'You have to know how to make the stuff'

Gerard Byrne takes a fairly blunt approach to the knowledge and skills artists need to succeed, but his work is beautifully made and terrifically exciting, writes Aidan Dunne

EACH YEAR SINCE 2005, Lismore Castle Arts has held a major exhibition through the summer months. Mostly they’ve been big group shows, but in 2006 the whole space was devoted to the renowned English sculptor Richard Long. This year the same honour goes to a Dubliner, Gerard Byrne.

While he may not exactly be a household name in Ireland, Byrne is probably the best-known contemporary Irish artist in the international art world. Although barely in his 40s, he has attracted a huge level of critical and academic attention, has shown extensively abroad and his ambitious, multi-media works feature in many important collections.

Lismore co-commissioned a four-screen projected video installation by him, A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not,which is about minimalism, the radical art movement that emerged in the US in the 1960s, which sought to divest art of any and all unnecessary elements. Also included is a set of black-and-white photographs of American subjects, and, in a former church hall in Lismore town, a single-screen projected work, Untitled Acting Exercise (in the third person), originally commissioned by the 2008 Sydney Biennale.

Byrne came close to missing his own opening. He teaches in Copenhagen, and volcanic ash had grounded all flights, so he embarked on a circuitous voyage home. He’d planned to spend a week overseeing the installation of the show, but by the time he arrived in Waterford he had only a day or so in hand.

“It was a bit pressured,” he says with a smile. “My character is such that I like to mull things over. I’m ruminative. With photography, I think it’s only in advertising that there’s this reductive sense of how something has to be, because you’re doing a job, you’re trying to sell the thing. My view is more Barthesian, that the image has its own life, and it takes you time to realise it, and it may not have much to do with your own intentions.”

Three of the four projections are on to screen walls constructed at angles in the main gallery space. “I knew that I wanted the walls to be free-standing, because I wanted the viewers to be able to circulate, to walk around each projection the way they would a piece of minimalist sculpture.”

Essentially, as he sees it, “The work is a meditation on how you experience sculpture in a museum.” It’s something that he first envisaged making five years ago. “Then other things got in the way.”

When the Glasgow International Festival approached him about 18 months ago, he saw a chance to finally do it. Then the Renaissance Society in Chicago, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and Lismore came aboard and “it gained some momentum”.

The Van Abbemuseum features prominently in one video. “That was their contribution. They basically set up a show of their minimalist works for us to film.” Such first-hand access to works by key artists including Frank Stella, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin was invaluable.

Byrne captures encounters with the works from the perspective of a group of technicians supposedly installing them for exhibition. Other videos record the process of photographing a piece of minimalist sculpture by Donald Judd, and recreate a radio interview with three minimalist artists. The unearthing and recreation of past interviews is a staple part of his repertoire. His approach is usually to do so using a variant of Brechtian “alienation” technique, nudgingly reminding us that we are looking at a construct, a staged contrivance. For the radio interview, it’s as if the camera operator has ADHD as the camera wanders restlessly over the furniture, the technical equipment, even the coffee cups.

Byrne cites two art historians and theorists as inspirations for the work. The first is Michael Fried, who was famously critical of minimalism in his 1967 essay Art and Objecthood. "I've been interested in that essay since I was a student," Byrne says. By emphasising the stark physical fact of the object, Fried argues in his text, minimalism betrays modernism by denying the viewer any transcendental experience. Art becomes part of everyday life, and no different from it (think of Tracey Emin's bed, and it's clear that Fried had a good sense of where art was headed).

The second theorist is Alex Potts, who wrote about the difficult relationship between minimalist sculpture and photography but drew conclusions different to Fried’s about minimalism. Its stubborn physicality, what he termed its “awkwardness”, made the viewers physical experience of it all the more significant, and in many ways this puts it outside the realm of what is photographable.

Byrne’s work explores these views or, as he says, meditates on them in relation to the artworks, how we experience them, and their historical context. For him, his installation documents minimalist works but also, “takes on a physicality” of its own. “I wanted the images to have an adamant quality, really because they’re addressing these fantastic minimalist works which are so austere, but also so human, so fragile. Those black paintings by Stella are beautiful when you look at them in close-up. It’s the little inflections, the details, the splashes.”

Hence his four films present different ways of engaging with the minimalist object, exemplified by different practitioners – photographer, technician, artist, theorist, casual viewer – while at the same time the installation overall “mimics the way you experience a sculpture in space”.

As ever, Byrne’s works are exemplary in their technical presentation. He’s technically flexible, as well, in terms of style, medium and format or, as he puts it: “Horses for courses.” From the first he’s employed imaging technologies with flair and aplomb but he didn’t, he points out, have any formal technical training. “I’ve only ever gone to art school, and you learn very little of that there,” he notes wryly. When he lived in New York in the 1990s though: “I shared flats with people who were in the film business, and really that was how I learned.”

Art students, he reckons, still tend to underestimate the importance of technical skills. “And in the end, if you’re going to be an artist, you have to know how to make stuff.”

Gerard Byrne, curated by Mike Fitzpatrick, is at Lismore Castle Arts, Co Waterford until September 30th, 058-54061. Byrne will discuss his work with Mike Fitzpatrick at Lismore on June 12, lismorecastlearts.ie