Culture Collector

Ryan Trecartin is a video artist who lived and worked in New Orleans before moving to Los Angeles in 2005, and currently lives in Philadelphia. Whitney May is a writer for NY Arts.

Courtesy of the artist.

Whitney May: I first saw your work A Family Finds Entertainment at the 2006 Whitney Biennial where I was immediately drawn in by its incredibly fast pace, full-bodied color scheme and unchecked exuberance. The overall tone of this and several other examples of your video work can be seen as nothing less than hysterical. Can you describe the concept behind your employment of such a heightened mood in so many of your works?

Ryan Trecartin: The way I structure ideas in video form right now comes from a natural relationship to growing up with media during the start of easy access to digital tools. The messy quality of performance and collaboration in time restricted situations mixed with the rebellious quality of user-friendly software, nonlinear editing equipment and cameras, Internet accessing virtual space, and connected creative communities. Added to that is a love for composing scripts. It’s fairly intuitional at start but gets dealt with differently in each scene through moments of hyper organized chaos, and multi-layered articulation. Video has an extraordinary self-reflective potential behind all sides of its screen and I try to deal with them.

WM: You’ve described yourself as a “collector of culture” as well as an artist. What areas of culture are you most interested in collecting and reflecting today, and which do you feel you have most fully captured already?

RT: I see my self as an artist in the broad sense of the word—the word that would include basically anyone doing something inventive or expressive. I see my self growing up in a culture that collects its self and I’m inspired by a world that is eating its own, and puking its way to a new natural place with a more abstract wider logic, the end of reality being self-centered. Some kind of crazy growing pain. I think I do a lot of translating certain vibes, culture momentum, and flow. The videos capture twisted questions of now, projects potential answers, and then re-asks those questions. 

WM: The characters in your films are hardly ever fleshed out fully. It is almost as if they function as something other than individuals with actual emotions, feelings, and desires. Is there anything behind the fact that your narratives lack relatable protagonists altogether?

RT: The protagonist/antagonist idea sits funny here because people don’t live on sides—everyone has endless parts. The videos try to deal with a more fluid idea of performance, character, plot development, setting, and space—all of these things act on equal but malleable ground, giving themselves up to a shape-shifting identity where the individual is still highly valued but used in a more abstract way of translating ideas. There are so many layers that the whole idea of opposite, like this or that is outmoded. In my videos no character is stuck and the sum is never just linear as plot is read in multiple ways and directions. Secondary characters are just as primary as the string stars. Nothing is without recognized tolerance for excessive multiple meaning and intention and so the excitement happens in the choices. They could make any choice and have it mean many things and the time spent in a situation acts as a stage for other potentialities, agenda, and meaning. It relates much more to the viewing experience one has when surfing from space to space through comment and flow in profile communities and message boards—collections group into form and then change completely—separating again but in changed forms.

WM: In Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me you explore the concept of creating identities online. How little or how much do you think these alternative identities factor into contemporary culture as a whole? Are they just as real as one’s identity offline, or are they just a temporary and limited game that people play?

RT: I think we’re living in an amazing idea of time. Many potential histories and futures are all taking shape and dealing with each other in a very messy ultra-transitional present. It’s super queer and the new videos are totally celebrating the “now” as being the start of the end of the world as we think we know it. So, I’d say everything depends on the person. The future of identity doesn’t stop with our Internet twin. We ain’t never gonna figure her out in the old ways of knowing something to be true. Some people play a game others live. Plus, games are real.

WM: Often, you have employed the method of collaboration in your work. What are your views on authorship when it comes to your projects?

RT: I believe in the individual and the community being many individuals who take a networking approach to leadership with lots of sharing, rearranging and play. I think it’s totally crazy how the art world is the only area that doesn’t understand people and credits. Every presentation has its own logic and people should credit and describe how they feel in as many words and ways as they wish. For my movies, the credits at the end are very important. Artist Lizzie Fitch made the credits for I-BE AREA. The sculptural work has art credits as well. The I Smell Pregnant show was a total credit mess—it being mine and all my artist friends first time dealing with the art world. But now the word “and” is used to describe equal collaboration, and the word “with” is used to describe some directed form of organized collaboration, like assignment-based or invited section. Example: Mr. Ashley, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch with Lindsay Beebe. I don’t know anyone from my generation making anything interesting totally independently. 

WM: You have put your films on YouTube while other artists charge hundreds of thousands for copies of their work—some even make them unavailable for sale or public viewing altogether. Can you explain your thinking behind this?

RT: Video is accessible media made for the people. People want to share and communicate through connected media. The audience I care about is bigger than the art world. The beauty of a space accessed by millions from different contexts posting response and call in exchange with different ways of understanding and contextualizing the same thing, is really really cool. It’s all about wanting to share and be shared.

WM: You recently moved to L.A. as a Hurricane Katrina refugee and constructed an elaborate exhibition entitled I Smell Pregnant at the QED Gallery in L.A. not too long after. Since the majority of the sculpture on display was New Orleans float-inspired and dried fruit-based, it’s clear that the experience of Katrina had a lasting effect on your life and work. Do you foresee your work taking on a more somber and less exhilarated tone as a result?

RT: My life is more twisted and complicated. The world feels bigger, wickedly emotional, and more inspiring as I get older, so the range of feeling is getting more extreme.