Düsseldorf. »I have absolutely no taboos!« This sentence comes at the end of a group discussion on »New Sexual Lifestyles« that appeared in the men’s magazine Playboy in 1973. The Irish artist Gerard Byrne has reconstructed and filmed this discussion for his video of the same name. Byrne found, already formulated in the text, the pathos of a complete revelation of even the most unusual facets of sexuality by people who talk about themselves as though they were researchers. At the same time, it is an interesting compromise. The non-representable forms of sexual behaviour are (in a magazine that sticks to its Bunny deal in its visuals) covered in the discussion instead. Homosexuality, S/M, sodomy – with its aspiration to be the central organ of permissiveness, Playboy feels itself to be implicitly responsible for these. In the discussion, Gerhard Byrne finds a theatrical text that fits in with his interest in Brecht: the subjective confession is broken up by manners of speaking that are intersubjective and objectivising. The participants talk about themselves, while at the same time making themselves into »cases«. This produces an alienation effect in which the distance between the figure and its text is not something emphasised by the author; instead, the many facets of the intimate arise as if of their own accord in the language of experts of the self ( even if they are trash experts like the editor of the magazine Screw) when they come into the open. Especially in Playboy.
Gerard Byrne has made his own individual genre by filming interviews from popular print media. This genre is also the focus of the exhibition that the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen has dedicated to him this spring in co-production with the Biennale in Venice. As well as the »New Sexual Lifestyles«, one can see »1984 and beyond« (a group discussion of well-known science-fiction authors about their visions of the future, published in 1963, also in Playboy), »Homme à femmes« (an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre on his relationship to women, published in 1977 in Le Nouvel Observateur) and »Why It’s Time for the Imperial, Again« (a conversation between the Chrysler manager Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra about the luxury limousine Imperial, published in 1980 in the National Geographic at the start of an advertising campaign). None of these works is concerned with the psychological empathy of the actors with the role of the speakers, but with the presentation of linguistic material from the context of mass media.
Gerard Byrne gives the deliberately casual »conversation« between Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra in particular a touch of unreality: he has two actors walk through disused urban spaces, overgrown train rails and past a car-wrecking plant, and finally even to a toilet where they continue the conversation through the toilet door: »We have even more standards than you would ask for.« As in the other works, the element of manipulation consists above all in the fact that Byrne assigns a location to the texts. The conversations are placeless, inasmuch as it is seldom of importance for the form of the interview where it takes place. However, Byrne makes the interviews location-specific in a culturo-historical sense: he films in locations of modernity such as the Sonsbeek Pavilion of Aldo van Eyck (where the science-fiction authors gather as if at an academic lecture) or the Goulding House of the architects Scott, Tallon, Walker near Dublin (with a glassed-in room hovering strikingly above a stream landscape). In this way, he mediates between the ambitious formal programme of an architectural modernity and the heterogeneous effects of modernity that have emerged from the consumer society and its phantasms. Byrne brings the ruptures within the speech act, which are obscured in the genre of the interview, to the surface once more. A photographic work that hangs inconspicuously on a wall in the Kunstverein Düsseldorf becomes a key to Byrne’s entire project: three pictures of a crossroads in Brooklyn where a traffic accident has occurred serve him as a model for his own epic theatre, in which strategies of presentification and abstraction merge with one another in analogy to Beckett and Brecht. If one could look at the conversation between Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra about the Imperial today »in the original«, the effect would probably be inevitably humorous. This would be a fallacy, however, which results from the historical distance and a supposedly advanced state of knowledge (about oil prices, energy efficiency and the state of the American empire). Byrne, on the other hand, tries to use his reconstructions to look for a way of bringing across apparently discredited utopias using places and non-places of modernity. The space that opens up in the process is beyond taboos, beyond any linear de-bordering: it is, as Jacques Rancière would say, a space of »historiality«.
Translated by Tim Jones