Lizzie FITCH / Ryan TRECARTIN. Priority Innfield 02.05 — 04.24.2016 The work of American artists Lizzie Fitch (Bloomington, Indiana, 1981) and Ryan Trecartin (Webster, Texas, 1981) explores and reflects on language, the audiovisual medium and the construction of identity taken to new extremes.
The present exhibition, entitled Priority Innfield, belongs to the Zabludowicz Collection and is a complete reworking of the installation presented at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Priority Innfield is a sculptural theatre comprising five freestanding pavilions, or sculptural sets (Fence, Pole, Tilt, Way and Villa), which include four movies (CENTER JENNY, Item Falls, Comma Boat and Junior War). The installations invoke the mise-en-scène of everyday life, and the viewing of the works intertwines with the spectator’s own memory and experience. For Fitch and Trecartin, the audience’s physical engagement with their work is crucial. Visitors are invited to enter this intensely disturbing yet terribly familiar space, where the apparent chaos is a metaphor for the artists’ vision of humanity as predominantly unstable, as well as for the trivialisation of our society caused by the information overload and the new languages spawned by the digital era.
Fitch and Trecartin met in the year 2000 while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where they graduated in 2004. Both are at the vanguard of a generation of young American artists — including Cory Archangel, Ryder Ripps and Shana Moulton — who grew up surrounded by computers, mobile phones and Internet. Consequently, their creations portray a world where everything and everyone is aware of being recorded, edited and, eventually, broadcasted. Ultimately, Fitch and Trecartin’s characters — if we can call them that — aspire to be images, and the importance of the real world therefore becomes secondary.
In 2010, Fitch and Trecartin opened a studio together in Los Angeles. Lizzie makes the sculptural theatres, carefully fashioned out of familiar objects and furniture, while Ryan, whose work is characterized by a particular emphasis on language, writes, directs and edits the movies, showing how technology affects human beings. Together they devise sculptural rooms, transforming film sets into thea- tres of real life where their films can be viewed as “immersive movies”.
Trecartin’s first film — made when he was twenty-three years old and submitted as his senior thesis at RISD — already introduced a number of themes and formal devices that have since become constants of his work: identity as role play, the group versus the individual, queer culture and globalisation, as well as much less abstract elements, such as television and university house parties. Working on his Kenneth Goldsmith own or in collaboration with Fitch, Trecartin produces films that have no intention of being decipherable — instead, they spew and sputter information in strident day-glo colours and achingly bright lights. Images spin, morph and impact us with a hyperactive intensity. One can watch them time after time and still miss count- less details. The artist’s fondness for placing images within images, screens within Reading screens, might seem excessive, even extreme, but no more so than the staggering number of web pages we open each day on our personal computers. Ryan Trecartin
In Trecartin’s films, footage is sped up, slowed down and even reversed; colours strobe and bleed; flesh becomes plastic in post-production; and even the titles read like corrupt data files or unrepeatable acronyms. This apparent chaos is a metaphor for the instability that characterizes Fitch and Trecartin’s vision of humanity.
Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s work challenges the idea that we have control over technology: we have created a world full of gadgets and given them their own identity, and in the end they have enslaved us. We are living the technophobic nightmare foreshadowed by writers of speculative fiction — from Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov — and we feel trapped, unsettled and alienated, wanting to criticise everything. The artists seem to be telling us, “If we are images, if we are avatars, if we already exist in the on-line world, then we can delete ourselves, recharge ourselves and, above all, reinvent ourselves”. Kenneth Goldsmith Reading Ryan Trecartin
Although Gertrude Stein wrote in the simplest of language, she is one of the most works with language as material; words are building blocks. The word “and” is used difficult writers to understand. It wasn’t the words that she used which made her not so much as a conjunction as it is as a spacer, a bridge between two thoughts. work disjunctive, it was the way in which they were put together. In this single If you read the word “and” as a comma, the sentence is broken into segments and long sentence of Stein’s, for instance, there’s not a word that any nine-year-old its meaning starts to reveal itself. Every time we read Stein, we have to learn how wouldn’t recognise: to read anew.
