Pre-production still from Kerry Tribe’s There Will Be _______ (2012)
The Greystone Mansion, Beverly Hills, February 16, 1929, around 9:55 pm. A gunshot echoes down the stately hallways, and then another. Edward “Ned” Doheny Jr. is found dead in his study, along with his personal assistant Hugh Plunket. It is deemed a murder-suicide, and the case is quickly closed. Doheny’s wife Lucy remarries, and Doheny is not buried in his family’s plot in a Catholic cemetery; instead, he and Plunket are buried together in nearby Glendale. The mansion is sold and spends the rest of its life as a backdrop for television and film productions: The Big Lebowski, The Bodyguard, Death Becomes Her, the video for Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love,” There Will Be Blood and The Witches of Eastwick were all shot at Greystone Mansion.
These are the basic facts that inspired Kerry Tribe’s latest video, There Will Be _______ (2012), the centerpiece of her new solo show at the Power Plant, Speak, Memory, curated by Melanie O’Brian. There are three pieces in the show — the other two are a 40-second film loop, Parnassius mnemosyne (2010) and the double film projection H.M. (2009).
There Will Be _______ stages the imagined events leading up to the murder: the servants quietly milling about the house like worker ants; Ned in his study; Lucy reading by the fire; Hugh entering; words exchanged; drinks drunk; the gun going off once, twice; a call to the family doctor; the police arriving. And then the video re-stages these events, and re-stages them, again and again and again, each time offering a different narrative, iterating a different script, choreographing different exits and entrances. Between scenes, Tribe inserts the date, or the word “…or…” In one version, Hugh is sweaty, desperate, and coughing, railing against consignment to a sanitarium; in another, Hugh and Ned contemplate the impossibility of their love and enter into a suicide pact; in yet another, Lucy discovers Ned giving Hugh a blowjob and executes them both in a fit of sanctimonious, jealous rage. Tribe’s dialogue is appropriated from the films that have been shot at the mansion. She offers us a glimpse of various purported facets, processed and re-processed from bits and pieces of the Hollywood entertainment machine.
“Processed” is, in fact, le mot juste: There Will Be _______, like anything heavily processed, is bland and dull. There is a significant gap between form and content; the video fails utterly to achieve the melodramatic intrigue and gossipy salaciousness of the story that inspired it. The acting is stilted, amateurish, and bloodless. Any visual interest comes courtesy of the mansion itself (the piece was shot on location). The cinematography is plodding and workmanlike, with angles and framing devices borrowed from every silly murder mystery you’ve ever seen before.
Perhaps this visual aping doesn’t signify a lack of cinematic and artistic imagination; perhaps it’s intentional, like the pilfering that created the script. The didactic panel statement makes great hay of all this referencing and cross-referencing, telling us that it instills in us a sense of “familiarity or déjà vu.” There Will Be _______ did feel familiar, it did mine a specific vein of Hollywoodiana: it profoundly evoked the movie version of Clue (a murder, an old mansion, a revolver, multiple endings). Every time the intertitles ended a scene, I fully expected (and desperately hoped for) Tim Curry to run breathlessly on-screen telling me where Colonel Mustard had hidden the candlestick.
The other works fare slightly better. Parnassius mnemosyne, a microscopic close-up of butterfly wings, is quite pretty, and makes effective use of the tactile seductiveness of film stock. H.M. is a faux-documentary about a notorious neurosurgery patient: in 1953, a young man underwent a last-resort treatment for severe epilepsy. Doctors removed bits of his brain, and in the process completely erased his ability to establish long-term memories; he could only remember things for 20 seconds at a time. The piece is a two-channel installation, with dual projections showing the same film, one at a twenty-second delay. It’s an interesting conceit, and there are some lovely moments that arise from the interaction of the two films at that time gap.
Nevertheless, there is a void at the centre of this show, and that void is Tribe herself. Both H.M. and There Will Be _______ fail to transcend their medium. The latter fails even to achieve its medium; There Will Be _______ is flaccid melodrama, and H.M., despite its formal conceit, comes off as something out of an Oliver Sacks book, a Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not entry. In fact, Speak, Memory as a whole fails to make a convincing case for Tribe the artist; she emerges instead as a trivia junkie. Both of these works need reams of didactic explanation to get the viewer up to speed on their first principles, and thus fail to stand on their own. These tricksy games of appropriation and cross-reference seem like cold intellectual exercises, rendering the work as sterile as encyclopedias. I began to wonder where Tribe is in all this, aside from being a relentless footnoter. The only voice I was left with as I wandered out of Speak, Memory was its curator’s, filling me in on all its storied minutiae; it’s a poor thing when an artist can’t speak for herself.
Kerry Tribe’s Speak, Memory runs until June 3 at the Power Plant.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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