatly cut from even more perforated builder’s material, hanging above. The paneled walls have frame-like shapes as if to contain pictures. Around the large floor, leaves are scattered. They are a beautiful autumn red.
This could be a ballroom or an abandoned theatre. A gray fireplace is set into the paneling and in the grate is a small theater platform, with a sharp modernist set that would have been perfect for Ibsen.
It is theatre, perhaps Boyce is telling us, the way you can create feelings of anger, despair, humor and prayer by playing with abstract spaces and objects. But whatever is playing in the little theater in the hearth, you know it is real and serious – a modern tragedy. This exhibition has an exquisite beating heart. Every bit of painted trash is an image of the joys and sorrows of our lives. The Glasgow School of Art could not have had a more profound elegy.
• Martin Boyce: Before Behind Between Above is at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, from 2 March to 9 June
