A Shout in the Street
Declan McGonigal - Tuesday, January 01, 2008


"John Byrne's practice could also be described as a strategy... (his) approach reminds me of an expression which is used in rural Ireland. 'Whistling past the graveyard'. It refers to the fear passing a rural graveyard at night. In order to bypass that fear you would whistle a cheerful tune as you passed.

Byrne's practice and strategy is similarly a way of negotiating the darkness of our historical reality, or to paraphrase the psychologist R D Laing, Byrne's part humourous, part anxious moments are actually 'sane responses to an insane world'."



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