In loving some one is jealous, really jealous and it would Stein’s writing was a response to the onslaught of print at the dawn of the twentieth seem an impossible thing to the one not understand- century. Like Picasso including pages of newspapers in his paintings, Stein dealt in ing that the other one could have about such a thing a the metrics of immensity, what we would term today as “information overload”. jealous feeling and they have it and they suffer and they In response to the explosion of language produced by newspapers and magazines, weep and sorrow in it and the other one cannot believe Stein wrote books that mirrored that condition. The Making of Americans, penned it, they cannot believe the other one can really mean it between 1903 and 1911, is a 925-page tome written in the simple language of the and sometime the other one perhaps comes to realise mass media, which is looped, repeated and fractured with the intention of drawing it that the other one can really suffer in it and then later our attention away from the content and steering us toward the form. that one tries to reassure the other one the one that is then suffering about that thing and the other one the Stein was instrumental in jumpstarting one of modernist literature’s great projects: one that is receiving such reassuring says then, did to render the word material. Throughout the twentieth century, there was a push to you think I ever could believe this thing, no I have no fear expand the role of language from a purely discursive mode to one that elevated the of such a thing, and it is all puzzling, to have one kind of word’s formal qualities to an equal footing. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, feeling, a jealous feeling, and not have a fear in them that when Stéphane Mallarmé threw words according to chance across a page — he the other one does not want them, it is a very mixing thought of it more as a canvas than a page — and continuing in the early years of thing and over and over again when you are certain the twentieth century with the Futurists’ radical typographic experiments, the word it is a whole one some one, one must begin again and gradually was transformed into image. By mid-century, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake again and the only thing that is a help to one is that there — a 628-page novel comprised almost entirely of neologisms — further demolished is really so little fundamental changing in any one and narrative by stitching together compound words from dozens of languages into always every one is repeating big pieces of them and each other. Unreadable — or differently readable — in any language, the Wake so sometimes perhaps some one will know something could be considered an early example of literary concretism, an idea that gained and I certainly would like very much to be that one and worldwide traction after World War II with the concrete poetry and musique concrète so now to begin. [A] movements. Musique concrète — which processed prerecorded everyday sounds beyond recognition — extended the Futurists’ practice into the electronic realm. Dense and repetitive, in order to understand it — and there is a clear sentiment Similarly, concrete poetry dismissed syntax entirely, proposing that language being expressed — one must change the way one has been taught to read. Stein in a purely visual state had poetic form. By the 1950s, words were being cut-up and subjected to chance by writers like John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, William S.
[A] Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. by Carl van Vechten (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 267. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, who discovered that no matter how chopped, sliced, Kenneth Goldsmith Reading Ryan Trecartin diced or randomized words were, they still carried meaning. As it turns out, lan- You don’t fucking deserve my dad you fucking fuck guage is hard to break. my daddy and I don’t like it anymore. I just want my daddy back I just want my daddy back. I just want These explorations continue today in our digital world. The materiality of language my daddy back. Return to me. She don’t even know. finds its full blossom on the web, a medium based on duplication, replication and She don’t even know. I don’t know. That’s true. It’s the mirroring. Words are the web’s lifeblood, coursing through the network in the form truth Joshua. Me. Thank you.[B] of code, blog posts, emails, tweets and status updates. The Internet itself comprises alphanumeric language entirely, sometimes in the guise of code, other times in the While Stein’s language is written for the page — rolling and fluid — Trecartin’s is form of media (think of a .jpg attachment that mistakenly renders in your email as written to be spoken. Spoken language is, by nature, fractured and disjunctive, miles of code, all alphanumeric language). From this angle, all our images, music littered with stutters, stumbles, slurs, half-finished sentences, interruptions, pauses and videos are constructed from the alphabet. In a sense, we can say that all of and mispronunciations. This passage, transcribed directly from the movie, is full our production on the web is a form of writing (although the web’s graphical user of awkward phrases, partial sentences, decontextualisation, incorrect grammar interface gives us the seamless illusion that we’re actually uploading photos, posting and numerous instances of repetition. From a conventional literary stance, it’s a videos and watching movies). terribly flawed passage. But from an emotional point of view, it’s compelling: even on the page, we can feel the highly-pitched desperation. Ryan Trecartin’s works extend the investigation of language’s materiality into the digital age. In his movies, language is not a carrier