https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osCt33qBcIA
Can’t make it to Los Angeles for tonight’s Outfest screening of artist-of-the-moment Ryan Trecartin‘s videos Sibling Topics and P.opular S.ky because you live in an art-deprived town? No big deal, win against geography and watch them online.
Trecartin’s commentary on and intelligent indulgence in the speed of everything Right Now finds its digital realization in the multiple screen brain-scramble Any Ever, a non-sequential, seven-video work with collaborator Lizzie Fitch that spent the early part of this year at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art and currently assaults viewers at New York’s PS1 MOMA.
Sibling and P.opular come from that larger body of videos and make for a bracing introduction to Trecartin’s signature maelstrom of warp-speed internet meme cycles, reality television’s “not here to make friends” babble, stingingly funny conceptual one-liners, hyper-aggressive me-me-me-ism and frantic tween code-switching attention spans. Add some clown make-up damage, unintelligible squealing and actual physical destruction and you’ve got the kind of art experience only Xanax can cure. If “amazing” weren’t over as a superlative that’s what you could call it.
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Back to that online promise from a paragraph ago: watch Sibling Topics here, P.opular Sky here, more of Any Ever and older work on Vimeo and YouTube. And if you still can’t get enough, Trecartin’s collaborated with Tumblr’s David Karp on RiverOfThe.net, an almost soothing stream of disconnected images where you’re guaranteed never to see the same series of meditations on static, brooding Ikea chairs, swingset disasters, wrongheaded lipstick application and existential despair in a supermarket cereal aisle twice.
SpireaX
Not everything can be art. I won’t even say “nice try.” Terrible way to use Queerty space.
Adman
40 years later and the conceptual arts went from High-low to Low and Lower. The banality of dying a little every day while the voices of mediocrity browbeat you for the experience, wow. It’s hilarious though, how critics think of this as some kind of product of “liberal” thought. These cannibal children couldn’t render a more cogent apologia for the dead zombie consumer culture if they tried.
pfitzner
A brilliant new talent he may be, but I find Ian Benardo’s work far more compelling.
Aaron in Honolulu
I remember him for those crazy “I-Be Area” viral videos on YouTube. This guy is nuts. lol
JettStone
Brilliant. The next era of smart queer commentary on culture without shame or excuses. it’s hard for the sheeple to follow new paths. In ten years, when Gaga needs a comeback visual, Trecartin will be her go-to boy.
And you will buy the t-shirt and love it.