Ryan Trecartin (born 1981, Webster, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004. Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Trecartin
Trecartin’s first feature-length film,
A Family Finds Entertainment
(2004), was submitted as his final thesis at the Rhode Island School of
Design. He was 23. It introduces a number of themes which recur
throughout his work: identity as roleplay, the struggle between
individual expression and communal belonging, family politics, queer
culture, globalisation – and less abstract things like house parties,
make-up, TV static, poster paint.
It’s a little absurd to boil this filmic fugue state down to a bare-bones narrative, but here we go:
AFFE
follows a young, potentially psychopathic man called Skippy (played by
Trecartin) who locks himself in bathroom while his friends have a party,
tells his parents he is gay, goes outside, becomes the subject of a
documentary, gets run over by a car and is magically resurrected by a
group sing-along before a round of fireworks. These plot coordinates
create a loose framework for forty-two minutes of playful, schizoid
imagery and wildly gestural performance, a film that masquerades as
surrealist autobiography while dramatising a complex debate about the
possibility of belonging.
Patrick Langley
http://www.thewhitereview.org/art/ryan-trecartin-the-real-internet-is-inside-you/
One
may ask if there is some merit to this, artistically, if considered to
be an experiment in creating an insufferable, obnoxious piece. However,
there does not seem to be a point to this beyond that. It felt like a
waste of time. Sure, it's impossible to sit through without curling into
a fetal position begging for the horrific imagery to go away, and no
other work I have witnessed has achieved that. But I don't know anyone
who would want to sit through that, let alone enjoy it. Some art can be
difficult to enjoy, yes. But I don't see it in this case as a factor of
how much the viewer thinks about it, but rather how little.
The
characters include a flock of face-painted horrors, screaming nonsense
at the camera, and various other colorful crazies. Trecartin uses a
myriad of image-processing effects to achieve his goal (I think) of
creating a convoluted, visually confusing mess of a piece. There is no
cohesion, there is no plot, but that is not to its detriment. It would
almost be laughably terrible if it attempted to tell a comprehensible
story. But no, A Family Finds Entertainment seeks only to expose you to
this world of horrors. It is a forty-minute view into a hellish place
that may have once been inhabited by humans, but no longer.
Pseudo Fawks
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1563700/
If
A Family Finds Entertainment can be reduced to a thumbnail
description, this might be it: Trecartin stars as Skippy, a clownish but
terrifyingly psychopathic boy who has locked himself in the upstairs
bathroom of his family home during a wild party. Ignoring his siblings'
and friends' pleas that he come out, he paces the little room, cutting
himself with a knife and musing opaquely on his existential dilemma in a
kind of King Lear-style delirium. Downstairs, the partiers are
experiencing wild mood-swings and having complex, disassociated
conversations (mostly about him) that are constantly interrupted by
bursts of visual effects and animated sequences that disorient the cast
of characters like so many lightening strikes. Eventually Skippy
emerges, borrows money from his creepy, sexually inappropriate parents,
and heads outdoors, where he runs into a documentary filmmaker who
decides to make a movie about him; but then Skippy is immediately hit by
a car and, apparently, killed. Back inside the house, a hyperactive
girl named Shin, also played by Trecartin, gets a call on her cell phone
with the bad news. She spends twenty or so hysteria-filled minutes
trying to focus and construct a sentence linear enough to tell her
friends what has happened. When she finally does, a band plays music
that seems to magically raise the young man from the dead, and everyone
runs outside and sets off fireworks. Then everyone runs back inside
before the police show up.
Dennis Cooper
http://www.eai.org/title.htm?id=12079
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