of narrative, a way to tell a story To add to the sense of doom and anxiety, a bevy of sound and video effects are or to make a point; instead, words are another formal element in his dense and layered over the short speech. During that time, twenty-two different fast-paced chaotic landscapes. Trecartin’s language obfuscates, confuses and disorients, video edits are made — almost one per second — and a number of sound effects, similar to the way his use of music or editing does. Words are chopped, stuttered, including booming sub-bass, high-pitched dog whistles, meandering mid-tone fragmented, clipped, repeated, slowed down, sped up, pitch-bent, elongated, synthesizer notes and random explosions, underscore and interrupt the speech. stretched, misshapen, layered, sampled, Auto-Tuned, double-tracked and glitched — all with the intention of making them less understandable and more opaque. Although they are speaking to one another, Trecartin’s characters appear dazed and disconnected, as if no one understands what is being said to them. Even the Like Stein’s, Trecartin’s words are simple, drawn from everyday Internet vernacular, simplest concepts seem out of their reach: the kind of language that floods chat rooms, voicemails, text messages and status updates. His language is curt, often lasting just a few seconds. The longest soliloquy You broke my camera… what’s a camera, what’s in CENTER JENNY (2013), for instance, is just twenty-one seconds long: a camera?[C]
In passages like these, Trecartin questions the basic premise of language as a vehicle for communication and understanding, throwing us squarely into the realm of Wittgensteinian language games. Wittgenstein asks, “How long does
[B] Transcript of CENTER JENNY provided to the author by Zabludowicz Collection. [C] Transcript of CENTER JENNY provided to the author by Zabludowicz Collection. Kenneth Goldsmith Reading Ryan Trecartin it take to understand a sentence? And if we understand a sentence for a whole >Teraphim< found in HOFF- hour, are we always starting afresh?”[D] Trecartin’s characters are indeed always MANN’S >Elemental Spirit<… [F] starting afresh. Schmidt’s unusual use of typography and punctuation is meant to rupture Trecartin’s movies are theatres of alienation and disconnection. Like a roomful the seamless surface of the message, making us more aware of the language’s of people staring at their cell phones while attempting to have a conversation, materiality. It also brings forth a multiplicity of readings: the “f ” in “fear” is also Trecartin’s protagonists are eternally distracted. When they do speak, they often the “f ” in “fruit”, which also becomes “fruitfully”, resolving in the word “strong”. speak to the camera rather than to each other, an effect common to homemade Words are jammed together and blown apart to ensure that the work cannot be webcam YouTube videos. Words and actions rarely sync. One could imagine that read one-dimensionally. Chevron brackets and capitalised words act as emphatic when asked why they appear to be baffled at even the most basic spoken English signifiers, while punctuation is emotionalised (recalling today’s emoticon sets). commands, they could take Wittgenstein’s words as their own: “Whatever I do to exhibit understanding, whether I repeat an explanation of a word, or carry out an Beginning with the title of K-CoreaINC.K (Section A), Trecartin’s relationship to the order to show that I have understood it, these bits of behaviour do not have to be materiality of language is evident in its use of double entendre and echoing, both taken as proofs of understanding.”[E] visually and sonically. “Corea” is a common spelling in languages other than English for North and South Korea. The “INC” stands for “career”, which echoes the word While many of Trecartin’s movies are improvised (he coaches his actors to repeat “Korea”, — yet the trailing “K” remains a mystery. The script itself gets even thicker lines over and over, then splices together various takes), there is one script avail- and more linguistically playful: able on-line, K-CoreaINC.K (Section A) (2009), which offers further evidence of Trecartin’s connections to modernist materiality and disjunction. The script is I Am Mystified as 2Y eerily reminiscent of the German experimental novelist Arno Schmidt (1914–1979), whose unconventional use of punctuation, spelling and spacing was often referred Please Re-think, The way that You are fraise-ing to as post-Joycean fiction. A section from his late book School for Atheists (1972) that 2ME is thick with visual language: With Your MEMO, of THIS… always );below the middle You need to REALize,
[D] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar: Part I, The Proposition, and Its Sense, Part II, On Logic and Mathematics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 50. [F] Arno Schmidt, School for Atheists: A Novella = Comedy in 6 Acts (Los Angeles and Copenhagen: [E] Ibid. Green Integer, 2001), p. 268. Kenneth Goldsmith Reading Ryan Trecartin
I never say “THEY” semiotics has been fully absorbed into advertising; and Instagram can imbue any cell phone snap with the lustre of an Atget silver gelatin print in just one click. I say –US- or –WE-, However, for language, the time is now.
These accomplishments are our –Own- The Internet — a giant copying machine — has given words a new life. Modernism liberated language from the burden of telling stories, so that it can now embody You-See, lastnight –WE- Bombed –OUR-Selves – a host of other roles. The materiality anticipated by Mallarmé and Stein over a again,,,,,,, century ago has come to fruition in the digital age, as most powerfully demon- -WE- Bombed another ONE of –OUR- OWN “Cities” strated in the work of Ryan Trecartin. after – WE- had Bombed the OTHER, |ONE| OF –OUR-Selves-, ,,,,,,,,,,, 2Ballance –OUR-Selves- OUT.
