Imploding the Frame: Ryan Trecartin's I-Be Area and Frameless Writing

(2015)

Let’s say there is always something outside the frame, lurking or knocking or waiting, unwelcome perhaps or unnoticed — the stranger or the strangeness that refuses to come inside, or that we ignore, or deliberately keep at bay. What happens if the frame breaks and this thing, this otherness, gets inside? Doesn’t everything change, the frame as well as each thing it once held apart? And doesn’t the fact of our acknowledging it shift our focus, alter the syntax from one of tidy resolution to one that verges on chaos, or cacophony, or meaninglessness, as we enter this suspended irresolute space of rejection and acceptance, until this strangeness is absorbed? It is the pressure of this strangeness that might in fact produce the work of art in the first place; the desire to accommodate it, to bring it into relation with what already is; we might say that what comes to be known of a particular age or spirit has to do with this adjustment, this inclusion, which alters old habits of thought.

 – Ann Lauterbach, “The Night Sky II”

Perhaps traditional writing practices are, in fact, a dead end. It could be that writing has finally reached that plateau so long ago attained by the other arts, having left behind its traditional perimeters in polluting the once-sacred spaces of other, formerly autonomous disciplines. Perhaps now is the time for us to take into consideration writing “in the expanded field,” to employ Rosalind Krauss's famous phrase for sculpture. And in order to do that, perhaps we would do best to look at one of those contemporary practitioners whose expanded field bewilders, if not desiccates, the frame.

Though a “video artist” by convention, Ryan Trecartin is also an artist for whom writing plays a formidable role in his overall practice. His work departs from a zone that will be immediately recognizable to most of us. The Reality TV script is, by now, formulaic, easy enough to decode by nearly anyone. It’s been around now for a generation, the youngest among us has known no other function of television other than constructing and presenting a mediated form of reality. Ryan Trecartin's work, and in particular his film I-Be Area, is both an amplification and distortion of that script. Reality TV changes our whole perception of reality; reality is now something that you watch on a screen. In I-Be Area, we get screen upon screen upon screen upon endless screen. The screen is both filter and transmitter of heavily performed and heavily edited reality. Although there are many different settings, the entire action of the film occurs within a single zone, which is both RealityTV amplified and Reality© amplified, a space where all interactions are heavily scripted in order to orchestrate the illusion of chaos and a natural collusion of conflicting wills, a locale controlled by a god whose iterability manifests itself in a total situationality that is occluded by the all-recording digitalized über-presence. Affectation and gesture become just as important as the text being deployed by the participants in these multiproliferatory screens; they become the emotive norms that encase the seemingly random collage of words and ideas that form the script – thoughts melting into one another linguistically because one thought can never be completed: a New Real Order of distraction.

There are many different ways of watching I-Be Area. It's like taking a different ride each time: There is the participatory way, wherein you join the party, projecting your own zone of being and becoming into the “total minimal situation” that the film proclaims; the narrative engulfment, in which you attempt to navigate the “multilinear” (Kevin McGarry) pathways that the plot entails; the linguistico-linear tributary, immersing yourself in the piece's pure language stream, finding the sense in the seeming nonsense; imagistic engulfment, giving yourself over to the sensory overload in the piece's manic cuts, the repeated strains of neon color, the detailed visual anarchy of the sets and costumes; the energo-intensive path, wherein affectation becomes your beaming guide; the elemental way, in which you attempt to sort out the millions of parts that form the spectral collage of the whole.

In all likelihood, however, your way of taking in I-Be Area will combine all or many of these methods, thus putting you in a schizoid delirium that may repel or enliven you, depending on your openness towards destabilization and the manic mediation that forms the fabric of RTV and R©. All of your impulses become amplified, the aim of your desires is no longer certain, stable identity becomes a joke.

It can be a discomfiting ride to take, which makes it all the more worthwhile.

It should be noted, however, that there can be no characterological way of watching I-Be Area, because in a topia where identity is so fluid, there can be nothing so solid as character – thus there is no such thing as a standard linear narrative. Rather, the triumph of simultaneity – both the multiplicity inherent in being and in situationality. (In one of Trecartin's subsequent films from the Any Ever series, a character suggests re-writing the US Constitution and replacing the word “God” with “Internet” and “people” with “situations.”)

If the film can be said to be “about” anything (this “about” is always the worst thing anyone could ask of an artist, as it necessitates going outside the work – though we often do), then it is the dissolution of identity into a sort of digital being – a hallmark of the New Real Order. Don't like your identity? Buy a new one online, pay with plastic. Don't react; redact! “Sometimes I feel like a prequel to a horrible person,” says one persona early on in the film. This embrace of becoming – a multiplicity of selves (everyone is different people, different genders) – is certainly a generational influence; an abundance of youth marks every Trecartin statement. Despite the current shadows looming over the civilized West, we must keep in mind that the RTV generation was reared into an attitude reflecting an overload of confidence, unafraid of the consequences of taking risks – unafraid of appearing stupid. It is this latter fact that allows for so much of the vileness of Reality TV, and which I-Be Area subtly mocks. “What will I be when I grow up?” asks I-Be after he has been transformed into a new avatarial persona, Oliver. “A production company!” s/he answers. Media and the means of mediation are newly morphed into one with technology's showboating and accessibility; not only is everything shot in HD, the cameras are often visible and frequently held by the speaking personae. Nearly every line of dialogue in the film is spoken directly to the camera, reflecting a consciousness of the process of mediation, a demolition of the fourth wall borrowed from the theater.