The Boyle Family and Radical Enactivism

The aim of radical enactivism, according to Hutto and Myin (2013), is to remove the foundation of representationalism entirely from the model of mind developed by traditional cognitive science. However their notion of ‘basic minds without content’ leaves many perplexed as to what relevance the theory has outside of being an anti-representational polemic. In 1972 the artist Mark Boyle declared that ‘nothing is more radical than the facts’ – his aim was to encourage students to develop an artistic practice and a relationship with the environment that was not filtered by personal prejudice or cultural conditioning. This paper focuses on the history and artistic strategies of Mark Boyle and the Boyle Family as a means to bring radical enactivism a broader contextual appeal. Identifying the links between the Boyle Family’s aims to remove, as far as possible, any subjective content from their artworks, with certain theories underpinning earlier minimalist and romanticist practices and with the aims of Hutto and Myin’s philosophy. But beyond any parallels between the Boyle family’s art and the scientific processes of recoding, the Boyle’s objective is to produce imagery that is neither scientific nor artistic but which invites audiences to experience reality for its own sake (Locher, 1978).