Byrne, Whitechapel

Blazwick

Byrne sifts through charity shops and libraries to find old magazines wherein lie his scripts

He also draws on Brechtian technique and the conventions of television drama to remind us of the artifice of period pieces; costumes may be slightly anachronistic, a camera may pan out to eveal a stage set.

Through them we witness the ideas and aspirations of what was once urgently modern, as history.

Interview

‘Acting as a mode of precarious representation’

‘I started working with material that didn’t carry the baggage of having been authored’

‘All interviews including this one, have a stlightly debased status as text, but as a form the interview has a very immediate connection to the body, because somehow behind the text there’s always a body’

‘What constitutes the ‘historical’ is constantly shifting, from one present to the next’

‘When I was in graduate school in the mid-Nineties the real theoretical and critical urgency was around post structuralism and deconstruction in particular’

‘Linking authority to the voice of the text by naming the premises upon which its authority was founded. For deconstruction the text was never whole, but always partial’

‘That tension between the whole and the fragment is quite an important trope that I think runs through the way I edit things’

‘Yest, it’s a quite inconvtrovertible observation about the works that I’ve made over the past 10 or 15 years, that they very conspicuously stage masculine subjects or the masculine’

‘It comes out of this early formative sensibility shaped in relation to deconstruction and that mode of thinking. I think that historical discourses are historically patriarchal and re-inscribe patriarchal forms and norms. Part of the critical traction of what I’ve been doing for a while incovles a certain deconstruction of these patriarchal representations’

‘The works reproduce, or re-enact these historical referents in ways that make them palpably vulnerable, not in a sentimental way. But in the sense that they’re not solid or stable – they become bodies’

Like a Man, Reckitt

Laura Mulvey’s articulation of man as holder of the gaze and woman its object

Works that depict men performing their public personae

A man and a woman make love restages the first of 12 conversations about sex and eroticism initated by Andre Breton in 1928.

Homme a Femmes interview of Sartre

Tom McDonough, ‘the camera is implicitly feminized’

Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’, and his concern with learned, embodied behaviours

Performative utterances Austin

Byrne also highlights how critics made use of artsits’ accounts for their own ends – how Michael Fried