Film UbuWebRyan Trecartin (b. 1981)
P.opular S.ky (section ish) (2009)
K-Corea INC.K (Section A) (2009)
Sibling Topics (Section A) (2009)
I-Be AREA (2007) [Version française] [Versione italiana]
(Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me) (2006)
A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)
What's The Love of Making Babies For (2003)
Wayne's World (2003)
Yo A Romantic Comedy (2002)
Valentine's Day Girl (2001)
Kitchen Girl (2001)
RYAN TRECARTIN
Kevin McGarry, 2009
Perspective
Ryan Trecartin has established a singular video practice that in form and in function advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative and identity, and also propels these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture is amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish, virtuoso uses of color, form, drama and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life.
2009/2010 Rotation
Trecartin's video installations currently on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art are the first presentation of his episodic new works: K-Corea INC. K (Section A), Sibling Topics (Section A) and Re'Search Wait'S (Edit One: Re'Search Missing Corruption Budget). These works can be considered three parts of an ongoing, overarching project of seven interrelated videos, which can be viewed independently as individual movies or in combinations to form feature-length films. The forthcoming Sibling Topics (Section B), serves as a part two for both Sibling Topics (Section A) as well as K-Corea INC. K (Section A) where characters and themes from both films intertwine. Re'Search Wait'S (Edit One: Re'Search Missing Corruption Budget), a compilation edited exclusively for the installation at the New Museum, is comprised of the four mid-length movies: Y-Ready, Roamie Collect History Enhancements, The Re'Search, and Temp STOP, all to be completed over the following year. Each movie compliments and complicates the themes and systems at work in the videos presented in this exhibition.
While I-Be Area (2007) explored Trecartin's construct of metaphysical "areas" that manifest characters' emotional, spiritual and mediated conditions in three dimensions, the new works focus less on ideas of space and interiority/exteriority and more on transactions that occur between characters--on characters' conditions formed by the continuance of behaviors, whether behaviors that are continued in looped patterns, directional sequences, or in ways that cause negation.
K-Corea INC. K (Section A) and Sibling Topics (Section A)
The cast of K-Corea INC. K is mainly comprised of actors dressed as various "Koreas" (sounds like "careers"), in blond wigs, powder, and office casual attire, the sum of which Trecartin calls "work face." The homogenized Koreas represent all nations in a UN-inspired flavor spectrum... USA, Mexico, Canada, Hungary, Morocco, Argentina... presided over by Global Korea, a CEO whose safari-style "post drag re-take" stands out from her employees' neutered uniforms.
The Koreas are held together in a lightly allegorical cloud, assimilating cultural stereotypes and reductive international relationships as individual basic operating procedures (for example, fiery Mexico Korea spits Spanglish into the phone and busts glass while the others meet with eachother). But individuality is subsumed into the group and refracted, collectively, as diversity. This image of the chorus (a loud one!) acquires life as a brand value--diversity--prizing the gamut of voices for the sense of cultural genuineness their confusing disparateness engenders, and the easy harmony that follows from each one conforming to the central look and feel of K-Corea Inc.
The video revolves around an unending "meeting"--a busy, aimless meeting that goes in circles to evade a traditional narrative arc. The meeting is essentially a party, and the entire company bumps and grinds with itself everywhere from in boardrooms to airplanes. K-Corea INC. K processes ideas of automation and containment, embodied by these hyper-controlled locations and by the seemingly looping actions that take place in them. Air travel, for instance, is a means to rapidly transport contents from one place to another, but while expanding the possibilities of travel, it also drastically compresses the experience of travel into a automated and contained procedure. Meetings, where discrete parts of a corporate body come together to attempt to "get on the same page," display the futility of corporate unity, and of individual purpose or voice remaining intact within a corporate culture.
Amid the din of self-negating office politics, one underling aspires to introduce her own agenda to the workflow. This intern--a millennial who wears what she wants, comes in when she wants, and does "whatever the fuck she wants"--designates herself as North American Korea, a neo-NATO opportunist who stands to capitalize on any sort of merger between her constituents (or their failures to maintain discrete national identities after such a process). In doing so, she also alters the narrativity of the video, advancing a linear plot line, which makes the rest of her company vulnerable to concepts like before and after, cause and effect.
With the nature of nonsense thoroughly conveyed through the frenetic stasis of K-Corea INC. K's corporate logics, Sibling Topics reverses the pendulum, adopting a narrative and style that is more cinematic than any of Trecartin's other or previous videos. In this sense Sibling Topics counterbalances the circularity of K-Corea INC. K, and together the videos explore polar dimensions of narrative absurdity, along with the persistence of communities (be they corporations, families or both), to form and operate in any circumstance, real or imagined.
