Gerard Byrne, Still from A thing is a hole in a thing it is not , 2010, film installation.

Gerard Byrne, Still from A thing is a hole in a thing it is not , 2010, film installation.

The Renaissance Society
The University of Chicago
5811 South Ellis Avenue
Gerard Byrne
A Thing is a Hole in a Thing It is not
January 9-February 27, 2011

By HAMZA WALKER

How Long Is Now?
In the decade spanning 1958 to 1968, developments in American visual art moved at a fast clip. In the wake of a triumphal Abstract Expressionism came Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Keeping abreast was a challenge fielded by the burgeoning rank of critics eager to sort out debates well in advance of history. Over and above the artwork itself, proof of a major paradigm shift lay in the robust discourse surrounding the so-called “new art.” The polemics were anything but centralized, being argued by artists, critics and curators through exhibition catalogues, reviews and art journals. E.P. Dutton & Co.’s decision to publish a series of “new art” anthologies was all but a fait accompli. Between 1965 and 1968 it produced three volumes edited by the critic Gregory Battcock: The New Art (1965), The New American Cinema (1967), and Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (1968). Of these, Minimal Art has by far had the longest lease on life. It remains in circulation, having been reprinted by the University of California Press in 1995. In addition to seminal essays by Michael Fried ("Art and Objecthood"), Clement Greenberg ("The Recentness of Sculpture"), Robert Morris ("Notes on Sculpture"), and Barbara Rose ("ABC Art"), it contains the interview with Frank Stella from whence his dictum, “What you see, is what you see,” as well as Tony Smith’s recounting of his epiphanic drive along the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Whereas Dutton had its eye on a 1968 readership, the transmission of these documents over two generations unwittingly converted the genealogy of Minimalism into the stuff of myth.Minimalism’s genealogy is mythic precisely because the work is situated in and outside of history. As the culmination of an art for art’s sake, Minimalism is securely tethered to a trajectory of modernism dating as far back as Manet. The movement’s key figures expanded a self-reflexivity previously reserved for painting into an equation comprised of object, viewer, space, and most important, time. Paradoxically, extending what was an historically evolving logic only served to sever their work’s relationship with history. Minimalism’s staunch anti-representational posture, combined with a recourse to phenomenology, renders it ahistorical by design. Encountered as an obligatory period room, minimalist works instigate a ritual participation in a time-mediated aesthetic experience rooted in the here and now. Minimalism, however, was above all else highly self-conscious. Inscribed in the ahistorical “real time” aesthetic of the here and now is an historical consciousness belonging to the there and then of Minimalism’s inception. The past engendered by Minimalist period rooms is a past responsible for crafting an eternal present, a degree zero, an artistic logic so conclusive that, no matter how dated or of its moment, extends into this present, displacing all history save for that which brought those works of art into being. As a result, these period rooms function as portals allowing this present to co-exist with a present from half a century ago. For Dublin-based artist Gerard Byrne (b.1969), the medium best suited for soliciting from Minimalism a tale of two presents is film. His multi-channel video installation, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, titled with a quote from Carl Andre, consists of vignettes whose mainstay are dramatizations. Two of these — sculptor Tony Smith’s New Jersey Turnpike drive, and Robert Morris’s 1962 performance cum sculpture Column — belong to art historical lore, handed down as transcribed oral accounts. Another vignette has, as its audio track, a 1964 interview with Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin conducted by Bruce Glaser for WBAI radio, New York. For that vignette’s visuals, Byrne cast four actors who pose as the artists and interviewer in a period-style sound studio.

A fourth vignette, filmed in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland features iconic minimalist works from their collection. Works by Stella, Morris, Judd, Flavin, and Andre were selected and installed as minimalist period rooms per Byrne’s instruction. Brokered through conspicuously filmic machinations, it is a highly faceted vignette whose concerns are the transmission and mediation of Minimalism’s conceptual, historical, and museological underpinnings and implications. In addition, the vignette’s sequences shift between past and present with style of dress and comportment being the only clues as to whether a scene is meant to be taking place circa 2009 or circa ’1969, leaving the time frame for those scenes void of people hopelessly indeterminate.

In two scenes featuring a dapper Dutch narrator, Byrne crafts a fictional scenario, using film to project over time and into our present Minimalism’s spatio-temporal tenets as espoused in the past. The narrator’s cigarette is an anachronism announcing a moment belonging in spirit to the era of Dutton’s anthologies. Clearly, the “new art” demanded a new narrator; yesteryear’s connoisseur has undergone a makeover — gone are the pipe, tweed and hornrims. In one scene he quotes Donald Judd, citing the artist’s desire to break with a tradition of European art. In another scene, he speaks of the “dreiklang,” the “triad” of object, viewer and space. More important than either of these points is his pompous air, legible as a dated convention requisite for any televisual discussion of art, new or old. It signifies the extent to which he is wholly absorbed by and in the moment from which he speaks; a point summed up in the deep drag he takes on his cigarette while standing before a Flavin.

To address the temporal conditions undergirding Minimalism more directly and as a subject unto itself, Byrne staged a reenactment of Robert Morris’s legendary 1962 performance cum sculpture work Column originally mounted at The Living Theater in New York. Morris developed the piece after having taken an interest in dance, wanting to replace dancers with objects representing basic positions such as rigidly standing or lying prostrate. For Column, Morris built a hollow plywood plinth measuring two feet square and eight feet high, which he painted gray. The plinth stood on a vacant stage in a vertical position for three-and-a-half minutes after which time it is toppled with the yank of a string whose one end is affixed to the plinth’s top and the other is held off stage by Morris. The plinth remained on the floor horizontally for the performance’s remaining three-and-a-half minutes. Though a simple event, Column held numerous implications for what could be said to constitute the aesthetic experience, particularly with regard to sculpture, admitting into the discussion notions of time and the body heretofore banished from a modernist rhetoric based exclusively on the eye. Byrne’s reenactment is brazenly dramatic, generating suspense through its emphasis on a ticking watch, a spotlight and a ripcord.

