The film focuses on the life of Jenny who has, according to many of the other characters, become too “left-of-center” while pursuing her interests.
Sep 2013
A fascinating hybrid of performance and video verité, The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd introduces Carel and Ferd, a couple who allowed Ginsberg to produce an ongoing documentary record of the intimate moments of their relationship. Carel, a porn actress, and Ferd, a drug addict, invite the camera to participate in their wedding, their sex life, and their break-up. Produced before the landmark PBS documentary An American Family introduced television audiences to the live-in camera — and many decades before the ubiquity of reality television — this document raises questions about the relationship between subject and camera, privacy and manipulation. Originally presented as an installation, this one-hour version, which includes interviews with Carel, Ferd and Ginsberg, was distilled from thirty hours of footage recorded from 1970 to 1975. - Electronic Arts Intermix
Jan 1975
In Ready, Wait, played by Trecartin, is introduced as the eponymous figure of the series. Wait waits. He forsakes a "career" in favor of a "job," the execution of which Trecartin calls a "work performance." A careerist like Y-Ready (Veronica Gelbaum) may call the shots, but she is locked in her own endless narcissistic ascent, whereas Wait can retire from his job at anytime, and does, only to come back from vacation marked for containment. A third type of worker, Able (Lizzie Fitch), more fluidly adopts and discards the gestures of job and career, positing herself as a hobbyist who contrives the situations and outcomes she needs to keep her wave going.
Jan 2010
Shot in 2013 - In 'honor, of cause fake news - less gravity here - don't bird watch with a gun - remember your dreams before they remember you : the sloppy mix, bullshit version coming near soon USA.
Sep 2016
In Item Falls, we are peaking. We start out at a casting call, but before long we're firmly in the grip of hallucination, shedding our anxieties and evidently regressing to the animation era, a time when stunt chickens were mere chicklets. Friendly archetypes float in and out of what seems like our bedroom. The red-headed Jenny has returned, but this time she's squeaky and trusting. Unlike in Center Jenny, here our perspective is literally centered. The camera seems to be the in middle of the room, which is good, because we're too blissed out to move. Luckily, our hallucinations look directly at us.
Feb 2013
Ryan Trecartin’s film A Family Finds Entertainment is a camp extravaganza of epic proportions. Starring Trecartin’s family and friends, and the artist himself in a plethora of outrageous roles, A Family Finds Entertainment chronicles the story of mixed up teenager Skippy and his adventures in ‘coming out’. In this over the top celebration of queerness, Trecartin’s film mines the bizarre and endearing in an unabashed pastiche of ‘bad tv’ tropes. Cheesy video special effects, dress-up chess costumes, desperate scripts, and ‘after school special’ melodrama combine in the fluency of youth-culture lingo, reflecting a generation both damaged and affirmed by media consumption.
Mar 2005
This 1992 video highlights Dan Graham's installation Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and a Video Salon, originally created as part of the Rooftop Urban Park Project at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1991. The video documents and further explores Graham's investigations of the urban environment, from Abbe Laugier's theory of the Rustic Hut to Parisian shopping arcades, wintergardens, museums, Disneyland and corporate office buildings. For the Dia Center in New York City, Graham developed an environment, analogous to a small-scale urban park, which integrates aesthetic and utilitarian functions, and spatial and visual experiences, bringing the landscape into the roof and extending the roof into the landscape. Graham writes: "The pavilion structures are psychologically and socially self-reflective. There is a dialectic between the perception of oneself and other bodies perceiving themselves, making the spectator conscious of him or herself as a body.
Jan 1992
In Comma Boat, we're stuck in a mock-authoritarian fantasy--a power trip. The film centers around a director-character played by Trecartin who oscillates between feelings of omnipotence and self-doubt. As if a post-human, post-gendered reincarnation of the Fellini character in 8 ½, the director gloats and frets about professional and ethical transgressions. "I know I lied to get ahead," he admits at one point. "I've made up so many different alphabets just to get ahead in my field." The director is fancier now, but the fear nags that he might be "repeating" himself "like a dumb soldier ova and ova and ova and ova." The meta-connection to the artist's own career, while obvious, is also a decoy. All art, at some level, is about the artist. Here, reflexivity is the surface level, providing a decodable veneer that encases something more unsettling and complex. Single-channel and 3-channel versions.
Dec 2013