DC's

* (restored)

 

‘In his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed writes the story of an ‘epidemic’ of black culture—song, dance, slang and other elements—spreading into mainstream America. He calls his plague ‘Jes Grew’ and it is spread by ‘Jes Grew Carriers’ (or J.G.C.s) who are responsible for outbreaks throughout the US, and in some locations overseas.

‘Reed sets most of his story in New York during the Jazz Age. An earlier outbreak of ‘Jes Grew’—associated with the rise of ragtime in the 1890s—had been effectively contained. But now a new, stronger bug is sweeping northward from New Orleans, and threatens to subdue most of the population. There are “18,000 cases in Arkansas, 60,000 in Tennessee, 98,000 in Mississippi and cases showing up even in Wyoming.” Workers are dancing the Turkey Trot during their lunch break, and singing in the streets. The authorities are alarmed. People want to catch this new disease. Those who are still healthy gather around those already bitten by the bug, and chant “give me fever, give me fever.”

‘But if everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon of the new black plague, who is left to stop it. Here Reed outdoes himself, offering the grandest of conspiracy theories. The Knights Templar, apparently disbanded in the year 1312, are actually still hanging around, and waiting for a chance to stop the Jes Grew epidemic. But they need to get in line. The Teutonic Knights, founded in the twelfth century, also want to block the disease. And some Masons, a former cop, yellow journalists, Wall Street, politicians the folks at the Plutocrat Club, and a mysterious group known as the Wallflower Order, dedicated to implementing the world- view of an even bigger conspiracy group, known as the Atonists, all have skin in the game (literally and metaphorically).

‘Three years after Reed published Mumbo Jumbo, E.L. Doctorow released his novel Ragtime to great acclaim, with particular praise lavished on that book’s mixture of fictional characters and real personages from early 20th century America. But Reed set the tone for this mashup up truth and fiction in his colorful predecessor, and even anticipated Doctorow’s reliance on black music as an emblem for the flux and flow of the era.

‘If anything, Reed is more ambitious. He even includes footnotes and a lengthy bibliography at the end of his novel—with citations of everyone from Edward Gibbon to Madame Blavatsky. Photos and artwork are also inserted into the text, which often seems intent on breaking free of the constraints of the novel, and turning into a radical reinterpretation of the last several thousand years of human society.

‘Reed has delivered a classic work in the literature of paranoia. He joins an illustrious company, offering us a book that can stand alongside—at least in terms of the breadth of its conspiracy theories—Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus Trilogy, Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and other powerful literary evocations of our zeal to find hidden enemies everywhere we look. Writers nowadays may do some things better than their predecessors, but the generation that lived through McCarthyism, the Cold War, Alger Hiss and Kim Philby had a much better skill at capturing the exotic flavor of the paranoid mindset in narrative form.’ — Ted Gloria

 

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Facsimile pages

 

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Further

Ishmael Reed Website
‘Mumbo Jumbo’ @ Wikipedia
‘Ishmael Reed and the Psychic Epidemic’
‘Mumbo Umbo: Wormholes through History’
Ishmael Reed @ Biblio
Ishmael Reed’s KONCH MAGAZINE
‘Ishmael Reed on the Life and Death of Amiri Baraka’
Ishmael Reed @ goodreads
‘Fade to White’, an Op Ed by Ishmael Reed @ NYT
‘Bad Apples in Ferguson’ by Ishmael Reed
‘All the Demons Of American Racism Are Rising From the Sewer’
Ishmael Reed on ‘Juice!’
‘Self-reflexivity and Historical Revisionism in Ishmael Reed’s Neo-hoodoo Aesthetics’
‘The Black Pathology Biz’ by Ishmael Reed
‘ISHMAEL REED: JABS, LOW BLOWS, AND KNOCKOUT PUNCHES’
‘Mumbo Jumbo’ reviewed @ Autodidact Project
Ishmael Reed’s Top Ten Books List
‘A Progressive Rebuttal to Ishmael Reed’
‘Ishmael Reed on the Language of Huck Finn’
‘Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo: Afrocentricism, Philosophy, and Haiti’
‘Ishmael Reed: The Idol Smasher’
Buy ‘Mumbo Jumbo’

 

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Extras

Ishmael Reed reads two poems and discusses his novel “Mumbo Jumbo.”

