As in Trecartin’s later films, the pacing is frenetic, the content is a palimpsest, and the hysterical storyline is mostly beside the point. What lingers is the mood of events happening too quickly and too simultaneously to be taken in fully. The 42-minute video is somewhat incomprehensible, strangely mesmerizing, and overstimulating to the point of exhaustion.
Trecartin made A Family Finds Entertainment with a band of RISD collaborators, most of whom have remained with him even as new people have joined up. They are the Mercury Theatre players to his cyberworld Orson Welles. His closest ally, Lizzie Fitch, is a sculptor he was introduced to during their freshman year. “When I first met her I thought she was insane,” he says. “Then the first time we hung out, we bonded immediately.” Soldered platonically, they have lived together—always with three or more other people—since 2001.
In June Trecartin took a two-year lease on a sprawling, grandly tacky Spanish Revival house in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles; he and Fitch have bedrooms that face each other at the top of a wrought-iron staircase, and there are accommodations for four other housemates, along with rooms for studio space and editing facilities. As Trecartin gives me a tour, I am momentarily nonplussed to see a couple of syringes lying on the kitchen counter. Surely this isn’t a revival of Warhol’s Factory? No; Trecartin’s drug of choice is Red Bull. “We’ve been doing B12 shots,” he explains.
After graduating from RISD in 2004, Trecartin moved to New Orleans with a group of friends, including Fitch. Most of them earned a living by working in a Ninth Ward barbecue joint while he and Fitch tried to drum up an audience for A Family Finds Entertainment. On Friendster they looked for people who might like the movie; if an e-mailed overture elicited a positive reply, they snail-mailed a DVD.
Even in that rusty dawn of the digital age, before sizable videos could be uploaded easily onto a website, Trecartin’s work was of, by, and for the Internet—disseminated, as well as inspired, by it. One of the DVDs went to a group of art-school students in Cleveland, who showed it to visiting artist Sue de Beer, who was so impressed that she recommended it to curator and writer Rachel Greene, who in turn tracked Trecartin down and talked him up to several New York gallerists, including Elizabeth Dee. Dee became Trecartin’s dealer.
This was social networking as it was meant to be—until a virulent slice of reality in the form of Hurricane Katrina intruded. The house where Trecartin and his friends were living was destroyed, and Trecartin and Fitch moved in with a group of lesbians in Fitch’s hometown of Oberlin, Ohio. There they got the good news that A Family Finds Entertainment would be included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. “I was more of a tech major, so I didn’t really know what that meant, but Lizzie was a painting major, and she knew,” Trecartin tells me. “She said, ‘This means we’re going to be able to make art.’”
