He is one of today’s most successful video artists: Ryan Trecartin practices cultural criticism that is enormously entertaining yet also a little frightening.
Clicking through Ryan Trecartin's Vimeo site is a horror trip. The scary scenario: a world interwoven with reality television and YouTube in which image cultivation is everything. The protagonists in Trecartin's videos live for non-stop fun that is only enjoyable if it is documented and presented--ideally live and in real time. In the videos by the American artist, born in 1981, young people stage themselves in hip outfits in front of several cameras at once with teetering wigs on their heads, their faces wildly made up. They clown around, sing, dance, hop, and blab incessantly into the camera, interrupted only by rapid cuts and snippets from pop songs. The brightly lit set is reminiscent of a television studio; on view is a hedonistic reality show with a dystopian aftertaste.
It is a bit as if these young adults wanted to play forever in their bedrooms; as if the world were the Internet, which is there anyway. The artist also integrates other elements into his works with which digital natives such as him grew up in these rooms, for example graphics from video games und avatars with synthetic voices. He exaggerates them in his high-quality productions and enhances their aesthetics. The result is shrieking digi-pop-post-camp, a multilayered, deliberately overtaxing event.
Today, our media presence and the way we stage ourselves in the media defines who we are, as if life were nothing but a music video. The countless intimate glimpses into the bedrooms of young people in this world are frightening--the teenagers become YouTube performers in front of their webcams and vie for attention. Trecartin has made this net-based role-play the focus of his artistic interest. He plays with transgender identities, often appears wearing a mask; besides wigs and costumes, his characters often wear colored contact lenses that make their eyes seem strangely inhuman and artificial. The analog human being gradually turns into a cyborg; no one really knows how it will end.
The New Yorker wrote that Trecartin is the most consequential artist to emerge on the art scene since the nineteen-eighties
Trecartin presents his cyber-philosophy as a space-consuming installation. It is not just about reception, but above all about experience. The artist Lizzie Fitch, with whom he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and who has a studio in Los Angeles, designs the interiors with beds, pillows, and sofas for his installations, onto and into which visitors can fall and let themselves be taken in by the videos. Trecartin's actors are also colleagues, friends, and relatives. The camera is a kind of omnipresent third eye; it allows the out-of-body experience in the first place and is consequently a part of what is taking place in his works as an unsteady hand-held camera that is often also visible.
The unsettling and at the same time engaging aesthetics of Trecartin's works have made him one of the most successful artists of his generation. He has participated in numerous exhibitions; video-art collectors such as Julia Stoschek and Ingvild Goetz support him. In 2013, curator Massimiliano Gioni invited him to the Biennale in Venice, where he and Fitch appropriated an entire room. His presentation is now also one of the highlights in the exhibition Infinite Jest at the SCHIRN. His unmistakable artistic signature is like the flurry of confetti that the artist Lara Favaretto produces with fans in the same show. Ryan Trecartin does his thing. The New Yorker wrote that Trecartin is the most consequential artist to emerge on the art scene since the nineteen-eighties.