Gerard Byrne

Gerard Byrne

Work from A Thing is a Hole in a Thing It is Not.

“…Minimalism’s genealogy is mythic precisely because the work is situated in and outside of history. As the culmination of an art for art’s sake, Minimalism is securely tethered to a trajectory of modernism dating as far back as Manet. The movement’s key figures expanded a self-reflexivity previously reserved for painting into an equation comprised of object, viewer, space, and most important, time. Paradoxically, extending what was an historically evolving logic only served to sever their work’s relationship with history. Minimalism’s staunch anti-representational posture, combined with a recourse to phenomenology, renders it ahistorical by design. Encountered as an obligatory period room, minimalist works instigate a ritual participation in a time-mediated aesthetic experience rooted in the here and now. Minimalism, however, was above all else highly self-conscious. Inscribed in the ahistorical “real time” aesthetic of the here and now is an historical consciousness belonging to the there and then of Minimalism’s inception. The past engendered by Minimalist period rooms is a past responsible for crafting an eternal present, a degree zero, an artistic logic so conclusive that, no matter how dated or of its moment, extends into this present, displacing all history save for that which brought those works of art into being. As a result, these period rooms function as portals allowing this present to co-exist with a present from half a century ago….” – via The Renaissance Society

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