Not surprisingly, family is the central theme of Sibling Topics, post-family to be precise. Trecartin returns to his conception of family-as-business-enterprise (I-Be Area), casting parent figures as managers and executives on one end of the spectrum (do they lead with a hands-on style? Or are they more absent?), estranged children as freelancers on the other. The director plays four sisters named Ceader, Britt, Adobe and Deno, the boundaries of whom are indistinct... it is difficult to tell where one sister ends and the next begins, especially in the case of the middle siblings, Adobe and Deno (but isn't that always the case?).
The sisters' questing--for identity, for romance, etc.--leads them on an episodic series of adventures, several of which are defined as "premises." A Trecartin premise plays out as a predetermined situation where the character initiating it has already set the tone, terms, and trajectory of the experience in their mind. The actual, lived event serves only as the shading-in of the outline. An early premise, between Ceader and her lover Baby is called "a conversation in easy mode."
Later, Ceader finds herself in another romantic premise, with her friend Mass Major, this one based on the experience of a delicately furnished vacation house. But this one goes bad, it's too sterile and too foreign, with nothing to hold on to. Ceader's expectations of the hosue seems to entrance and even trap them--until they shake themselves free of the premise and back to reality. Like the business protocols enacted by the Koreas, the characters of Sibling Topics lock themselves personal scenarios that are similarly predetermined by externalized priorities. As with I-Be Area, the emergence of a character as author (of their desires or of their life) signals growth and power. However, the agency of the sisters is called into question by Mass Major, who tells Ceader, "You want to much, what you want is vague, and you don't work towards it." The general idea of something, manifested as the time and place of a premise, is not enough to count for personal history. Preconceived control of a scene from one's life is more an expression of weakness than mastery, and of inherent doubt in one's ability to direct the action of a spontaneous encounter.
Re'Search Wait'S (Edit One: Re'Search Missing Corruption Budget)
Re'Search Wait'S is a meditation on existential abstractions of market research. In this video, an industry is predicated on the idea that life experiences have intrinsic commercial value because they can be harnessed as data for the purpose of forming business strategies to best the market and its consumers (not so much unlike real life). The performance, collection and commodification of research carries fantastic mortal consequences. Characters, most prominently Able, played by Lizzie Fitch (Able at times haunts the other two videos included in the New Museum exhibition), convert research subjects into pawns, and play them to advance their corporate agendas.
A defacto protagonist in Re'Search Wait'S is Wait, played by Trecartin, whom he calls a "work performance." Wait waits... because he is imprisoned by a job, while other characters are consumed by the endless activity of their careers. The inciting action of the video, and perhaps of the entire cycle, is Wait's decision to quit his job and to stop working for the betterment of those who exploit him. This call to action is reminiscent of IÐBe the clone's in I-Be Area. The idea of waiting surfaces as a crucial and paradoxical theme across the cycle: both negative, in the sense that Wait is discontent with waiting for options and opportunity while others snatch them; and positive, in that 'to wait' is to halt the constant motion of automated ambition, to pause and engage with a certain place and time.
Another character played by Trecartin is JJ, who pops up as a heavily painted Suze Orman pantsuit-guru type, with a brooch of checks pinned on his lapel. He confesses an addiction to personality drugs, and as his high fades we see a swift decline. JJ later reappears as a husk of himself, a sad, Dickensian thing teetering around his room giving a plaintive tour of the lifeless art he has collected as placeholders for human warmth.
A cast of other players rounds out the logic of the life-as-research industry. RoamieHood (a Robin Hood figure) steals from the past in order to streamline the present, and to accelerate her agenda for the future. She attempts to rearrange a past situation to revive JJ, but fails. JJ remains foreclosed on.
Wait's plight, JJ's containment, and the objectives of Able, RoamieHood and others, all concern the transactional nature of personality traits underlying Re'Search Wait'S, and touch on the idea of "examplizing" that erupts as on-screen text during Wait's epiphany. Personality traits are labels placed on routine behaviors, which should be malleable and ephemeral, but in this world they ossify--examplize--into static examples that can be handily traded among owners. The duality of lived market research and personality traits as commodities generates quite a horrifying knot for the characters. Everything they do is studied, and the findings dictate the brands that pilot everything they do.
RESOURCES:
These videos are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to Ryan Trecartin. Used with permission of Ryan Trecartin.
Used with kind permission of Elizabeth Dee Gallery.
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