The World’s a Stage

A country road, a tree. Evening.
Dan Fox (1976– ), sitting on a low mound, is trying to take his boot off.
He pulls at it with both hands, panting.
He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.
As before.
Enter B.S. Johnson, novelist (1933–1973).

Dan Fox: I could talk about Walter Benjamin. I notice some critics have brought up Bertolt Brecht, or the history of photojournalism but why step in other writers’ footprints? Something tells me it would be easier for me to articulate my thoughts about Gerard Byrne’s work with the help of a literary conceit, some clever device that in its very form might directly, or indirectly, serve to highlight just what it is that makes Byrne’s work interesting. I hope you don’t mind if I run a few things by you?

BS Johnson: […]

DF: Well, if nothing else it’ll make a change from the usual. You have, or rather had – I’m not quite sure what the correct etiquette is for tenses in these situations – a problem with fiction. Your profound conviction was that mid-20th-century literature was backwards. You saw yourself as carrying the torch for James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, arguing that any attempt to follow the narrative forms established by the 19th century novel, after landmark works such as Ulysses (1922), was …

BSJ: ‘… anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant and perverse.’1

DF: Yes, exactly the line I was going to quote.

BSJ: Present-day reality is markedly different from 19th-century reality. Then it was possible to believe in pattern and eternity, but today what characterizes reality is the possibility that chaos is the most likely explanation.2

DF: Looking at Byrne’s work, I suspect he shares your concerns, yet is perhaps more at peace with fiction and representation – less worried about the chaos. Here we have a body of photographs and films that consider the effects of cultural production on the way we perceive ourselves; through architecture, through the construction of historical narrative and orthodoxy, or simply on the level of day-to-day experience. Just like you did. Here, however, referentiality is also central. The texts used in Byrne’s films are often from popular journalistic sources – Playboy, or Le Nouvel Observateur for instance – and the relationships between his photographs and their titles set up long associative chains. Yet this dense reflexivity is never used as a prop to shore up hollow stylizations. Instead it enriches, it acknowledges and plays with currencies of form.

BSJ: As far as I’m concerned nothing a writer produces comes from nowhere, everything he does comes from somewhere: you can’t push anything out that hasn’t gone in some way or another.3

DF: Well, at risk of being reductive, I’d argue that the itch constantly being scratched in Byrne’s work is the malleability of representation – of history, of ideas, of place.

BSJ: If you haven’t seen for yourself how your eyes can mislead you then you must be metaphorically blind; and remembering even more so: how many times have you remembered something you thought accurate only to find it was not so when you had it checked by some independent means?4

DF: Let’s look at it from another angle. Isn’t the thread that connects Byrne’s work together that of the theatre, albeit in a very expanded sense of the word? Take In Repertory (2004), for example. A gallery space is turned into a mini-theatre of sorts, using a reconstruction of Alberto Giacometti’s ‘tree’ from a 1960s production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952; a play that recurs with almost Beckettian regularity in Byrne’s oeuvre), a painted backdrop from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) and a covered wagon from a 1963 production of Brecht’s Mother Courage (1941). Visitors were videoed walking around the space, like protagonists in some weird Modernist-Neue Sachlichkeit musical. Here are two aspects of ‘theatricality’ that can roughly be discerned throughout Byrne’s practice – ‘acting’, and the re-presentation and dramatization of existent texts, and ‘scenography’; the arenas in which these texts are recontextualized, and how spaces and objects do not just form the backdrops to our lives but play an active part in defining the ways in which we see and conduct ourselves. Does that make sense?

BSJ: […]

DF: Hmm. OK, let’s follow the ‘acting’ thread. Four of Byrne’s films in particular can very schematically be described as the dramatic reconstruction of interviews or roundtable discussions, originally published in magazines and newspapers at various points in the last century, and transposed to a different historical moment to that in which they occurred. New Sexual Lifestyles (2003) restages, in an Irish Modernist house, a 1973 roundtable discussion from Playboy about changing attitudes to sex; Why It’s Time for Imperial, Again (1998–2002) dramatizes a conversation between Lee Iacocca, chairman of the board of Chrysler, and Frank Sinatra, nicknamed the ‘chairman of the board’ of the entertainment industry, from an advertisement originally published in a 1980 edition of National Geographic. A candid interview with Jean-Paul Sartre regarding his attitudes to women is reinterpreted by ‘journeyman’ actor Michel Debraine, in Homme á Femmes (Michel Debraine) (2004). Another Playboy discussion – this time featuring sci-fi luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke and Rod Serling speculating about the future (‘I think we can visualize permanent bases on the moon around 1980’) – is reconstructed by Dutch actors in 1984 and Beyond (2006). You with me so far?