Are you Able to See how \THIS\ works- NOW? Have I made My-Self (Clear)?[G]
As a script, the visual surfaces are instructions on how to speak these lines. Capitalized words, brackets and slashes are indicators of stresses. Tempo is scored by the strings of commas as lengthy pauses; compound words (“lastnight” or “RightNow”) mean that they are to be spoken at a fast pace; while parsing words into syllables signifies that each syllable should be pronounced independently (OUR–Selves). Writing about Trecartin’s work in relationship to the voice, Ingrid Schaffner says that his characters are “speaking a form of Twitter, full of codes, quotations, ellipsis, and trash […] the experience of seeing voice as a material in contemporary art”.[H]
It’s been said that modernism was killed by the digital. In some way it’s true: the most evident legacy for once-radically dissonant twelve-tone music appears to be its use today in horror films; painting abstraction is often presented in quotes;
[G] Ryan Trecartin, script for K-CoreaINC.K (Section A), PDF, 2009: http://www.ubu.com/ubu/unpub/Unpub_046_Trecartin.pdf [accessed 10 January 2016]. [H] Ingrid Schaffner, Queer Voice: Laurie Anderson, Harry Dodge &Stanya Kahn, Sharon Hayes, John Kelly, Kalup Linzy, Jack Smith, Ryan Trecartin, Andy Warhol (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2010), p. 172. Text by Christopher Glazek CENTER JENNY is a crash after a Slowly we get resocialized and drugged-out marathon and an attempt reacquaint ourselves with the history to pick up the pieces of a night (A life? of the world. We’re at a university. Lizzie FITCH / A world?) that has gone terribly wrong. We’re rushing a sorority. We’re getting As the film begins, we stumble down a quizzed about the human era — a Ryan TRECARTIN. hallway getting pelted with fragments time after dinosaurs became chickens we cannot decipher. “More moments but before humans became animations, Priority Innfield please, bitches!” a pair of girls cry out. and before animations became us. We have a sickening feeling that much We’re looking for sources and witnesses has already happened. Did our car — who is Sarah Source? Where did Sculptural theatre comprising five freestanding pavilions, four movies, an ambient get smashed? Did we fuck our best we come from? What is our name? soundtrack and a credit movie. friend’s father? Did we waive all of We transfer our anxiety onto an our rights on acid? Despite the film’s ingenuous redhead (played by Rachel Priority Innfield (Fence), 2013 Priority Innfield (Way), 2013 title, our perspective is decidedly Lord) who bears the brunt of a sa- Pavilion, 346.7 x 487.7 x 487.7 cm Pavilion, 325.1 x 548.6 x 487.7 cm de-centered: no one’s looking at the distically-framed — though actually Exhibiting the movie CENTER JENNY Exhibiting the movie Comma Boat camera, and even the audio sounds quite tame — initiation ritual. “It’s a © Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, like playback. We’re stuck viewing the big deal, we are going to be accessing Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, “making-of ” footage — the behind- the foundation of consciousness as New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles the-scenes. “He’s just playing a joke a university”, a teacher tells us. We’re Los Angeles on you”, a character says. “No one else tripping as a group, but without the Priority Innfield (Villa), 2013 can see what you see.” We feel abused, euphoria. Priority Innfield (Pole), 2013 Pavilion, 316.2 x 579.1 x 438.2 cm but also that we’ve transgressed. “I’m Pavilion, 344.8 x 643.6 x 492.1 cm Exhibiting the movie Junior War going to get in so much trouble”, a girl Exhibiting the movie Item Falls Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, in a pink sweatshirt worries. We’re © Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin New York, and Regen Projects, worried, too. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, Los Angeles New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles Priority Innfield (Credits), 2013 HD video, 9:27 Priority Innfield (Tilt), 2013 © Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin Pavilion, 335.3 x 507 x 555.6 cm Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, Exhibiting the ambient soundtrack New York, and Regen Projects, Wake (MP3, 41:03) Los Angeles Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles We learn there have been wars While CENTER JENNY is preoccupied and revolutions. Some Jennys are with origins (“Sarah Source”), it’s also bigger than others. “I’m privileged worried about end points. Some of as fuck, get used to it”, declares one. us may have fought in the audience “My parents owned and funded the revolution and some of us may have war”, brags another. A third Jenny weaponised earmuffs, but we all end admits to having styled the war. up in Los Angeles, or, more specific- “Did you see those weaponised ear ally, we all end up on a fake TV set muffs?” she asks. “Those weapons, in a warehouse in Burbank, an eerie those earmuffs? I saw them! I saw suburb that stands in approximate them!” Over time, the war becomes relation to LA as LA does to the world. a nursery rhyme. There are no actual performers here, just stylists and stunt-chickens. Some provide mumbling vocals. Some per- Behind every great fortune there form feats of Parkour. Some draw all is a great crime. In CENTER JENNY, over us while we’re still awake. We’ll get a retreat from utopia that presents a through it, though. No nightmare can grim future grimly focused on the survive the sunrise. past, we are all guilty; we worry, though, that we’ll never really know CENTER JENNY, 2013 what happened or who was respon- HD video, 53:15 sible. The possibility of a whodunit Edition of 6 with 2 APs © Ryan Trecartin is excluded by our mishandling of Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles cause and effect.
