If one day I meet an alien emissary, I can only hope he is as friendly and amusing as video artist Ryan Trecartin. At first glance a typical American hipster, with a little multicolored hoop in his right ear and a boyishly open face, Trecartin, 29, starts to talk, and you gradually realize that, no, he actually comes from another planet. Because that extraterrestrial sphere might be called Twentysomething, curators and critics have responded with rapt fascination to the dizzying signals that Trecartin is emitting. Last year he was the first recipient of two new art prizes: the New Artist of the Year Award, presented at the Guggenheim Museum, and the Jack Wolgin International Prize in the Fine Arts, awarded by Temple University in Philadelphia, with a stipend of $150,000. Ali Subotnick, a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, gave Trecartin his first one-man museum show in 2008. She says that when she initially saw his work, “it was a new language, basically. It was the first time I was looking at something in pop culture or art that was clearly from a generation after me.”
Part of the fascination with Trecartin’s art (which will be the subject of a solo show at MoMA PS1 next spring) is that it captures the feeling of information saturation in the Internet age. “Things are moving so quickly: You’re getting e-mails and you’re being chatted, and there’s so many things going on at once,” observes Lauren Cornell, an adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York, who included Trecartin in the “Younger Than Jesus” triennial last year and featured him in a group exhibition, “Free,” that opened in October. “He’s representing this hyper-simultaneous way that people are interacting these days.”
For Cornell, who is 32, Trecartin’s aesthetic—“People staring into the computer camera and performing, being hyperactive and narcissistic”—evokes YouTube. Yet while his style meshes with that of the other videos on the site (and most of his own work can be found there), the movie that established Trecartin’s name, 2004’s A Family Finds Entertainment, appeared before there was a YouTube. You could say that technology had to catch up to him. Chronologically, geographically, cognitively, and sexually, Trecartin might have been engineered to fill the artistic niche that the Internet revolution obligingly opened.
A Family Finds Entertainment was Trecartin’s senior project at the Rhode Island School of Design. In it he plays a black toothed, garishly made-up youth named Skippy who has locked himself in a bathroom and is cutting himself with a large knife while his friends alternately chat about taking their band on tour and plead with him to come out. He does emerge at last, only to run out of the house and be fatally struck by a car. But in this world nothing is irrevocable, and Skippy rouses himself from death to rejoin the party.
