An Irish Artist's Time-Twisting Storytelling

VENICE -- One way for art to be good is for it to talk about essential things. The art of Gerard Byrne, who was asked to fill the Irish Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, does that. It also talks about the way we talk about them. That may make his work good art, squared.

In one video installation, called "1984 and Beyond," Byrne re-creates a panel discussion published in Playboy in 1963, featuring famous science-fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, discussing what the world would look like 21 years later. Their conversation ranges widely, from the promise of contraception to the idea that the whole Earth could be as alive as any creature on it. Of course, from our vantage point, we can see that these futurists got their future mostly wrong. No, it doesn't cost less to get to the moon than to take an airplane flight, and an orgasm pill has not come along to replace booze.

The discussion, as we now know, was much more fiction than science; the whole thing was more a literary exercise than a search for facts. That suits Byrne's art fine, since it seems keen on pointing out the artifice and fiction behind most of our encounters with the world.

Byrne is clearly happy, for instance, with the temporal disjunctions inherent in his piece -- a current video revealing the past as it looks forward with confusion to a future that the present now looks back on. Those disjunctions represent some of the complexities of human storytelling. But that isn't nearly enough for Byrne. He also makes his own re-creation disjointed, splitting the video into 12 separate chapters and playing different ones on each of three monitors, in different rooms, in different sequences.

Still not enough. Byrne also injects doses of geographical, linguistic and cultural confusion. His actors are dressed in the correct vintage suits and narrow ties, but despite the obviously American content and setting of the original round table, it has been restaged by Byrne in two famous modernist buildings in the Netherlands, using only actors who speak English with a Dutch accent. Byrne will never let us forget that his art, like all art -- like almost any reporting of anything -- is about re-creating the truth, and interpreting it at a different place and time. It's never about a simple presentation of the way things are.

And deliberate fiction, maybe, is never as far from truth as it sometimes pretends to be. Byrne's Venice show also includes a series of large-scale color photographs called "A Country Road. A Tree. Evening." The title is built around the opening stage directions for -- "Waiting for Godot," published in 1952 by fellow Irishman Samuel Beckett, the great absurdist playwright. But instead of letting those directions float free and vague, as purely absurd fiction -- Beckett said they were based on a famous painting by a German romantic -- Byrne attempts to make them literal. He seeks out rural roads in Ireland, at dusk, with trees like those that Beckett might have seen, then shoots them by the light of colored theater spots. However false the theatrical effects may be, it always rests upon what's been seen and known. But even that banal assertion, when it pans out as looking for the trees that Beckett might have seen, has absurdist repercussions.

Byrne often sets himself absurd projects, to see where they will lead. In Venice, another of his videos involved getting contemporary actors to restage "candid" actor interviews published by Andy Warhol in his Interview magazine. Byrne then filmed his own hired actors both as they played their parts and as they warmed up to playing them. What is it, to begin with, for someone -- let alone a struggling actor -- to tell the unvarnished truth, in a magazine that's run by Warhol, master of a life lived as fiction? And how much truth is lost, or possibly even gained, by having other actors, probably better ones, use every trick they've got to give flesh to the stilted, printed texts put in their predecessors' mouths by Warhol's editors?

Like Byrne's futurists, all we ever have is interesting questions we can ask about the way things are and will turn out.