In Item Falls we are peaking. We start first-level basic to second-level stupid Jenny makes various attempts at airs, hence my synonym, hence my out at a casting call, but before long to level-center. An Adele-like figure logical argumentation but gets vibe, hence my arm!” The logical chain we’re firmly in the grip of hallucination, pops in from time to time — or is she distracted by her own words. “Some becomes a sort of failed genealogy. shedding our anxieties and evidently the good witch of the north? As the of my friends believe that I should be To the extent that boy-band functions regressing to the animation era, a film progresses, the producer shows an eagle”, she asserts. “I believe that as a discrete gender, the speaker ap- time when stunt-chickens were mere off a boy band she has purchased, and I’m grounded and that I should stay on pears to be worried about becoming chicklets. Friendly archetypes float mostly they seem really gay. the ground with the chicken, because a man. in and out of what seems like our chickens used to be dinosaurs. And it’s bedroom. The red-headed Jenny has a fact. One of the most elegant things returned, but this time she’s squeaky Since we’re having a peak experience, about facts is that I believe in them.” and trusting. Unlike in CENTER the big questions show up. Do we Her logical leaps take on a sharper JENNY, here our perspective is literal- have free will? Is what we’re seeing real? edge when discussing her family. ly centered. The camera seems to be What does it mean to be normal? “This “My parents ran one of the last print in the middle of the room, which is is not a real chair”, we’re admonished magazines […]. I was very generous good, because we’re too blissed out at one point. “We animated it. It’s to acknowledge the things that they to move. Luckily, our hallucinations not really here.” Nothing quite makes did. It was a very common decision to look directly at us. sense, but it doesn’t matter. “One of make now. I fired them.” As with the the most significant things about my rest of Priority Innfield, worries about stunt-chickens is that I deserve a the past and previous generations get The driving force of our trip is a pro- solo”, says Jenny, who continues to tangled up in violent delusions. Later, Item Falls, 2013 HD video, 25:45 ducer named TK (played by Allison muse about clubs and applications, a boy-band member is disturbed to Edition of 6 with 2 APs Powell) who seems to be coordinating but without the fear and regret that notice his own armpit hair. “Oh no! © Ryan Trecartin Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, auditions, which enable going from fuels CENTER JENNY. Look at my armpit hair. Hence my and Regen Projects, Los Angeles In Comma Boat we’re stuck in a mock- If CENTER JENNY sounds an alarm As with the rest of Priority Innfield, disgusting and “forgetting to pull out”. authoritarian fantasy — a power trip. about the artist’s complicity and literal performance is delayed or refrac- “Ew, you’re gonna start a family!” he The film centers around a director- helplessness within a system of ted into pre- and post-production. chides. character played by Trecartin who indecipherable tribal rituals and, A group of singers seems to be conti- oscillates between feelings of om- more broadly, about any individual’s nually testing levels — reliably affirm- nipotence and self-doubt. As if a powerlessness with respect to his- ing they sound “real good” — without The film suggests that the director can post-human, post-gendered reincar- torical change, Comma Boat raises ever beginning the music video they’re no longer be educated. He has entered nation of the Fellini character in 8 ½, the possibility that these worries are filming. The director rants about a a fantasy world and won’t come out. the director gloats and frets about essentially bullshit — convenient red rental boat — “One of the most sig- The predicament is summed up by professional and ethical transgres- herrings that disguise a deeper, more nificant things about being on this a voice-over by the singer Lauren sions. “I know I lied to get ahead”, terrible truth: that in fact we have been particular boat is that it’s summer time Devine: “What you gonna say now, he admits at one point. “I’ve made up in control all along, that we’ve stage- on cement” — but we never set sail. you’re too late now, I’m in LA now.” so many different alphabets just to managed every aspect of this dream, get ahead in my field.” The director is and that our actions have not only fancier now, but the fear nags that he damaged our own lives, but poten- Along with his fear of not being filmed, might be “repeating” himself “like a tially the lives of others as well. procreation is a special concern for the dumb soldier ova and ova and ova director. “There used to be a moment and ova”. The meta-connection to in time where people would peck