REVIEWS GERARD BYRNE
GERARD BYRNE In a poem entitled ‘Enueg’ (1931), Samuel Beckett conjures the image of ‘a bunch of gorse on fi re in the mountains after dark’: an eerie
LISSON GALLERY, LONDON vision that the young Sam sometimes framed through his bedroom
22 MARCH – 4 MAY window after a walk in the hills around Dublin with his father. (He fails
to mention that at least once he had set the fi re himself.) In Gerard
Byrne’s ongoing photographic series A country road. A tree. Evening.
(2006–), the location mentioned in the opening stage direction from
Waiting for Godot (1954) is tracked through the countryside that might have inspired the play’s sparse setting. The search, of course,
is absurd: not only did the playwright himself adduce Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819) as the model
for the leafl ess tree and vacant expanse of time, but Byrne’s overlit nocturnal tableaux reveal their project to be a self-evident sham, a
theatrical restaging of a nonexistent scene in which nothing happens, twice.
The artist’s sedulous reconstitution of Beckett’s laconically imagined landscape – as also his replica of a tree made by Giacometti
for a 1961 production of Godot (complete with the fi ve leaves it acquires for the second act) – is of a piece with his conviction that
history is a matter of paradox, anachronism and pure comedy. Byrne’s is an art obsessed by translation: between text, image, stage
and individual or collective recall. In 1984 and Beyond (2005–6), his source material is a discussion published in Playboy in 1963. In
Byrne’s video, a symposium of science-fi ction writers is dispersed about several modernist interiors and asked questions concerning
the future of sexuality, technology, politics, interplanetary travel and the texture of daily life in the century to come. In the original
text, unsurprisingly, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke et al. got a few things half-right (‘wrist communicators’, the pharmacology of sexual
performance) and a whole lot wrong: they posit the end, for instance, of dull, routine labour.
It would be easy to refer 1984 and Beyond to a standard pop-cultural paradox: the mystique of the might-have-been, the future
anterior that exercised the science-fi ction writers of the next generation. But it’s rather the gaucheness with which the past is pictured,
not the 1960s writers’ failure to predict the future, that is most telling here. Played by Dutch actors with more or less unconvincing
American accents, the assembled seers are an awkward lot: they fl uf_f lines, miss cues, bumble about in their ill-fi tting suits like Jacques
Tati in his futuristic fi lm Playtime (1967), or Morecambe & Wise suborned to a Cold War think tank. They represent a masculinist,
over-confi dent era that is as hard to grasp in its specifi city as our future was for their mid-century moment. As in the accompanying 20
black-and-white photographs, depicting a picket-fenced, neon-lit present that is practically unaltered since the 1960s, Byrne proves
that there is no such thing as a historical now, nor ever was. Brian Dillon
,
A country road. A tree. Evening. Beside Knockree, looking towards Crone and Bahana, Glencree, Co. Wicklow. 2007, c-type photograph, 88 x 110 cm unframed. Photo Dave Morgan. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London
ARTREVIEW one.linfive.lintwo.lin
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