Ryan Trecartin

“I love how you you are all the time!”

By Jeff Edwards

Over the last few years, Ryan Trecartin has done for video what James Joyce once did to language: torn it open, twisted it back on itself, and transformed it into a goopy metanarrative soup where everything operates on multiple levels at once, often at cross purposes. Trecartin’s hyperactive mashups of words, images, and stereotypes fed through a funhouse mirror seem to foreshadow the nonlinear, post-text future that has terrified iconophobic philosophers for years (Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio come to mind). However, unlike so much other commentary on the state of media and culture today, Trecartin’s work contains at least as much hope as despair…and it’s also hell of a lot of fun.

Trecartin’s legend is already well known: discovered within a year after graduating from RISD, his video A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) quickly secured him a spot in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed the New Orleans home where he and an ever-growing circle of collaborators had worked on AFFE and other videos, he wandered around, eventually settling in Los Angeles. His star has risen dramatically since then; his current exhibition “Any Ever” is now on tour, having completed stints in Toronto and Los Angeles, with stops forthcoming in Miami, New York, and Paris. The show presents Trecartin’s most recent works as a sprawling self-contained world, with a suite of seven videos screened in familiar environments (bedroom, living room, backyard) that allow the viewer to steer an idiosyncratic course through over four hours of alternating narrative and chaos.

Trecartin’s earliest videos show a sharp awareness of the way we cobble together identities for ourselves from the cultural flotsam that’s always floating around. In Valentine’s Day Girl (2001), Trecartin’s principal collaborator and close friend Lizzie Fitch plays a woman whose every word, fashion choice, and interior design decision is pre-ordained by an obsession with the Hallmark-card holiday. Things go awry when a mob of Christmas revelers take her hostage in her own apartment, torturing her with a spontaneous Yuletide celebration. It’s a hilarious tragedy, set in motion by the opposing parties’ inflexible commitment to festivities they seem to enjoy more for their prefab trappings than their spirit.

Early projects like this one and the cosmological sex drama What’s The Love Making Babies For (2003) have often been compared to the films of Jack Smith, George Kuchar, and Kenneth Anger. Such comparisons are fair enough, at least on surface terms. All make works with the same basic elements: anarchic exuberance, a Rococo sense of overabundant but mismatched details, an Our Gang spirit of showmanship on a shoestring budget, and a nonchalant pansexuality. (Although Trecartin has often been discussed as a queer artist, he thinks of sexuality as something mutable and open-ended, and looks forward to a time when we all leave our bondage to our genitals behind.)¹

What sets Trecartin’s videos apart is that while his cinematic forebears often seem to have a naïve optimism about a person’s ability to forge a new identity from a mixture of dress-up and sheer imagination, he never loses sight of how readily we define ourselves by choosing personal traits from a predetermined menu of cultural junk (vast though that menu may be). Trecartin also takes their wild aesthetic into uncharted territory; his characters often sport garish, expressionistic makeup that veers between clownishness and psychosis. Somehow, though, it works; his barrage of images would be weaker without all the Emil Nolde sci-fi facepaint.

Trecartin’s works in other media are not nearly as gripping. His sculptures feature the same spirit of bricolage, being cobbled together from a slew of grubby pop-culture castoffs, but their static nature sets up a critical distance that makes it easy to write them off as parallel-universe echoes of Rachel Harrison’s assemblages. What’s missing is the relentless immersive pull that makes the videos so direct and powerful. A recent new-media collaboration with Tumblr founder David Karp titled riverthe.net falls equally flat. Consisting of viewer-navigated streams of tagged clips uploaded by anonymous users, the result is a bland and vaguely predictable collection of disconnected attempts to charm, amuse, and shock. The lack of the strong authorial vision that’s so obvious in Trecartin’s own videos is painfully apparent.

