‘There will be_____’
Time-based media, video art, artists’ films … when moving images get into galleries they carry with them problems for viewers more accustomed to regular film and television. How long do you stay with the work? Should you start at the beginning, and if so, how do you work out when that is? (The Institute of Modern Art helpfully tells visitors that the film centrepiece of There will be_____ (2012) starts on the hour and the half hour, which at least indicates that they feel the knowledge will be useful in this instance.) The protocols for installation art and commercial entertainment are different, but the domains are not separate and artists move over or between them. The Best Picture Oscar for 12 Years a Slave represents an extreme case: the first time such a mainstream award has been won by a film directed by a former winner of the Turner Prize—in 1999 when Steve McQueen beat Tracey Emin.
In There will be_____, Kerry Tribe is explicitly concerned with the intersection of art and entertainment and the different audience expectations involved. The entertainment component is especially important here, the piece works with narrative film and with film genres, but, as is now the case for artists and entertainers alike, not so much film as a physical medium. Almost all work now is on DVD, so the accuracy of the term ‘film’ is threatened as stock becomes unavailable—see Tacita Dean’s many laments and pre-emptive purchases of raw material on the brink of disappearing. Like Dean, Kerry Tribe has long been interested in the mechanical aspects of film, and several earlier works, like H.M. (2009), play with projectors and celluloid as part... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
There Will Be ________, 2012. Video still. Courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.
The Grand Hall (Pre-production study for There Will Be ________, 2011 Video still. Courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.
