Visual Arts: Aidan Dunne reviews Gerard Byrne: In Repertory, Project, Dublin, Homme À Femmes (Michel Debrane) Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, James Hanley: Souvenir at the RHA Solomon Gallery, Dublin.
Gerard Byrne's In Repertory has just concluded and his Homme À Femmes (Michel Debrane) has just opened. Both are carefully rationalised, precisely nuanced projects, and both operate at one remove, looking quizzically at cultural representations.
For the former, an initial installation and a subsequent projection, Project's gallery space was first given a theatrical makeover, so it became not so much a theatrical setting as a setting that evoked "theatre". Byrne drew together elements from three theatrical sets, including a 1961 production of Waiting For Godot, with a spindly tree designed by Giacometti and the iconic bowler, the backdrop of a 1943 Broadway production of Oklahoma! and the wagon from a 1963 Broadway production of Brecht's Mother Courage. These made up a composite, dramatically lit set.
The visitors to the installation, recorded on camera, became the performers. Some were in fact performers, actors who improvised actions with props. The footage was edited and screened in the gallery as the second part of the project. A fully fitted-out stage is a heightened space. That moment of hushed expectancy as a play is about to begin is extraordinarily charged, regardless of the quality of what is to follow.
Perhaps In Repertory aimed to capture and sustain that mood of anticipation and possibility. But the strands of the installation, each with a distinctive theatrical identity, pulled apart rather than blended into an overall, abstract theatricality. The references were there to be ticked off and considered, but nothing seemed to emerge from such consideration. And the footage itself was banal. In a way it had to be, because - and this was the central weakness of the project - no allowance had been made for it to be anything else. Plausible enough in outline, In Repertory was curiously arid in execution.
Homme À Femmes (Michel Debrane) is the latest in a series of staged re-enactments of interviews and discussions culled from 1970s and 1980s magazines. By subjecting obscure pieces of advertising or editorial to scrutiny Byrne highlights the shifting ground of implicit cultural assumptions, the forgotten or unspoken disparity between then and now. These pieces are not straight re-creations. Instead he uses Brechtian devices to distance us from the material.
This instalment, commissioned by a Utrecht-based arts body, BAK, and Anna Sanders Films, in Paris, takes as its source an interview between a journalist, Catherine Chaine, and Jean-Paul Sartre, published in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1977. In a characteristically cold and analytical way, Sartre discusses his relationships with women. An accompanying note tells us that the structure of the video underlines the schism in consciousness between the modernist patriarch and the younger feminist by, oddly, leaving Chaine out of the picture entirely. In a virtually empty, rather beautiful apartment, Michael Debrane, playing Sartre, responds to questions from an unseen interlocutor. His isolated performance is further distanced from us by a jittery, erratic camera that shakes, zooms and lurches arbitrarily, as though it can't quite settle down.
Chaine is effectively put in the position of us, the viewers, throwing questions to Sartre from outside the frame, perhaps from behind the camera. As Sartre, Debrane puts in a good performance. In fact, he engages us because the field has been left open to him and, as actors do, he makes the most of it, enough to convince us that people are more than cultural ciphers. Sartre was notoriously cold in his personal relationships. By 1977 he was near the end of his life, his sight had long since failed, he knew that his last great project, on Flaubert, would remain unfinished and he was well aware that, as a popular philosopher, he had long since been superseded by the wave of immensely fashionable structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers.
Homme À Femmes highlights one aspect of his character. Inevitably, a moralistic note creeps in, not just to this instalment but to Byrne's whole series of reconstructions. Poststructuralists have argued that there is no position of privilege possible in terms of such cultural commentary, no way of being outside the text, as the late Jacques Derrida put it. Byrne's intriguing, edgy revisitations to cultural bywaters incorporate the ambivalence of his own position, the ambivalence of all efforts at understanding the past, but despite their fruitful uneasiness one suspects that they never quite forsake the idea of a privileged viewpoint or acknowledge their inevitable partiality.
A solo show by James Hanley RHA is a rare thing. He is perhaps best known as a portrait painter who attracts some notable commissions, including one of Bertie Ahern. And he has just been asked to tackle the re-inauguration of the President, Mary McAleese. What makes all this mildly surprising is that there is nothing ingratiating or sycophantic about Hanley's style. He takes a distinctly cold, hard-edged view of things - although his sheer technical competence must count for a great deal.
Souvenir, his Solomon Gallery show, recalls the other, personal side of his work that has, in the past, included an exploration of masculinity. His new paintings, made to a standard, blue-bordered format, are for the most part oblique, fragmentary images, featuring a bewildering variety of subject matter, from expansive landscapes to mundane details. What unites them is their personal significance to Hanley, their association with places and events. Their particularity and precision, while always separate from us, serve as a template for the workings of memory. In fact their openness, the way each image opens up an empty space or the possibility of spaces beyond, is vital, making them strangely habitable and suggestive of narratives.
Gerard Byrne: In Repertory, Project, Dublin, run concluded (01-8819613); Homme À Femmes (Michel Debrane) Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until December 23rd (01-6713414). James Hanley: Souvenir, RHA Solomon Gallery, Dublin, until November 19th (01-6794237)