on the artist’s own career, while obvious, Arbitrary power is a reality in Comma the lips and people would give them is also a decoy. All art, at some level, is Boat, but it’s also a joke. “I’m going awards because of this thing […] cine- Comma Boat, 2013 HD video, 33:02 about the artist. Here, reflexivity is the to name a daycare after her”, the matic things.” The director forces a Edition of 6 with 2 APs surface level, providing a decodable director proclaims as punishment seapunk girl to make out with a boy © Ryan Trecartin Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, veneer that encases something more for an underling who uses words he — and then castigates them for being and Regen Projects, Los Angeles unsettling and complex. doesn’t understand. “But it’s going to be very gas-chamber oriented. Like, you’ll go in, but you won’t come out.” These are idle threats — the director is needling, but the subordinates are hardly cowering. “I’m going to put you at the end of a pier”, he says soon after, “and you’re going to stay there forever. I’m not going to do anything, you’re just going to stay there”. The pier scheme could be a piece of Warholian performance art, but no one seems to take the director too seriously. In Junior War a throng of high In the context of the tetralogy, Junior past and also reshaping it — Junior The arrow of time — whichever schoolers congregates at night for a War looks like a time capsule from “the War looks more like the diary of a direction it points — is fraught with party in the woods sometime in the human era”, otherwise known as high time-traveller who has re-entered a guilt. To age is to decline: this we’re year 2000. A band plays, the kids school, where themes and phrases historical moment and turbulently told. To trace is to blame: this we get drunk, the boys and girls tepidly from the other three films — searching restructured it. fear. To the extent that Priority Innfield flirt, and groups deploy into cars for for keys, smashing, farting — uncannily confounds our understanding of the purpose of destroying mailboxes, recur. All of Trecartin’s trademarks sequencing, iteration, and cause and tee-peeing houses, breaking lawn are here — frenetic pacing, musical All remembering is editing — an effect, it also lets us off the hook for ornaments, and sparring with the punctuation, carnivalesque destruc- attempt to create what scholars call a crimes of chronology. By the end police. The film is composed entirely tion, adolescent dialect — but this “usable past”. In Junior War, the editing we may feel confused, exhausted, of footage Trecartin took during his time the Ryanverse is forged out of is intentional and aggressive — but is and epistemologically spent, but senior year of high school in exurban actual co-eds. “We found a golf ball, the past it creates usable? Most of the we also feel exonerated. “Nothing Ohio; as such, it baits the viewer with a tennis ball, and a baseball”, a boy footage is recorded in night vision, a is documented.” We all believe that, genealogical significance. The film proudly declares, underlining the male style that recalls both The Blair Witch don’t we? is incontrovertibly “source material” brain’s infinite capacity for pointless Project, which came out in 1999, a year — dangling the possibility that we’ve taxonomy. Other teens display apti- before the footage was taken, and Zero finally unearthed “Sarah Source” — tude for legalism, complaining about Dark Thirty, which came out in 2012, but it’s also rigorously repurposed, a policeman who was “wrongfully a year before the footage was released. just as any social media #tbt marks accusing” and “didn’t have probable The youths in Junior War are expressly the present more reliably than it cause to fucking pull us over”. Another militarized, but they’re also innocents Junior War, 2013 HD video, 24:25 renders the past. boy at odds with law enforcement who venture into the woods in search Edition of 6 with 2 APs combatively declares, “I’ve been of the supernatural. © Ryan Trecartin Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, riding these woods since I was three and Regen Projects, Los Angeles years old. I know all these woods! If anything I’m going that way”, yielding a stream of teen poetry whose pecu- liarity might go unnoticed but for its resonance with the rest of Priority Innfield’s unruly syntax.
Are these the formative experiences that gave rise, a decade later, to the artist Ryan Trecartin? To the extent that Priority Innfield is an exercise in retroflection — in revisiting the theatre, on a movie — usually we are working on all of Lizzie Fitch in Conversation those things at any given time — and at other times we will work separately for extended periods on specific with Ossian Ward elements of the work.
So you’re behind the camera one minute and in front of the camera, as one of the actors, the next.
