CIRCA 111 review

Dublin: Gerard Byrne at Green on Red Gallery

Byrne’s video projection reconstructs an interview between Jean-Paul Sartre (played by Michel Debrane) and Catherine Chaîne (played by an anonymous French actress), originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur in 1977. The subject is Sartre’s relationships with women, from the doting female figures of his childhood up to his open though uneven partnership with Simone de Beauvoir and, of course, Sartre’s troubled encounter with the feminist Chaîne. Ironically enough, Sartre remains the centre of female attention throughout.

Played through a system of surround-sound speakers, the voice of Chaîne questions from off-screen, filling the space of the audience, whilst that of Sartre remains caught behind the screen that holds his manner up to scrutiny. Between spoken French and English subtitles there is discontinuity, placing a sporadically engaged Anglophone audience as the third term in this loose equation.

Gerard Byrne: Hommes à femmes, installation shot; courtesy Green on Red Gallery

Separating audio, image and text, Byrne expands the divisions history makes between the antagonists. Chaîne interrogates Sartre from a position that is strangely absent, perhaps more theoretically sound but a little sanctimonious, whilst Sartre speaks with all the obstinacy and frankness of experience. We might look upon Sartre as a product of his experiences, but of greater interest are Sartre’s eloquent attempts to avoid the bad faith of either being captive to his situation or denying it (given substance by Michel Debrane’s excellent characterisation of Sartre).

Under interrogation, Sartre’s chauvinism and solipsism are obvious, as is his vain unease at being the object of less than benign female attention. Like “a wind blowing from nowhere towards the world,” (Sartre, Being and Nothingness) Chaîne takes up a transcendent nonposition, investing the female voice with the agency that patriarchal modernism had denied it, but at the expense of her disembodiment (a surprising omission considering the feminist insistence on the body as the site of both oppression and liberation).

This reversal of power continues an asymmetrical conflict between men and women, and corroborates Sartre’s notion of the battle between sovereign subjects each trying to make the other an object. As de Beauvoir herself notes, in such a state of affairs “instead of displaying mutual recognition, each free being wishes to dominate the other”: what needs to be realised is that each sex liberates itself in liberating the other. Despite Sartre’s anachronism, it is still an open question to what extent the contest of submission and domination has been dismantled, our present situation being often one of equality in form only. Likewise, the question remains whether or not we can recognise others’ difference without seeking possession through the judgements that we make of them.

It is to Byrne’s credit that the complexity of his work refuses the subsumption of its three parts under a whole, just as the significance of this altercation cannot be exhausted by the historical circumstances of the parties involved. It is peculiar then that from these fragments it is the faltering continuity of Sartre’s position that the work, almost despite itself, seems to confirm.

Tim Stott is a critic living in Dublin.

Gerard Byrne: Hommes à Femmes (Michel Debrane), Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, November - December 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, p.93

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