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.