Abstracting presence.

I-BE AREA

BY RYAN TRECARTIN

128 MINUTES, 2007

Over the past three years, Ryan Trecartin has come into the national exhibit scene with two distinct bodies of work: sculptural, varying in style from his Matt Ronay-like figurative efforts to the more abstract Rauschenberg-esque set props that appear in the artist's videos; and, more importantly, video. The feature-length I-BE AREA (2007), the artist's latest output in the latter category, premiered this past September at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York City. The content of the video is all too familiar territory for the twenty-something artist, whose field of interests, as Dennis Cooper smartly noted in the January 2006 issue of Artforum, are chic topics for artists of his generation. Trecartin explores various underground music scenes, the marriage of youth and consumer culture, the role of high-tech goods in the private social lives of his peers, and the expanding social platforms of the Internet. According to Cooper, it was Trecartin's strategies for engaging such subject matter that truly distinguish the artist, and those strategies remain very much alive in his latest efforts.

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I-BE AREA consists of a large cast of the artist's friends and colleagues performing to various effects and capacities. All don eccentric, stylish, and symbolically uninvested costumes, their faces heavily laden with makeup, their voices often subject to digital pitch-bending in order to masculinize or feminize them to absurd degrees. The characters in the video run around Trecartin's scattered and messy indoor sets with exuberance reminiscent of the late 1990s' amphetamine- and ecstasy-fueled rave culture. Many revel in their disjointed conversations and slapstick, irrational behavior. Trecartin assists his characters' dialogues with a liberal use of reverse-shots and frequent solitary close-ups of speakers, recalling the language of talking-head commercial television, a representational strategy not uncommon in media-critique video art of the 1980s--made once more relevant in the era of YouTube confessionals and personal video blogs.

The incessant chatter of those talking heads hardly constitutes a grand narrative stream in the video. Rather than expanding understanding, the coded language and indulgent outpourings, littered with cyber-culture vernacular, are usually more confusing than elucidating, becoming a sort of theatrical disarray--similar in experience, perhaps, to watching the scrolling text of a busy Internet chatroom. Coupled with Trecartin's virtuosity in costume design and art direction, the rowdy chat-room dynamic in the video might be described as a broadband Internet upgrade to the highly stylized work of Tom Rubnitz or the theatrical and camp excess of George Kuchar and Jack Smith.

Maintaining some narrative orientation throughout the video is taxing. Trecartin creates meaning not through investment in individual characters or narratives so much as the relationships between parallel narratives and small visual spectacles. The discussion that happens between brothers Lance and Avondale (both played by Trecartin), for example, is not so interesting--the two talk on their cell phones and earnestly discuss their love for one another and their mutual distaste for a third, unseen brother. Yet, the scene remains visually complex despite the dull lines and non-narrative: the cutting between two different interiors, two visions of the same performer with very different makeup, and their mediation by mobile phone standing in as a symbol for their formal mediation via the reverse-shot and jump cut all work together to create a compelling scene more about the distance between the two characters, between the artist and his double, than any conversation happening between them.

If we were to expand upon this last aspect of the scene, we might say I-BE AREA is about the kind of abstracted social presence that can only happen on the Internet. Nearly all of the live action in the video takes place in discreet and constructed sets, with actors rarely passing between sets. The one presence excepted from this implied confinement is Jamie, the ostensibly pregnant female lead in the video played by Trecartin's longtime collaborator Lizzie Fitch. As the video's press release states, I-BE AREA is about Jamie's "area" in particular--and Jamie's continued comings, goings, and presence throughout the video confirm this.

Artist and critic Patrick Lichty writes that discursive Internet practice has, since the 1990s, continually shifted away from the model of circulating distribution (email, listservs, and newsgroups) and toward a model of the privatized booth (blogs, profiles on social networking sites, and personal domains). The rest of the cast requires Jamie's presence as an authority figure in the video, making their actions reasonable as she provides both the materiality, partly through her enlarged pregnant state, and the abstract spaces where the other characters of the video meet and engage with one another. To put it in ironically utopian, dated terms, we might quote the press release: "Jamie's Area is a literal and metaphorical space ... which functions as a kind of bedroom-classroom-drama-department-blog-space-internet-community-site where the characters come to realize their own creative potential and sense of empowerment." Jamie's pregnancy, later revealed to be a hoax, could well be a stand-in for a time to come--an emergent technology that forms the endless chatter of the characters into something more significant or meaningful.

BOSKO BLAGOJEVIC is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York.