Controlling the Chaos

The artist Ryan Trecartin was famously "discovered" via the now forgotten online social networking site Friendster, where a portion of his assuredly twisted college film, A Family Finds Entertainment, was passed around from art school students to curators, eventually finding its way to the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Elizabeth Dee Gallery swooped him up soon after. Trecartin was 25-years-old at the time, making work at a share-house in Oberlin, Ohio. A few years later, Trecartin's Any Ever, a collection of seven movies spanning four-plus hours, has been traveling the museum circuit from Toronto to Istanbul to Los Angeles, opening at the Museum of Modern Art's P.S. 1 in June.

Any Ever is a sublimely feverish stream of video and sound, operating on a totally unique cognitive wavelength. Trecartin employs a fluxing cast of gender-ambiguous characters (as well as playing several himself) wearing wigs, creepy contact lenses and caked-in colored makeup. Their barrage of histrionic jabber is further amped-up by rapid edits and stridently high pitch-modulations. Lines are a poetic amalgamation of advertising copy, corporate jargon and self-help mantras like, "I get shit done behind my back," and, "I love learning about myself through other people's products." Voices meld with jittery soundscapes and electronic music, recorded by Trecartin himself. Any Ever simulates the experience of media saturation and employs its visual language, but the experience is a human one, inspired by social interactions, identity questions, anxieties, hierarchies and dramas.

I met Trecartin at the sprawling Los Feliz home and studio he shares with four other creative types the morning he was flying to New York to prepare for the opening of Any Ever. There was party detritus all over from the night before, but Trecartin looked fresh-faced, even with all the Red Bull gone from the fridge. We made do with take-out coffee.

David Jacob Kramer: There's a lucid chaos and heightened hysterical atmosphere to the action in Any Ever. There's the burning furniture floating in the pool and everyone smashing wine glasses and furniture, and it feels spontaneous and real. How do you orchestrate chaos without it appearing contrived?

Ryan Trecartin: The script is as constructive as it is destructive, because you have to deal with the parameters of what you set up, realizing that if you try too hard to get what you want you're not going to get anything interesting. So a lot of the shoots are set up in a way where the parameters will be contained. If the shoot completely falls apart all of the elements within still relate to the agenda of that shoot. When it falls out, it's still within.

DJK: The performers truly stepped up to the plate. While the "Mexico Korea" character is yelling in Spanish he's ripping glass out of picture frames with his hands.

RT: When you have a performer like Raul [de Nieves], who played "Mexico Korea," kinesthetically he is brilliant--what he can make his body do is just pretty amazing, and his throat. I always cast a lot of freedom in his roles.
 
DJK: So you leave room for that chaotic element, but control it.

RT: Yes. Or not control it, which is an act of controlling it. With Raul I don't control it, and he just absorbs the space and the idea of the scene. There's always an amount of agency that all the characters have because it's a collaborative effort. There's a meeting point where the performance meets the set, meets the props, meets the script, meets the wardrobe.

DJK: You gauge opportunities.

RT: Also, there's no in and outside of the shoot. It's not like you're waiting behind
the lights and there's a bunch of people on set watching you. It's more kinetic: the camera starts getting passed around, the director-actor role collapses and people start to have authority on how they want to be directed.

DJK: You used many child actors from Orlando, who are there hoping to get cast by Disney. I'm assuming they'd never seen the kind of work they were making with you. How did they respond to the material?
 
RT: They were really talented first off, and I feel like [close-collaborator] Lizzie [Fitch] and I never assumed they wouldn't get it, so we never acted like, "This is going to be really weird, blah blah" to them. Obviously if you cast a lot of friends they might be secretly making fun of you while you're directing them, but that's going to help their performance and it will make their giggles more real.

DJK:  Was that happening?

RT: I think there were moments where they were like, "Who the fuck is this guy? He is so retarded." Some of the things I was having them say, they were like, "Are you serious?" But sometimes they'd be like, "Whoa, this is really awesome." It's really essential for someone to not know where their character is going because it leaves an openness when they're saying a sentence, so they don't know the territory it's going to occupy.

DJK: There's a kid with a hammer smashing the wall looking pretty stoked, like he can't even believe he's being encouraged to do that.

RT:  That's his first time acting, too. He applied through a post we put on an Internet casting site. He came to the interview and he was really cool. And we asked, "Can you do any accents?" He said, "I can do the gay accent." And we were like, "Oh yeah? What's that?" and he started acting gay, and we said, "Oh, you'll be perfect!"

DJK: For a year-and-a-half you lived in a house in Miami that was also the set for the movie. How did that impact your psychological state?

RT: When friends would come down to work on it they would say how eerie it was that nothing in the house had any sort of personalized history radiating from it: It all felt like a cyberspace, like an animation where you could tweak it at any moment because none of it had any cultural weight, no memories.  So psychologically I think that was really healthy. I think a lot of growth happens when you have to get rid of your past in a way; and I don't mean forget about it, but just get over it.
 
DJK: I read you saying that you're more interested in hearing your friends imitate Jersey Shore characters than watching the show itself. People sometimes refer to your work as concerning media technology and saturation, but you seem more interested in people's responses.

RT: Technology is not the subject matter in the movies as an 'otherness,' or an element that can be treated as a device. It's much more about the response, and the exchange, and it as an extension, and the way that it's transforming our relationship to where we exist, who we are, and how we co-mingle and communicate and what counts as a reality.

DJK: Every production element seems as crucial in the communication as the dialogue, as in the wardrobe, sets, makeup and soundscape. Is that how you treat those elements?

RT: I'm considering how they can propel into a space that activates an investigation, the same way a series of words would in a sentence. I like to think the movies are asking people to read them rather than watch them. It's kind of like taking all the structures that you've accumulated over time of how to understand something, and accessing those at different levels of the work to read its content. And then you let those different varying understandings of a particular moment sort of linger and resonate as you remember it.

DJK: Each movie in Any Ever relates to the others in intricate, non-linear patterns, in terms of character, mood, structure and plot. I understand they started off as one movie that imploded.

RT: It just started getting bigger and bigger. A lot of times Lizzie and I'll write a scene that we think is the beginning of a movie, but it ends up being a very small moment in the center, and then at some point it becomes a side note at the end of a center somewhere else, and the centers keep dropping out as we compose because the writing processes are all happening simultaneously. So it's not like we have a script and then we make it.

DJK: It relates to the way they can be viewed as well.  You've screened them consecutively as a movie series at cinemas or some can simply be viewed on vimeo.com.  Then there's the museum experience where you've installed "sculptural theaters," sets like we see in the movies, full of Ikea furniture for the audience to sit in and watch. With the audience hop-scotching around at will, would you say the museum viewing experience lends an audience-participatory element to the work?

RT: Definitely. They are composed to be native to multiple frames. A frame brings out different aspects of the content and the way you interact with it.

DJK: How do you expect these varied frames to create different meanings?

RT: For example, in a movie theater you start to think of scenes as [cinematic] scenes which makes you navigate the content totally differently than you would watching the same scene on the Internet. In the museum it's more about the space relating to a poetic frame, a packaging that's specific and unique to the content that almost feels like it's coming outside of it, more theme park-like in a weird way.

DJK: I like the theme park analogy, especially because the show is traveling to so many museums, kind of like a traveling carnival.

RT: Yeah, like the roller coaster gets popped up in different towns. There should be more conceptually-rigorous traveling theme parks.