Ryan Trecartin’s Playhouse

If Dash Snow was the art world’s enfant terrible five years ago, then 29 year-old film maker Ryan Trecartin is the current holder of the title. But for different reasons. While Snow reveled in hedonism and excess by becoming an active participant in his own critique, blurring the line between his life and his art, Trecartin maintains more of a personal distance from his subject matter by sharpening that line with unmistakably satirical films that give new meaning to the term ‘over-the-top’. This summer Trecartin will bring his twisted sensibility to the Pacific Design Center of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, under the auspices of new director Jeffrey Deitch (formerly of New York’s Deitch Projects), in which he is being given free reign to do as he pleases. His fans and critics alike (both camps boast many members) will have a field day.

Trecartin’s work is unlike anything else you’ve seen, and at once unsettlingly familiar. The trappings and personages of daily life are strewn throughout, yet so many things are off. Darkness lurks behind the bright colors. Trecartin is often the gender-bent protagonist, made unrecognizable by wigs, costumes and face paint, and he enlists a cast of friends to play the other parts. The characters are abstracted contemporary archetypes, reduced to frantic, nerve-shattered, self-involved beings who shout and babble over each other, smear paint on themselves, dance to electronic music, expose themselves and laugh insanely.

Much of it reads as an indictment of contemporary ‘girl’ culture perpetuated by the media––the notion that to be sassy, bitchy, and assertive should be every woman’s disposition. This is accentuated by the overblown valley girl accent adopted by the characters in his films, making even the most straightforward statements seem inherently vapid and punctuated with question marks. Most pronounced are Trecartin’s own incarnations of what I can only presume are his many ids: a dejected teenager/clown with blacked out teeth who locks himself into a closet and cuts himself, a beyond-ditzy, maniacal party girl who talks incessantly on her cellphone. The verbal delivery is intentionally stilted and abstract, with bizarrely intoned, unnatural word choices. While the characters are interacting and speaking to each other, their milieu evokes the biblical passage of the Tower of Babel when God punished the people by making them speak different languages, hindering their ability to communicate with each other. The world Trecartin creates is so manic and engrossing––the way a car wreck captivates, that it’s easy to forget the sharp social commentary. His craft as a filmmaker is also fully on display, as he deftly employs the use of amateur digital tricks and animation to professional artistic effect. It all adds up to something brilliant and wholly original that must, ultimately, be experienced firsthand. I urge/dare you to watch.