For his debut
exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York, Gerard Byrne will present a new video
installation, In Our Time. Commissioned
for the 2017 edition of Skulptur Projekte Münster, In Our Time depicts the daily activities of an archetypal
commercial radio station, provoking questions around the relationship between
radio broadcasting, time, pop music and collective memory.
Centred around the control booth of the radio station, the camera moves
continuously through the meticulously realised mise en scène Byrne has created,
picturing in detail the cassettes and vinyl, the microphones and speakers, alongside
the various other hardware used to coalesce pop music, call-ins, news bulletins
and the voice of the presenter himself, into a seamless ethereal broadcast. Of
non-fixed duration, In Our Time plays
back in sync with actual time of day during the gallery opening hours, and as
such establishes a richly complex relationship between the hidden space of the
radio broadcast depicted, and the physical circumstances of the gallery viewer.
As with many of Byrne’s previous works, In
Our Time conjoins ideas of naturalism from film, physical presence from theatre,
together with the concrete temporality of radio broadcasting, into a hybrid
form influenced by Bertolt Brecht.
In Our Time is a study of Radio as a model
of Time, from the micro level of adverts or radio jingles, to the macro level
of timeless pop classics. The artist utilises and emphasises radio's
inherent tapestry-like structure where different references and songs are
interwoven, and key motifs are repeated at various intervals throughout the
day. Radio’s inherently rhythmic nature — from daily music or talk programmes
to updates on weather or traffic repeated at symmetric intervals throughout the
hour — creates a modular structure of indefinite duration, similar to the
serial qualities of Minimalism. With a focus on this structure and the
materiality of the radio studio and its contents, Byrne continues an ongoing
interest in the legacies of Minimalism, and the complex nature of how Art
engages its own place in time.
- More about Gerard Byrne
- Press release (PDF)
