Internet baroque: Ryan Trecartin

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If you start out on the bottom floor of “Younger Than Jesus,” the New Museum’s buzzy generational survey, one of the first videos you’ll encounter will be Keren Cytter’s “Der Spiegel,” a ponderous work on loneliness and aging. Cytter’s videos vaunt all the signifiers of serious, experimental art: conspicuous camera work, French and German chatter, naked people, references to Boom-era Latin American literature. But they are totally unsatisfying. They rehash postmodern inanities about identity and narrative, without insight. Though they may be sparser and more elegant than corporate entertainment, they feel academic, built to flatter curators and mildly literary patrons.

But don’t despair! Upstairs at the New Museum, “Re’Search Wait’S” and “K-Corea Inc.K,” two new videos by Ryan Trecartin, proffer everything that’s missing from Cytter’s art: grit, joy, and mischief. Trecartin’s videos are genuinely cosmopolitan, featuring Chonga girls, hip hop drag queens, and suburban tweens–all the disparate kinds of trashiness that mingle and merge on Youtube. Trecartin keeps no distance from corporate branding; many of his characters have talismanic names like Britta and Adobe. “Re’Search” and “K-Corea,” along with Trecartin’s earlier works, are all so unimpeachably of the moment that they’re impossible to write about without sounding square.

Rather than grace or abstraction, Trecartin aims for cheapness, color, and excess. He combines blurry digital recordings with garish Second Life animation. His characters move through bland McMansion interiors and neon green bedrooms covered with dog posters. They wear body paint and uneven self-tanner; in many scenes, each is equipped, literally, with a blue tooth. They flail around like hyperactive eight-year-olds, their voices sped up or deflated to psychedelic extremes. The story lines take several viewings to penetrate, because there’s constantly too much to take in. No effect is too tacky or too annoying. Some viewers can’t tolerate Trecartin’s style for more than a few minutes, and many dismiss his art as indulgent or confrontational. But Trecartin, like all practitioners of the Baroque, delights in overcrowding, even if it means losing respectable audiences–even if, in the words of one of his characters, “the bonus track ruins the album.”

What makes Trecartin more than a camp-monger is his writing. “Global Korea” and “Re’Search” are text-heavy; word-art supertitles spell out the characters’ crazed, disjointed speech. It’s as if Trecartin wanted finally to be recognized for what he is: a poet. His lyrics lampoon every kind of language, by jumbling them all together with erratic emphasis. His characters say things like “I love redistributing myself to people who haven’t learned about me yet!” and “I have five mother figures on my desktop physicality” (since making his earliest works at RISD, Trecartin has been obsessed with parenthood). It takes a true genius just to generate such absurd combinations, and they seem to erupt endlessly from Trecartin’s gifted brain.

In Trecartin’s universe, people don’t act or learn; they customize their identities. A stripper dances around a pool, and another character asks, “Do you do pointe? Or is that not part of your personality?” A mopey teen girl swallows a pint of Listerine, then complains, “It never works. I’m always just a still-here.” Trecartin sympathizes with his own characters: he knows what it’s like to be overwhelmed by data and options, to pine for an “offshore identity storage unit.” But he also derides the people he mimics, people who are vicious and self-important, and have so very little to say.

In interviews, Trecartin likes to pretend that his art is naive. When a Times reporter asked him about his influences, he replied, “when I was young and my baby sitters came over and turned on music videos, I was inspired by that.” It’s an honest answer, but disingenuous; Trecartin does imitate other video artists, and even a few art-house auteurs. Cedar, a character in “Re’Search,” is in the habit of flashing a pair of scissors at the camera, snipping them through the air before removing chunks of her wig (she’s “a cutter”). The gesture looks like an allusion to Pierrot le Fou, Godard’s most color-smitten movie. The reference–if it is intentional–is only half-serious; Trecartin is also mocking the idea of making such a reference. But on some level he may be inviting a comparison. Watching Trecartin now is a lot like what watching Godard must have been like in the sixties. He may be a darling of the counter-cultural elite, but his work is so exuberant and unpredictable, so much choppier and denser and funnier than anything else out there, that it deserves real esteem.

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Filed under Art, Film

Tags: Godard, Keren Cytter, New Museum, Ryan Trecartin, Tom Rubnitz, Younger than Jesus