Ryan Trecartin is a very young artist, only having graduated with his BFA from RISD in 2004, and two years later participating in the Whitney Biennale. His works tread the fine line between intelligent critique and complete insanity, and for some reason are incredibly compelling. Upon first viewing, I was dumbstruck by overstimulation. The hyper-speed of his pieces does not allow for the brain to fully comprehend is happening, requiring repetitive viewings or at least a lengthy recovery time. Part of the draw to his pieces seems to be that experience overstimulation, and the sort of numbness it produces. At the same time, however, while there may not be much intellectual depth, there is a quality to them that demands further inquiry and serves as a critique on contemporary culture—even if we can never actually understand what he is trying to say (if he even understands it himself).
Narrative continuity is completely deconstructed in his videos (which he himself critiques, for example, in I-Be AREA, one of the characters states, “You are always trying to make things sound more special, and digital, and non-linear than they are. It’s stupid.”).
For example, in A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), it is hard to find discern a cohesive narrative at all, especially since Trecartin plays multiple characters. In the video, Trecartin is shown as the character Skippy, painted red, who has locked himself in a bathroom, melodramatically proclaiming his existential problems, while cutting himself with a bread knife, as his elaborately costumed friends (who are partying in the other room) try to get him to come out. The jump cuts between the two rooms do not make any logical sense, and the actions of every character are entirely unpredictable. They have drastic mood swings, and digressions that are frequently interrupted by random cuts, graphics, changes in color and speed, and conversations that are completely disassociated from everyone and everything else going on. Skippy finally comes out of the bathroom (I have no idea why), and has some strange interactions with his sexually inappropriate parents from which he borrows money. He then leaves the house, meets a documentary filmmaker, and gets hit by a car. At the same time, we meet a female character, named Shin (also played by Treacartin), who wears extremely exaggerated makeup in bright primary colors, and is a conflation of every sort of party girl/gay male stereotype. She is at a party at a house, and is told on her cellphone that Skippy has been hit by a car and killed. Jump cuts, sped up footage, and disrupted sentence fragments follow, during which Shin seems to be trying to tell her friends what happened. Any linear quality to be found in the beginning of the film is completely gone, and it is impossible to understand what is going on. There is a lot of yelling in sped up, highpitched voices, and once she is able to tell her friends what happened with Skippy, there are suddenly bands everywhere. Skippy rises from the dead, and they all go outside to shoot off fireworks (during which everyone continues to scream hysterically), and then run inside before the cops show up.The (un)structure of his videos is the epitome of the sort of schizophrenia Fredric Jameson talks about. The props, characters and themes of his videos are a pastiche of genders, nationalities, stereotypes and styles—a collection of unrelated, random signifiers that have been disconnected from their signification. His pieces are a heap of disparate symbols, collapsing past and future into an unstable present. It is hard to tell whether Trecartin’s pieces are a realistic critique of our experience in cybernetic techno-culture with its constant stream of images, sounds and words, or if it is complete nonsense, jumbled into a pile, played and edited at hyper-speed, and literally thrown in your face for 40 min to 2 hours. Or maybe that is the critique.
Trecartin has said about his videos that they are language.** They are not supposed to be a linear narrative film, they are designed, and transformed into pieces that mimic the way our brains work—the way they absorb, analyze and exchange information. While he scripts the videos ahead of time, the pieces frequently develop into something unexpected when the actors improvise, going off on tangents. As Trecartin put it, the videos are made through a process of “community web of share and tell.” The end resulting in a sort of emergence, in that, the piece becomes something of its own, an amalgamation of the group’s ideas and actions—a sort of collective consciousness.
I still do not really know what to think of Trecartin. Should I just blow him off as another wacky artist, or is he actually getting at some important truth about contemporary society. A lot of people seem to think he is pretty important, though, so maybe there is something there.
** For interviews see:
"THE Q&A: RYAN TRECARTIN, VIDEO ARTIST." MoreIntelligentLife.com
"Interview with Director Ryan Trecartin." Wexner Center For the Arts.
I think a fun way to think of Trecartin is through the medium of Deleuze's cinematic concept of the crystal. That, instead of there being a signified or signifier, there is this thing, which is a crystalline structure, that reflects the outside world through a type of appropriation or disguise while simultaneously letting it become confuted with its own structure or rhythm or pace. If that makes any sense at all. Except Trecartin is also close to the virus in his structure, you could call this the inheritance of a specifically 'Net dynamic, (Deleuze refers to virality as the seed/environment relationship), this is what gives his work such virulence, he infects as much as possible through inclusion in the work, until it seems to explode like a tick which can't take its mouth from the vein.
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