Is it possible to resuscitate the past and re-animate it?
Gerard Byrne is interested in trying to restage forgotten conversations. He
makes films with actors speaking the text of old seminars and debates retrieved
from publications. The film ‘ A Man and a Woman Make Love’ reproduces a
conversation among male Surrealists in 1928 which was first printed within
their magazine, ‘The Surrealist Revolution.’ Examining erotic and romantic love
between the sexes, these avant-garde dandies veer from analytic curiosity to
the smutty humour of a team changing room. All through this re-enactment Byrne
signals the contrived quality of the project. Sometimes the camera shot pulls
back to reveal a live audience in a Dublin television studio. The actors stray
into the declamatory ‘hammyness’ of amateur dramatics.
I saw this film at Documenta last year staged within the
modest space of a post-war hotel ballroom erected in bomb-damaged Kassel,
temporarily hosting Byrne’s enquiry about how a contemporary audience might
consider Surrealist theatrics. In Whitechapel Gallery’s largest room, the film
lost some of its incongruous peculiarity. What connects the film to Byrne’s
other work in the show is the artist’s consistent curiosity about attitudes and
belief across recent history.
Upstairs, two further films revive old discussions from
Playboy magazine addressing sexuality in the 1970s and futurology from 1964
leaving the viewer to witness the ironic predictions of an era long since overtaken
by the anticpated future. Accompanying these Playboy re-enactments is an
advertorial conversation between Frank Sinatra and the Chairman of Chrysler
published in National Geographic Magazine in 1980 and presented on the page as
if it were a piece of genuine journalism. We see the new car carrying the hopes
of a company struggling to survive. But Byrne shifts the action within the film
to a grimy New Jersey diner. The aspiration symbolised by the luxury car bearing
the latest technology is undermined by the industrial decay lying around the
performers. Hopes for the future may well become ambushed by crisis.
These films suggest an easy flow of ideas but the audience
is ‘alienated’ in a Brechtian sense by their artificiality and awkwardness.
Byrne revels in the tension prompted by these debates re-offered to us across
time. Perhaps the most successful works in the exhibition are the three black
and white photographs of newsstands in Paris evoking the timeless romance of
the city’s characteristic street design. Each work is titled according to the
gap between the moment they are hung and the date when they are photographed.
So the images are permanently in flux and are intrinsically unstable. They
suggest a timeless and unchanging Paris sought by the tourist and the hunter of
‘authenticity’ but these photographs will continue to slip away into the past
on each occasion they reappear on exhibition.
Byrne is one of the most intellectual artists working today
and demonstrates a genuine enthusiasm for opening up a dialogue with history.
We accompany him on these disorientating excavations. As we watch these films, the
content recedes further away from us across an unbridgeable chasm and yet we
can’t quite pull away.
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