Why it's time for Imperial, again

Artist Gerard Byrne (b. 1969)

Date1998-2002

MediumDVD and photographs

DimensionsPhotographs: 53 x 63 cm
Duration: 23 mins

ClassificationsMixed Media

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 2005. © Gerard Byrne.

Object number1988

DescriptionGerard Byrne explores the technology of representation and its pivotal impact on cultural history. His work, primarily photography and film, questions the construction of reality concurrently questioning the strategies and desires of representation.

Why it's time for Imperial, again re-stages and replays a fictional conversation between iconic Frank Sinatra and Lee Iacocca (then chairman of Chrysler) discussing the new Chrysler Imperial. The reference for this conversation was an 'advertorial' in the National Geographic, November 1980. The film follows the conversation from derelict urban space to freeway, seedy diner to toilets, a far cry away from the glossy car showroom. The script is played out again and again reiterating the pitch to a capitalist consumerist society. Yet disjunctions and faltering lines again contradict the 'text', the photographs of the advertisement shown in the installation, stacks of magazines. By employing documents from the recent past, Byrne questions and unravels both past and current suppositions, the real and the representation.

Byrne has exhibited widely including Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, 2002, and the Istanbul Biennale, 2003. He studied at the National College of Art and Design, and completed a Masters in Fine Art at the New School for Social Research, New York and subsequently the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1999.

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