Although illustrative, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not is extremely self-reflexive. It not only engages minimalist works and primary source texts directly, it addresses Minimalism’s subsequent mediation through photography and film. This includes reference to A thing is a hole in a thing it is not’s own making. Furthermore, as part of that self-reflexivity, A thing is a hole in a thing it is not is phenomenological in its own right, calling attention to itself as a projection-based installation. Toward that end, Byrne has installed an external shutter system on each projector. At various moments, the shutter pivots down, completely blocking the projection, leaving only sound. If Minimalism has been relegated to an art historical past, thanks to such exhibitions as Anne Goldstein’s seminal 2004 survey A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, it is a past from which we are hardly extricated. As the full blossoming of modernist ideology, Minimalism also contains the seeds of postmodernism. Even through an irony-driven morphology, its debates remain active such that the question Byrne asks of history is not how soon but how long is now.

The Renaissance Society, Lismore Castle Arts, C. Waterford, Ireland, and the 2010 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, co-commissioned Irish artist Gerard Byrne (b. 1969) to create this new multi-channel film installation titled A thing is a hole in a thing it is not. As this title — a quotation of Carl Andre's famous dictum — suggests, Byrne's attention here will be on the historical reception of Minimalism as a movement, a history that is resonant within the context of The Society's early engagement with that movement's artists.

Gerard Byrne, Still from A thing is a hole in a thing it is not , 2010, film installation.

Gerard Byrne, Towards a Gestalt Image: Loch Ness & Fact, 16mm film projection, Audio CD with variations on six possible voice-overs, recited by Roddy Lalor, 9 min.

Lisson Gallery
52-54 Bell Street
London
+44 (0)20 7724 2739
Gerard Byrne
February 11-March 21, 2009

Gerard Byrne exploits the ambiguities inherent in historicising the legacy of representational forms to address broader critical questions. Referencing diverse sources from Modernist theatre to Playboy magazine articles, Byrne questions the history of cultural consensus that grows around these subjects. Through selection and carefully nuanced reproduction, Byrne's work exposes the anomalies that affect the materiality of a picture, object or fact when transposed from its original historical context to the present time. With a keen awareness of how representation fundamentally alters the subject observed, this exhibition proposes a loose correspondence among historical materials, obliquely assembling a class of 'more archetypal forms'.

Works on show will include video installation Untitled Acting Exercise (in the Third Person). First shown at the 2008 Sydney Biennial, Byrne records the efforts of two actors and a director to understand a script through dramatisation. The script uses passages taken from published accounts of interviews conducted by US military psychiatrists in 1946 with P.O.W.s awaiting trial at Nuremberg, depicting the act of dramatisation as a fractured attempt to understand history through a coherent narrative.

Also on show will be Byrne's 2008 film work '68 Mica & Glass (a Demonstration on Camera by Workers from the State Museum), for which Byrne asked two conservators to dis-assemble and re-assemble Robert Smithson's Untitled, 1968. The film depicts the conservators handling the work according to a carefully choreographed sequence of movements and gestures, inducing what Byrne describes as "a sort of performativity in time". '68 Mica & Glass is a meditation on how Smithson's works exist in time. There is a sense of inertia inscribed in the development of the film; the work is at no point shown in a state of completion, as if suspended somewhere in the loop platter of the film projector.

Born in Dublin in 1969, Byrne studied in Dublin and in New York at the Whitney Independent Study Programme, graduating in 1999. Byrne received the Paul Hamlyn award in 2006 and represented Ireland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in June 2007. He lives and works in Dublin.

Recent Solo exhibitions include the ICA Boston and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2008) as well as the Kunstverein Dusseldorf (2007).

Gerard Byrne's work has been widely exhibited in significant international exhibitions including: The Turin Triennale; The Gwangju Biennale and The Biennale of Sydney (all 2008); The Lyon Biennale (2007), A Short History of Performance 3, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; 3rd Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2006); Eindhoven - Istanbul, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2005); The American Effect, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Istanbul Biennale, (2003); Manifesta 4, (2002).

Forthcoming exhibitions include a new commission for the Henry Moore Foundation, group exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern (30 January-22 March 2009) and the Kunstmuseum Basel (16 May-15 August 2009) and solo shows in 2009 at the Glasgow International and the Renaissance Society Chicago.

Gerard Byrne's work exploits the ambiguities inherent in historicising the legacy of cultural forms from theatre, to photography, or to magazines all of which have traditionally been accorded the role of representing society to itself.

The work is primarily lens based, in film, video, and photography. The photographic projects are generally characterised as historical site related projects made over several years. The film / video projects involve reconstructing particular historically charged conversations originally published in popular magazines from the 1960s -1980s, with the intention of testing the cultural present of the gallery space against the present evoked in a magazine article from the recent past.

Finally, developing out of his conceptual interest in acting and theatre as cultural forms, Byrne has worked on a number of projects with actors and sets in gallery spaces which test the nominal historical distinctions between sculpture and set design, acting and non-acting, and spectacle and spectator.

Gerard Byrne lives and works in Dublin.

Gerard Byrne, 8:29 p.m. The Jury Chamber from Twelve Angry Men, Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin, 2001, Design by Catherine Sanki, Selenium toned silver gelatin photographic print, 53.1 x 63.1 x 3.2 cm.