I, Refresh: Ryan Trecartin's Social Science Fictions

Feature essay published as ”A Cute Idea” in The New Inquiry, February 7, 2014

Excerpt

In her influential 1976 essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” Rosalind Krauss argued that because video receives and produces imagery at the same time, offering the instant feedback of a mirror, the medium’s defining quality is narcissism. It’s a barb that has often been leveled at Trecartin, perhaps the most prominent video artist since the computer screen superseded the TV as display. Yet for every critique of his videos as self-obsessed, cynical, or superficial, Trecartin has been the subject of still more deserved praise. He has been labeled “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl) and lauded in more extravagant terms by critics who tout his work as the oracular revelations of a Millennial back from Planet YouTube. “If there were a Spirit of the World Wide Web,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Blake Gopnik, “Trecartin would be its medium on earth.”

Fulfilling the role of an emissary from another dimension, Trecartin acts as a conduit for the culture industry’s most prized abstraction: the contemporary. He is seen to personify the present as reflexively as a medium in the technical and parapsychological senses that Krauss evokes. Yet despite his intellectual synchronicity with the Internet, Trecartin’s videos are not mirror reflections of either himself or his era, but critical recalibrations of tech-inflected neoliberal culture.

Trecartin’s world is populated by tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings; posses of material girls—plus the occasional boy; and flocks of post-material queens and clones. His characters have not only separated their actions from bodies, but also from selfhood as anything but perpetual, spontaneous becoming. The stable self disperses into first-person situations. History is substituted by the caption “Happening Now.” Template states of personhood and place, presets and premises, are manipulated by anonymous agencies. Feelings are ambient facts. Emotion exists externally, separate from subjects, as affect.

Non-linear editing technologies command Trecartin’s cast with inescapable force. In their more lucid (or paranoid) moments, the characters chatter about the digital protocols to which they are submitted as fluently as today’s humans might complain of a life-sucking job. Through aphorisms poised between brilliance and garble, and makeshift costumes that accentuate their feverish speech and evanescent identities, these cyborgs articulate a provisional worldview suspended in simultaneity, reversibility, and co-presence.