BSJ: […]

DF: Perhaps some more detail will help. New Sexual Lifestyles restages a ‘symposium on emerging behaviour patterns, from open marriage to group sex’ with a group of actors in the Goulding House, a beautiful Modernist villa designed by Scott Tallon Walker Architects, built in Ireland in 1972. We see close-cropped shots of the actors’ faces, occasionally pulling back to mid-shots, sometimes framed against huge glass windows that look out onto verdant trees and foliage. Camera focus slips between the actors and the girders and glass of the house, as discussion ranges candidly across subjects such as marriage, multiple partners, masturbation, orgasms, orgies and homosexuality.

A number of fissures open up as the work unfolds. Judging by the actors’ clothes, the time appears to be the present, rather than the early 1970s. We could be watching a self-help group for wealthy and successful professionals, held in a luxury health resort, yet this jars with some of the panellists’ remarks; ‘the dangers of bisexuality are comparable to those of LSD’ (the drug ties the comment very much to another era), or ‘if my wife cheated, I’d kill her. She’s part of my property. […] I am a sexist. And since I pay the bills I feel I own her, the way I own my car. And I don’t lend my car out to people.’ (A vile misogyny voiced too explicitly for the detached, relaxed, contemporary, middle-class types represented.) The accents are Irish and not American as they would have been in the original discussion, which included porn star Linda Lovelace, radical feminist Betty Dodson and Screw magazine editor Al Goldstein. Again, this adds to a sense of historical asynchronicity, that we’re not watching baby boomers but perhaps contemporary avatars of the 1990s Irish economic boom. An unevenness in the delivery of the lines – some are spoken with a confident, conversational tone, others sound flat, as if read straight off the page – flags up a sense of drama rather than documentary, an uneasiness to the translation, emphasizing the abrasive juxtaposition of multiple historical moments.

In all Byrne’s films, we’re very aware of watching actors at work; what the artist has described as ‘the texture of acting’5, a level of delivery that is neither highly polished nor amateur, but like the theatre of Brecht, emphasizes in its inconsistencies ‘acting as a type of representation’6; like the novel as a type of representation not just an act of fabulism. Why It’s Time for Imperial, Again was originally an advert masquerading as a macho chat about the wonders of the Chrysler Imperial luxury automobile, and is re-imagined by Byrne, as if in an episode of ‘The Sopranos’, taking place in a run-down industrial quarter of an American city, with two gruff actors sparring in streets lined with down-at-heel Italian diners. Tiny details unsettle the sense of hierarchy between these two supposedly powerful men; at one point ‘Sinatra’ straightens the tie worn by ‘Iacocca’, at another he seems impatient, rolling his eyes outside a toilet door as the car magnate urinates his way through his sales pitch.
You’ve speculated about historical fiction, haven’t you? Whether trying to imagine another time or era is a valid basis for a novel, and whether not experiencing the period about which you are writing matters?

BSJ: Does it matter? Does anything matter? The thing is that all seems very similar. Nothing seems capable of being new, I feel as old as the whole of history, knowing everything that mankind can. Except the details.7

DF: Details, yes. Maybe it’s the very absence of specifics that allows the other thread in Byrne’s work – the scenographic aspect – to breathe. Across his photographic projects, he records a range of spaces; theatre sets (‘Points of View, Waiting for Godot’, 2003–4), countryside (‘Loch Ness Sequence’, 2001-ongoing) and ‘A Country Road, a Tree, Evening’, 2006–ongoing), the built environment (the ‘Untitled Window Photographs’, 1997), all of which are by and large devoid of people, yet suggest recent or potential human presence. In his ‘windows’ series, the lens is foregrounded; the subject of the photos more the glass than the interiors – lens flares sparking off the corners of books; panels of reflected colour floating spectrally across empty rooms. The ongoing series ‘In the News’, begun in 2002, appears, as the title suggests, to be a curious form of reportage – a diverse collection of images nodding to photojournalism yet eschewing one of the genre’s defining features, that of recording action. Instead, these inscrutable images are accompanied by long captions referring to the history of photography, or seemingly unconnected events that, like a script, ‘activate’ the image, forcing narrative onto the photograph.

