Crack

Over time our memories change. It’s an inescapable fact that our memory alters and we look at the past in different ways as our lives progress and our experiences change us.

American visual conceptualist Kerry Tribe has a fascination with memory as this lucid, morphing concept. Her Dead Star Light installation at the Arnolfini delves into the subject of memory, through visual art installations that contain narrative and thought provoking ideas that deal with our own perception of memory. Tribe enters the rabbit hole that is the morphing human psyche and through the three pieces on display takes on the subject of memory with gusto.

Deeply passionate about her work, Crack’s time with Tribe is fast paced and exciting.
Tribe explains her early fascinations with memory: “My first works I did in film and video were documentary based. I tried to make a documentary about my senile grandfather who had been a kind of jerk when he was younger and actively parenting my mum. I thought I could make a straightforward documentary and hold him accountable for all the terrible things he’d done. But he’d turned into a sweet old man and he was totally dependent on my mother at this point. She still couldn’t take the things he’d done, but he couldn’t remember anything he’d done. The whole documentary was about calling attention to the way things get represented. Memory had skewed things completely because he had no idea what his past was.”

The exhibition takes on three strands. Tribe explains them all in detail:

The Last Soviet

“A lot of my work is born out of other pieces, in the case of The Last Soviet piece in my current exhibition it was born out of a previous piece I did entitled H.M.

"H.M. is an experimental film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, known in scientific literature only as ‘Patient H.M’. In 1953, at the age of 27, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy; the unintended result of which was a persistent amnesia. Though he was no longer able to formulate lasting memories, his short-term recall, lasting about 20 seconds, remained intact. He lived anonymously like this until his death on December 2, 2008. His case is widely credited with revolutionising our understanding of human memory.

“There are basically a load of important events that happened after HM became an amnesiac, so he doesn’t know we sent a man to the moon, he doesn’t know about the civil rights movement, he doesn’t know about The Ramones. One of these images of an astronaut in H.M set off a conversation between my collaborator Jason Torchinsky and myself about the different historical trajectories of the American and Russian space programme. He told me the story of a man called Sergei Krikalev, a cosmonaut left up on the space station Mir while the Soviet Union collapsed. Due to the political turnmoil he was left in space for 10 months.

"I don’t know where he got this story from but apparently someone sent him up some autumn leaves to show him that the season had changed. I haven’t been able to verify it from anyone, so it may have been something Jason imagined. Either way I’ve always been consistently interested in rumour and myth and what we remember and what we forget. What we culturally and historically remember and how that jives and doesn’t jive with personal experience.”

“I liked this idea of someone being off planet earth. It made me think if was thinking of us and are we remembering him, it seemed like a poignant source of origin to begin a larger explanation in my work.

“The video I’ve created has a female voice over and a male voice over in and they kind of tag-team. She talks about images that we see and he talks about the story of Krikalev.

“There is another thing going on in that video called the nostalgia effect. There was a film called Nostalgia in 1968 by a guy called Hollis Frampton and in that film he shows a photograph and describes it. As he’s describing it, you realise the description doesn’t fit the photograph. The next photograph he shows fits the description given for last image you’ve seen and you become aware of this after watching a few of them.
“This is how we chose to do with the voice-overs in The Last Soviet. The editing structure in that piece is like being in orbit, her description is always falling down towards the next image and falling down and then it comes back into loop. When you are in orbit you are always falling to the earth, but missing it. It’s never quite there.

“I thought if we were going to represent this guy in space on such a grand scale we should try and do it as realistically as possible, but in a low budget way. So we basically made a model of the space station Mir and filled it up with clear oil. We then dropped some leaves into it, so the weightlessness you see in the video is all simulated.
“Then I took a banana hung it from the ceiling and videotaped it and turned it upside down, so you have a levitating banana in the video. If you are looking at the sub-text of the video it’s very much about the culture of image fabrication, you can see this has all been re-created.





Milton Torres Sees A Ghost


“Milton Torres Sees A Ghost is a sound installation. Its format is two reel-to-reel players where two audio tapes loop between two listening stations. The two stations are stretch out between the two furthest points on the floor of the gallery. The audiotape stretches between the two and hugs the architecture of the gallery and spacialises the two experiences at each station.

"The soundtrack is the testimony of a chap called Milton Torres about how he was ordered to shoot down a UFO in 1957 and it disappeared. He was told if you tell this to anyone, we’ll take your airplane away and you’ll never fly again. Then in 2008 the national archives were released containing all UFO sightings and the government involvement. As a result he became a national celebrity.

"On the audio as he’s talking about it, he describes the airplane. When he talks about the technology of the airplane and the radar screen and how the sound moves back and forward and you have these moments it seems like he might be describing the installation you are actually looking at.

"At the other station the reel-to-reel is erasing what he is saying and playing back the hissy static. You get fragments of his speech. Milton Torres had this experience in the 50’s. He’s an old guy and losing his memory slightly, so it took so many hours of editing just to get a straight version of a story.”

“So his story was present and then it disappeared for a time and now it’s present again now, so the installation is present and then it disappears and comes back on the loop.”


Parnassius Mnemosyne

"Parnassius Mnemosyne is the name for a butterfly. Mnemosyne is the name that refers to the personification of memory in Greek myth. The work is an animated image of a butterfly wing seen under a microscope.

"I also had this idea to make a mobius strip film. Most film has perforation on one side, but occasionally you can get film that has perforation on both sides. So if you can imagine taking a long strip of film, flipping it once and placing it head to tail you’d end up in a mobius strip. If you were to walk around a mobius strip, you’d end up on the other side without ever crossing over. To me this structure is an interesting metaphor for memory.

"Of course we only ever know the future in the present. As soon as we get to the future and past it, it becomes the past and it loops around. In a more psychoanalytic sense we are always driven forward to get something but we always miss the thing we are trying to get. Freud would say we are always driven to get back to this place that we were only ever at in infancy and if we were to get there we’d be dead.

"The structure of the mobius strip seemed like a fruitful structure to look at memory and time. Then I discovered in this book, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, which is the memoirs of a well-known lepidopterist, Arthur Vladimir Nabakov, he included his drawing of Parnassius mnemosyne.

"Nabakov speaks French, English and Russian and he published it in all these different languages. Each time he published it, he would include memories that hadn’t surfaced earlier. His book is taken in literary circles as the perfect example of the subjectivity of memory. As you change where you are in your life, you remember things differently. In an earlier edition of the book, he did this little drawing of this Parnissus Mnemosyne butterfly. So it seemed like a nice pairing.



Kerry Tribe's latest installations are in The Arnolfini until Sept 12th

http://www.kerrytribe.com/

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