Supplies, On set there is no standard because the way the movies are shot is really dependent on where we are. It happens Situations, in many different ways, though in general it starts with Ryan putting together the network of themes, imagery, Spaces and language that he wants to go into the script, and then us beginning to talk it over once it’s developed to a certain point. That’s a big generalization, but often true. Recently, I’ve started having fun editing too. It’s really hard to peel apart or delineate what is a typical situa- Do you have a sense in which you usually conduct interviews like this? Do you tion for us collaboratively — the way we work together do them with Ryan or separately? moulds itself to whatever we are doing. We are both super-independent people; we like to focus. We can It depends on the situation. It’s sometimes nicer to do both go away for days or a week and come back and them one on one, because I feel like a lot of times we talk about something, but we also sit together in the expect the other person to say all that we want to say same room day after day. and as a result don’t say all that we might otherwise. How important is the creation of the sculptural sets, the decorations, the makeup Is that the way the collaboration works, in that you’re ending each other’s sen- and everything, when what you are describing in the films is almost a virtual world? tences? Do you find that you need to have space so you can do your own thing Do you have to somehow make that realm real or are there physical elements within and Ryan can do his bit? Is it accurate to say that you’re the sculptor and he’s that world that come out of the scripts? the filmmaker, or how do you see it? We are continuously making “supplies” for ourselves. We Well, that is actually one of the bigger misconceptions shop for things and we think of every object as a word or about the way Ryan and I work — the idea of a clear like lines in a movie. A lot of times they’re just themes divide where he works on the movies and I make the or ideas we’re tossing around during scriptwriting, but physical stuff. We work with each other in a lot of differ- equally what we build can inform what the script will be. ent ways. Often we’ll be in the same room, working on Ryan often writes furiously. He can also spend a month a sculpture, working on an installation, on a sculptural on a script, but there are moments when the script is Lizzie Fitch in Conversation with Ossian Ward Supplies, Situations, Spaces written the night before or it’s done all together. The you just have a completely different relationship to actors are generally our friends, collaborators and the camera. fellow artists, and they understand this process, ad- libbing and pulling in lines from all over the place, to In the larger installations I have seen, at the Pinault Foundation for example [Public weave together something that becomes the dialogue Crop (2011); Local Dock (2011); and Porch Limit (2012); shown in Prima Materia, or narrative action. Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy, 2013], you created environments around the movies, but for Priority Innfield am I right in thinking that the housing, seating, the It’s as if you’ve got these different kinds of glue. It could be the words or it could films and the whole scenario were all created around the same time? be something else. I like the idea that you call them “supplies”, because it also adds to this utilitarian, industrial look of all the physical accoutrements — like kitchen Yeah, that was interesting because those pieces that units or IKEA furniture. Is it a case of buying this stuff or does it get reinvented as house the movies were built simultaneously to the mo- you go along? vies and with the same exact people who were making the movie set. We also built them on the computer as With the Any Ever movies that’s how we were making 3D models first, which was not actually something we’d sets, in this really sculptural way. Sometimes it had to do done before. It allows you to re-edit, re-insert or revise with how the products we bought were branded — you something again and it creates this weird emptiness. know, it might be a welding table called “Nomad” — that becomes a way of engaging with that object. For the They are consequently very institutionalized spaces — bleak, tiled bathrooms latest project, Site Visit [2014; shown at KW Institute [for the sculptural theatre subtitled Pole], municipal benches and rubbish bins [Villa] for Contemporary Art in Berlin], which we shot at the and sports hall bleachers surrounded by fences, chains and the like [Fence and Tilt]. Scottish Rite Masonic Temple in Wilshire, here in Los Was there a preordained, frat-pack, Blair Witch theme for the look of Priority Innfield? Angeles, we were really very specific about the kinds of sets because it was such a specific place. It had an Ryan was really interested in these reality game shows, auditorium that seats 500 people, a banquet hall that’s like Killer Karaoke, and we did get attached to this certain 10,000 square feet of uninterrupted space. It’s dingy age group, of college kids, for Priority Innfield. Also — no one had been in there for fifteen years — and it many of the themes arose from engaging with the old smelled really bad. At first I was kind of horrified by it. footage Ryan shot in high school in Ohio. But since it all happened simultaneously, everything extends in every Normally you have more control over the spaces you use. direction, I guess. That was the first time we were really starting to do this time-synced multiple-camera thing, Most of the other movies were shot in a home of some so a lot of the scriptwriting became really structural — sort — all domestic spaces. And we always shoot at less about having a script in which this character says night because we don’t want there to be any exterior. this or that and more about lines and ways of organising But then I guess you let a lot more chaos happen and shoots and sets. We love fences and cages, that hasn’t Lizzie Fitch in Conversation with Ossian Ward Supplies, Situations, Spaces changed. I think we also pick those things because tural theatres and also on-line. We’d never prioritise they’re the types of objects that are meant to control one. The sculptural theatres have a social element to people and they have this relationship to editing too. them too and you really get to be inside them in a way It’s sort of like an affirming mechanism in some way — the other viewing experiences don't achieve, and that’s there is something liberating about compartmentalizing. important to us.
Talking about these controlling mechanisms, do you think about how an audience I was watching some of the earlier movies and, as you said before, they’re all set should stay in one place? There’s that story about how McDonald’s designs its in more-or-less domestic spaces. There’s a line in one of them in which one of the furniture in a way that it’s only comfortable to sit in for about ten minutes — so girls says, “I’m starting to not trust the house”, and it felt like you were leaving the you eat your food and then leave. Do you want people to sit there a long time or domestic space too. Have you started to hire spaces and build sets in a way that do you want them to feel uncomfortable and move on? you hadn’t before?