‘Points of View, Waiting for Godot’ and ‘A Country Road, a Tree. Evening’ explore scenography directly, and with specific reference to Beckett’s seminal Modernist play. ‘Points of View, Waiting for Godot’ depicts an empty stage dressed for a production of Waiting for Godot. The photographs, although lacking actors, nevertheless feel loaded with potentiality, shot to loosely simulate the views of characters from the play. ‘A Country Road, a Tree. Evening’ takes the famous opening description of the play’s location. Byrne tracked down and photographed a number of locations, in both rural Ireland and France, that were familiar to Beckett, in an attempt to, in the artist’s words, speculate ‘on the various intersections and overlaps between literary and concrete physical spaces’. In searching for the ‘original’ roadside, Byrne is, in a sense, looking for a literary archetype, demonstrating how our environments can become typologies of culture. Sorry, am I boring you?

BSJ: […]

DF: Good, because this is the important bit. The issue of reconstruction is haunting contemporary art. There is an almost pathological desire to keep picking apart historical moments by restaging them, as if in doing so some ineffable truth will reveal itself. In Byrne’s work, this is highly systematized. He allows different points of reference, like clockwork motors of varying sizes, to run alongside each other. Like winding up a number of watches and observing them move out of sync with each other, the time they mark shifts in and out of phase. He embraces disjuncture.
To act out a scenario is to examine it from many angles and, as in theatre, the texts Byrne uses are open to myriad interpretations. Unlike cinema, in which there is a ‘definitive’ version, plays written for the theatre have always had the potential to exist in multiple permutations – there have been hundreds of different productions of works by major playwrights. Resurrecting texts from 40-year-old magazines may not be so different from restaging a play written long ago; some topical nuances may be lost, but the texts can shed light on the new era in which they’re performed. Magazines have very specific currency and shelf-life; Playboy, in the 1960s and 1970s, represented a bizarre combination of the era’s liberation (and libertinism), and erudition (it often carried articles by high-profile novelists and critics). Byrne’s dramaturgical strategies raise the question of exclusivity – of information, of cultural and intellectual product – and as such have a number of potential economic implications in terms of the ways performance and the moving image can bypass increasingly highly packaged media systems.

Yet what does all this mean for the critic looking at his work? If the kernel of Byrne’s project is not whether he used X text from Y source (though that is highly illuminating), but rather the combination of temporal disjuncture and theatrical interpretation that he’s devised, then where does that leave us? Is the critic doomed to bounce across the surface of all these referents like a pond-skater, or the kaleidoscopic haloes surrounding the books in one of his ‘window’ images? Byrne’s work burrows deep into historiography to see how history is written, how, like Vladimir and Estragon by the roadside, it waits for meaning to appear so it can impose order – or dramatize – the vast entropic vagueness of reality.

BSJ: OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING!8

DF: Oh sorry, was I going on?

BSJ: I’m trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth …9 Look there were millions of people, thousands of peoples, hundreds of countries, all of them going in every direction and performing every kind of significant and insignificant act. How could anyone impose order on that multitudinous discontinuity? History must surely be lying, of one kind or another, no more true than what used to be called fiction? How can any one mind comprehend it? And would there be any point if it could?10

DF: Yes, there would. The most frightening thing about history is silence.

Dan Fox is associate editor of frieze. Skill 7 Stamina Dead, the new album by his band Skill 7 Stamina 12, will be released in November on Junior Aspirin Records.

1 Jonathan Coe, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson, Picador, London, 2004, p.13
2 Ibid. p.13
3 Ibid. p.204
4 Ibid. p.205
5 Telephone conversation with the author, October 2006
6 Ibid.
7 Op cit. p.30
8 Ibid. p.17
9 Ibid. p.17
10 Ibid. p.30