There’s always a potent mix of optimism and cynicism in Trecartin’s stories. In A Family Finds Entertainment, an edgy young thug named Skippy (one of several characters played by Trecartin) navigates a gauntlet of hipster friends, redneck relatives, wannabe artists, fashionistas, and party kids, each more depressingly familiar from Hollywood films and store displays than the last. Yet the overall piece is an ecstatic rhapsody about the potential for individual expression, played out as a noisy reincarnation drama. Skippy commits suicide in a friend’s bathroom, faces the judgment of his ambiguously disapproving parents, and then is reborn as guest of honor at a party with a seemingly endless supply of garage bands, each playing its own tune in its own room. What does it matter if each looks a little familiar? The important thing is the faith every character shows in his or her persona.

In recent years Trecartin has delved deep into the romance between commodity culture and personal identity. His newest works are disjointed, sprawling epics that take the basic elements of past projects and spin them off into a dizzying web of media-savvy catch phrases and hyperkinetic multi-frame montages, featuring characters ripped as easily from the pages of Business Week as from reruns of The Jerry Springer Show. At each turn we’re confronted with things we’ve seen somewhere before, and forced to consider how similar bits of microculture have shaped our own day-to-day existence under the new regime of Facebook and YouTube.

In the nearly two-hour-long I-Be AREA (2007), Trecartin’s protagonist, I-Be, plays a clone endlessly confronted with the shakiness of his own identity. His genetic original undergoes a sex change and a radical image overhaul, his friends and roommates chastise him for being himself and demand he trade places with someone else on the identity-exchange market, and his avatar asserts its rights and hijacks his online existence. I-Be eventually gets lost completely as the plot stumbles through a slew of different “areas,” physical analogies for the virtual territories that oppose the real world while drawing way too much from it. The idea of technology-assisted isolation is woven throughout: one of I-Be’s friends/assistants keeps tabs on his predicament from the bedroom, watching events downstairs unfold on The Living Room Channel. Meanwhile, the importance of commodities as tools for personal expression lurks around every corner (at one point one character gushes to another, “Jamie, look what I drew from memory!” He’s holding up a doodle of a copyright symbol).

In Trill-ogy Comp (2009), a suite of three videos that forms half of Any Ever, Trecartin takes the idea of identity remixing a step further. The business-speak spouting office drones and CEO of the pan-global corporate drama K-Corea INC.K (Section A) and the squabbling sisters of Sibling Topics (Section A) reappear in P.opular S.ky (section ish), but ripped out of their original contexts they begin to swap identities and serve as stand-ins for any other character that the plot might need at a given moment. The constant confusion reflects how slippery our own grasp on reality can get when our desires compete with the façades we struggle to maintain in both the physical and virtual worlds. In Trecartin’s universe, fact and fantasy fall on a recursive loop rather than a spectrum, and it’s often hard to tell what’s what, and which point on the circle is “real.” It seems like a hopeless jumble in which there’s never any time to slow down and get one’s bearings. The next fad or buzzword is always right outside, knocking on the door.

Yet a sense of hope always rises to the surface. Toward the end of I-Be AREA, the characters engage in open revolt against the system’s parameters, breaking open the literal and virtual windows that isolate them within their private zones. The rebellious outburst transforms into an impromptu party where the revelers refuse to be marked for future marketing. As Sibling Topics winds down, the outcast sister Ceader finds herself and a companion in a blandly perfect vacation home. Outside the windows is a cosmic swirl of stars and colors; nothing out there has rezzed yet, a prospect that’s both terrifying and liberating. Ceader takes it in stride, seizing the opportunity to deliver a personal manifesto that captures Trecartin’s hopes for radical human transformation in language that even the most vapid fashion slave can understand: “Fuck the body! I want a soul. And I’m going to make my own soul, ‘cause I’m not going to wait and find out if I have one or not…I’m sick of all of my outfits coming from Default Closet!”

Ceader’s final statement sums up Trecartin’s vision of escape from the tyranny of human limitations so well that it might be the pivot around which all of his works swing:

“Finally, I’m just an as-if. Sense me.”

NOTES

1.     See, Lubow, Arthur. “Ryan’s Web.” W Magazine, volume 40, issue 11, November 2010. Web. January 2011. <http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2010/11/ryan_trecartin>