MARTIN BOYCE REMEMBERS THE precise moment he realised what was so special about Venice. Scouting out locations for his exhibition in this summer's Venice Biennale, where he will represent Scotland, he and curators Judith Winter and Graham Domke of Dundee Contemporary Arts took a boat to the Lido, the "beach resort" island seaward of the old city.
Boyce says: "I walked a couple of paces and a car whizzed passed, and I was like, 'That's it. No cars or bikes or buses.' This universal urban texture was completely absent, that's what was so amazing, so unique. We immediately turned around and went back over because I didn't want to leave."
And so the magical old city in the lagoon cast its spell over another victim. An unlikely one, perhaps, for Boyce is an artist rooted in the modern. The design, architecture, music and thought of the 21st century saturate his work. He rarely works with historic spaces.
Yet here he is revelling in the idea of a 15th-century palazzo. He shrugs. "Weirdly in Venice, it wasn't like there was an option. I wasn't looking for a stand-in for a gallery. It seemed like the whole part of the game was to embrace the Venice-ness of the situation," he says.
Boyce and I are talking at a fabricators' workshop in Glasgow where the bulk of the work for Venice has been made. It's a cluttered, draughty place where the works of art mingle with components for unfinished sculptures and pieces of machinery.
Boyce is excited because he's getting his hands on the work for the first time. He says: "There was a long production period when people were making the work. I could visit and make suggestions, but it's only now I can get my hands on the things, play with the details. At the moment we're dealing with texture, rusting things, dulling down the galvanised steel, speeding up the ageing process."
Then the work will begin its journey to Italy. Each piece – including heavy "stepping stones" in cast concrete – will reach Palazzo Pisani by boat through a network of narrow canals, then winched into the old building through an upstairs window.
In early June, the art world will descend on La Serenissima for a week of openings. In recent years, the Biennale has spread beyond its traditional locations at the Giardini and the Arsenale into a vast network of unofficial "pavillions" around the city. In addition to the traditional British Pavilion in the Giardini, this year occupied by artist Steve McQueen, there are Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish shows elsewhere in the city.
Boyce, who had never been to Venice until he was selected for the Biennale, admits he has no idea what to expect. "People keep telling me how intense the opening week is. The Team Scotland thing is weird. It's such an old idea, representing your country. These other shows exist because of the shortcomings of the British Pavilion, because people outside London feel under-represented. In that sense it is important. But at the end of the day what I intend to focus on is making the best show I can."
Boyce is the first artist to represent Scotland in Venice with a solo show and the first to be involved in the process of choosing a location. He, Domke and Winter made several trips to look at spaces and were on the verge of signing for another space when Boyce decided he preferred Palazzo Pisani.
"It had quite a run-down quality to it – some of the palazzos are incredibly ornate, the walls are covered in paintings and drapes. It is like a series of interlinking rooms. The scale of it, the proportions, the light, were absolutely beautiful. I began to have a few ideas immediately, even on the plane on the way back.
"There was something about walking through the space, through these empty rooms; I kept thinking about walking through an abandoned garden. I had this image, I don't know which film it's from, of a grand country house which had been abandoned and the outside had blown through it."
He points out some of the objects he will put inside: chain-link litter bins and bird boxes made of rusted metal, an old bed frame with a roll of chain-link fencing for a bolster, a metal table. Leaves from waxed paper will be scattered on the floor. The Murano glass chandeliers will be replaced by aluminium light fittings, inspired by the inverted shapes of concrete trees designed by Joel and Jann Martel for the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris in 1925.
In fact, the concrete trees – "this collapse of architecture and nature" – permeate the whole show. Much of Boyce's work in the past five years has been inspired by the palette of geometric shapes he has derived from them.
The concrete stepping stones in the entrance hall are for the audience to walk on, suggesting the presence of water, echoing elements of the garden designed by Venetian modernist Carlo Scarpa just a stone's throw away. But there are no direct references. In this city of water, Boyce has created a show called No Reflections. He strides over and stands on one. "You don't have to get that high to see things from a different perspective."
Once the work has been installed in the palazzo, Boyce and the curatorial team can give their full attention to the challenge of considering how the same works can be best shown at DCA in December, a building different in every way.
Boyce, 41, from Hamilton, graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1990. Inspired by near contemporaries such as Douglas Gordon and Roddy Buchanan, he gravitated to David Harding's course in environmental art. His early work drew on modernist design, iconic pieces by Eames and Bauhaus, and was imbued with an atmosphere of paranoia and trepidation. As the scale on which he worked grew, the ideas pushed towards landscape: playparks at night, pedestrian subways, pieces of no man's land glimpsed from a speeding train. The sense of threat became more resonant and romantic. His seminal show at Tramway in 2003, Our Love is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, turned Tramway 2 into a park at night, a desolate place but also a place of dreams.
His star has risen steadily in the past ten years, no great leaps forward, no sudden changes of style, just a gradual growth in ambition and acclaim, to more and more prestigious commissions. Last year, he produced work for the Münster Sculpture Park and Melbourne Festival. He is currently working on a public sculpture to go outside the new cancer research building at MIT in Boston. He is invariably calm, diligent, and working on several shows at a time.
Venice, however, may just be his highest-profile project to date. Does he feel ready for La Biennale? "Yeah," he says, steadily. "Absolutely, without any question I feel more than ready to do this. I guess also, at the age of 40, 41, what am I not really ready for, apart from a big retrospective or something which doesn't feel appropriate just yet. If someone said, 'solo show at the Guggenheim', I'd think, 'Well, yeah, give it a go'."
But he has occasionally felt the pressure of a show like Venice. "I did keep thinking that I need to raise the bar in terms of spectacle. I kept thinking, is it going to be big and bright enough or amazing enough, is the wow factor going to be there? I kept having to calm down and say to myself, 'none of your favourite artists works in that way, none of the art that you've made that has had an effect on people has functioned on that level.' It's always been about something else."
He looks around the workshop, at the scattered objects which barely stand out from the rest of the metal. "It's not art yet, that's the funny part of this process. There's a certain point when you start wrapping it up and putting it in crates when it's getting close to being art. But it turns into art two hours before the opening when you go back to the hotel and have a shower. In your absence someone flicks a switch and you come back and it's turned into art."
• Martin Boyce: No Reflections is at the Palazzo Pisani, Venice, 7 June to 22 November, as part of the Venice Biennale, and at Dundee Contemporary Arts, 12 December to 14 February, as part of the venue's 10th anniversary celebrations. For more background on the exhibition, visit
www.scotlandandvenice.comThe full article contains 1457 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
