04.21.2011: K-KERRY KERRY TR RY TRIBE’S CRITICAL MASS

Kerry Tribe's pieces tend to be sort of like a bunch of really enthralling academic essay about rad, obscure historical figures. She's both a story teller and a disseminator of a ton of meticulously researched information, but instead of reading these essays, the audience experiences them, generally via video, sound, and installation. This feeling carried over into her latest performance, Critical Mass, a live restaging of Hollis Frampton's 1971 film of the same name, at The Hammer on April 7.



Frampton expanded a few minutes of footage into a 25 minute film via sound and video editing. Kerry Tribe used actors with commendable memorization skills to perfectly reenact the audio, along with the expected motions of a couple's fight that will never be won by either side. Though this seems like it might be incredibly frustrating to watch, certain repetitions seem to emphasize the actors' points, while others repeat the ridiculousness of this fight (both the fight itself and the phrases that date the original piece - "far out" and "hippie colony" were two stand outs). Pretty much everyone in the audience cracked up at least once. In fact, the few points at which the fight is allowed to continue uninterrupted by the editor's hand, while they give the audience more information as to what is potentially going on, were sort of, well, boring; the stutters and repetition actually added a certain amount of raw emotion and frustration that feels very real in the situation being staged....Sound like something you're bummed to have missed? Well, you're in luck! Tribe will be restaging her restaging at LAXART on April 22 at 7 pm.

Article originally published on the TENOVERSIX blog.

04.07.2009: THE GAME OF MEMORY

A man around 80 years old is asked what he looks like. He has dark brown hair. He is asked how old he is. Late 40s or early 50s, somewhere around there. He is asked about the Gulf War. It was a conflict having to do with Mexico and Cuba. These are not the responses of a man who has lost his memory due to old age or a recent accident; these are the responses of a man who has lived this way for most of his life.

Henry Gustav Molaison is the subject of Kerry Tribe’s new film installation, "H.M.," currently on view at 1301PE in Los Angeles. H.M., the initials that represented him in innumerable scientific reports, was born in 1926. He acquired severe epilepsy in a bicycle accident at nine, and on September 1, 1953, at 27, underwent an experimental procedure in which his left and right medial temporal lobes were removed. His epilepsy was gone, but so was his capacity to retain any new information past the immediate memory mark of 20 seconds.

Tribe’s interpretation of his story is conveyed with enough layers to confuse even those with all aspects of memory fully in tact - re-staged interviews and tests; abstract visuals of crossword puzzles and floating stars; Tribe’s (or the person whose notes she’s reading? or a fictional character all together?) personal memories with and about H.M. The viewer is even put to the test just as he was, pictures of famous faces flashing onscreen in an effort to understand where the memory of important events begins and ends. This audio-visual onomatopoeia is further extended in the 2-channel projection. The official description states that the same film is shown next to itself, a 20 second delay between the adjacent projections, but even after watching it a number of times, I remember the two films as being slightly different.

For H.M., time was liquid, not linear or fixed as people tend to understand it. He used clues from his immediate present and distant past to understand what was going on around him. Tribe’s installation is probably as close as any of us will get to experiencing what H.M. did, no temporal lobe removal required.

Article originally published on Anthem Online.