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Dances of Death

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The Daily Pic: Mark Tribe and Chelsea Knight compare choreography and assault strategies.

Stills from Posse Comitatus by Mark Tribe and Chelsea Knight

(Courtesy the artists and Momenta Art)

These are two stills from a video installation called “Posse Comitatus” by Mark Tribe and Chelsea Knight, on view since the weekend at Momenta Art in Bushwick. Momenta is participating in “Brooklyn/Montreal”, an exchange between galleries in the two cities, and this piece is part of the Brooklyn component. Tribe and Knight documented the activities of a survivalist paramilitary “club” in upstate New York, and also commissioned and taped a work of modern dance built around that footage. Videos of both are on view in the installation, where warfare and dance come off as surprisingly similar: They’re about rigor and training and craft, as well as the extreme artifice of rule-bound play. The guys tramping through snow in their camo are already involved in a dance, whether they know it or not. They might as well be in tutus.

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Blake Gopnik is a contributing critic to Newsweek and The Daily Beast and writes on art and design for a wide range of publications. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of The Washington Post and before that was an arts editor and critic in Canada. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthetic topics ranging from Facebook to gastronomy.

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