My impulse about seating is usually to make it com- Our studio is a warehouse in an area of the city where fortable because there’s enough material there that’s people make sets for movies. They often find it hard to uncomfortable in so many others ways. The thing about grasp that we wants our sets to be 360 degrees. We the movies is that we do think about them as a cyclical shoot everywhere — from the front, the back, the sides experience — you come back to them and you can leave. — and if there is a “behind-the-scenes” we’ll go there I don’t ever want to tell people how long they need to too. We’ve always structured our shooting in that way stay in a space. I love it when people just breeze through — we get a house and then every part of that house and then come back, or maybe they don’t. And the becomes that set. So we pushed that. But also we were headphones, that was always something that was really thinking about the physical relationship to 3D spaces appealing to us — to have the audio from the movie in that you can construct on a computer and how that is the headphones — because you can take them off and changing the way we think about space in general. We’ve pause for a moment and think. That’s something that I worked with Rhett LaRue for a very long-time on models love about the sculptural theatre — it’s a public viewing and animations and I think that working with him has space but it doesn’t have the rigidity of the theatre or influenced this way of thinking a lot. the cinema, where it’s not cool to get up out of your seat ten minutes in because you’re feeling nauseous. The credits are complicated, right? Even in this show there is a new film of credits [Priority Innfield (Credits)], but they are hard to read as they’re rolling and being There’s a freedom and a restriction at the same time — you can get up and go animated. For instance, are there discrete Lizzie Fitch sculptures — the anthropo- or you can stay for hours. morphic furniture with legs and masks and so on — that appear in the movies?
Yeah, and it’s engaging and it’s full. We make work for Yes, that was true in the older movies, but now with these all these formats. We want to show in theatres, in sculp- large-scale sets and freestanding sculptural theatres we Lizzie Fitch in Conversation with Ossian Ward Supplies, Situations, Spaces don’t rely on any of the existing architecture — so the game plan, but there’s more trust and also we just whole thing becomes blurrier. At this point, I don’t even know each other so much better that we don’t worry know what is a sculpture or a prop or a set anymore. about the specifics as much. I’d say we have fewer Before they make it out there they could be anything. boundaries, but reflecting on it we never had that many We don’t say “This is a sculpture and we’re not going to to begin with. It’s just become overall deeper. touch it”. But that has also changed for us because we were more compartmentalized before and now we’re less so.
We reuse a lot of stuff and think of things as having more than one life. We engage whatever we want to serve our purposes. But there’s always this part of us that wants to make something that’s new, to create a different world.
I like this idea that a lot of it appears flat-pack new; everything has this sheen. Is that important — this ready-made, shop-bought aesthetic, rather than a handcrafted look?
Yes, I think it is because for us it feels like an animation — like digital units in a programme. But there are also moments when we like the handmade. I think with Priority Innfield we stayed away from that very purpose- ly, except for a few given moments with hand-smeared paint, for instance — I think in Junior War — or body paint in CENTER JENNY.
Do you feel as if your practices are becoming, not just more collaborative, but that there’s fewer boundaries to who does what?
Our creative relationship has changed a lot — it’s evolving. We’ve gotten better at knowing what we do best alone and at the same time we explore things together that we didn’t use to share. We still have a La Casa Encendida Exhibition Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin. Director Priority Innfield Lucía Casani Publication Cultural Department Coordinator Mónica Carroquino Design José Duarte Exhibitions Department Coordination Translation Tania Pardo Polisemia Management and Production María Nieto García Printed by Vanessa Casas Calvo Brizzolis, arte en gráficas
DL M-2546-2016
Priority Innfield was originally conceived for the 55 International Art Exhibition, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Venice, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and organised by the Venice Biennale. The exhibition tour has been organised in collaboration with the Zabludowicz Collection. Courtesy Tamares Real Estate Holdings, Inc.:
10.02 — 12.21.2014 Zabludowicz Collection, London 02.05 — 04.24.2016 La Casa Encendida, Madrid 06 — 09.2016 Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal Exhibition Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin. Priority Innfield Lizzie FITCH / 02.05 — 04.24.2016
Spaces A, B and C Ryan TRECARTIN. Priority Innfield 02.05 — 04.24.2016
La Casa Encendida Opening Hours lacasaencendida.es Ronda de Valencia, 2 Tuesday to Sunday facebook.com/lacasaencendida 28012 Madrid from 10 am to 10 pm twitter.com/lacasaencendida T 902 430 322 The exhibition spaces instagram.com/lacasaencendida close at 9.45 pm youtube.com/lacasaencendida vimeo.com/lacasaencendida lacasaencendida.es blog.lacasaencendida.es