Maia and I are on the same page in terms of not being sure what to think about Ryan Trecartin's work, but it seems a lot of museums and organizations are stuffing him full of money and attention so he's doing something right. My idea of Trecartin is that he has a small theoretical base for his films, using the absurdity of his work to elicit intense theoretical readings by art critics. In one interview he describes this insanity as a product of technology and culture moving faster than they themselves, along with us, can really comprehend:
"The first brainstorm for the movie was in celebrating the messy transition of an accelerated crash into a world nature 2.0 that jumps into use before we have the time to ease into it with no culture space to form general understandings of new collective manners and appropriateness or codes of conduct. I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people. It’s like the jumper being jumped before the onset of “jump”—and the whole world is doing that, like tradition out and unmarketable."*
This warp speed progression makes sense in his work, reflecting a culture that, in the constant and exponential search for the new, has quickly moved so far from any comprehensible reality. Bjorn Melhus is another artist we watched last week who creates surreal/ eerie/ hilarious videos to critique contemporary culture. Instead of stressing the insanity of quick culture though, Melhus engages with the homogeneity of mass culture. As the subject of most of his videos, he stands in as a nondescript body with shaved head, miming voices from shopping networks, music, and the news. Melhus takes on a neutral pre-formed clone body image to represent these variations of our culture as a way to stress that the personalities we see delivering these lines to us are equivalent to programmed clones.
Pipilotti Rist was the third video artist we watched, and is something of a stand alone in relation to Trecartin and Melhus. Rist's videos are 80's feminist pieces that explore how the body, especially the female body, is used in relation to media technologies (e.g. video). in I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much, she is constantly blurred, her voice accelerated, and image warped with occasional video tracking to accentuate how women are distorted by the those who record them, while in Sexy Sad I she turns the tables by using a naked man as the subject. In both cases, the subjects aren't supposed to appear as willing actors, but exploited bodies that get more and more furious as they continue to be filmed. Pikelporno, on the other hand, is an exploration of sexual bodies, starting with a female view of the male body, then switches POV to the man to take in the the woman. As a video that is essentially of two people having sex, Rist avoids their faces to not get lost in the personal aspects of sex, while interspersing metaphoric imagery to re-create the phenomenon of pure body lust.
No sunshine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Captain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Again & Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
America Sells
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Deadly Storm
Ryan Trecartin
K-Kora INK
http://www.ubu.com/film/
Pipolotti Rist
Pikelporno
I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much
Sexy Sad I
http://www.ubu.com/film/rist_
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