Meet Ishmael Reed

To Become A Writer, Ishmael Reed

Huey P. Newton, Ishmael Reed & Jawanza Kunjufu On Racism Again Black Men (1988)

Ishmael Reed at Litquake 2007

 

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Interview

 

Let’s talk about writing. You’ve said before, “Writing is Fighting.” As you know, Miles Davis compared his musical exercise to the discipline of boxing. In fact, he said he respects good boxers so much, because they require and possess an intelligence; that, there’s a “higher sense of theory” going on in their heads. He compared it to his solitary exercise of performing.

ISHMAEL REED: Miles was also a boxer.

Right. So, we have this whole concept of boxing, writing, fighting. Why this philosophy of “boxing” as writing?

IR: I think I have a pugnacious style. My style is not pretty. I don’t use words like “amber” or “opaque.” (Laughs.)

Or Chrysanthemums? (Laughs.)

IR: (Laughs.) Yeah, yeah. My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali’s style. Others have compared my style to that of Roy Jones Jr. and Mike Tyson.

As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions. My latest poem is about a tree in my backyard, which is from the Tropics. I’m trying to explain how it got there. I had a meditative poem about watching out over the Golden Gate Bridge from a mountain.

It was published in The New Yorker. I think when I write essays I’m out to do on the page what we can’t do in the media. We don’t have billions of dollars that are available to these people who do what amounts to a propaganda attack on us. We’re being out propagandized. When I look at the newspapers, I’m furious. Because I can see where the interpretation of whom we are and how people from the outside define us.

My friend Cecil Brown is very upset because the SF Chronicle is doing a Black History Month series and it’s all White male writers! I mean they assign Black History Month to all White writers with all these African American writers in the Bay Area and in California? I mean I’m here and I’ve written for them. And of course, they wrote about the kind of Black image that appeals to them: Athletes and Entertainers. Not a single scientist, or inventor. I was down at Lockheed Martin, addressing the Black employees: Engineers and Scientists last week. I told them that a lot of the space equipment used by NASA was invented by Black scientists, yet when Mailer wrote that ignorant book about the moonshot, Fire On The Moon, he said that Blacks were jealous of this White achievement.The formula for sending a shuttle into space and bringing it back was devised by a Black woman scientist.

Cecil also said he was pleased that there was a Hollywood writer’s strike so all these demeaning images of blacks would at least disappear for a while, for at least 3 weeks. Because, I mean the Writer’s Guild is only like 2% African American. I think there’s probably, what, no Pakistani American writers?

I think there is 1.

IR: Well, probably, he’s the one saying, “We all ought to assimilate.”

Or, he might try to hide it.

IR: Yeah, hides it. Right. So, that’s all we have. All we have is writing. Sometimes it’s very effective. I mean I’m organizing my neighborhood block with emails, because we have criminal activity on our block. Instead of the old days, where we had to confront these people, now we can do it through emails and cyberspace.

I did a book called Another Day at the Front which was my first critical book about the media, and I got on Nightline. I was able to challenge some of these assumptions of African Americans and their culture.

Is writing a solitary experience? Is it shadowboxing in a sense?

IR: Not for me. I have T.V. on all the time when I’m writing. I have music on. I’m engaged with the world. If the phone rings, I answer it. I’m not the kind of writer who sits around 8 hours a day writing. I’ll write in the morning, and sometimes I’ll get up 4 in the morning sometimes and do this Anthology I’m working on. (PowWow, releasing this summer by De Capo Press). I’m learning a lot. I wasn’t really a short story person, but now I’m reading about 140 short stories and there are a lot of good ones out there. I’m reading stories from different groups– like from the 19th century immigrant perspective which is really overlooked. In this country, it’s not good to be “ethnic.” Although, T.S. Eliot said, “Not all ethnic writers are great, but all great writers are ethnic.” I mean Eliot was the head of the modernist movement!

I don’t know about this solitary stuff. I mean I do plays and they are collaborative. My last play was called “angry” by the New York Times. Even though every line could be footnoted. I got a great review in the Backstage which is a theatre trade magazine, but the Times guy said I was “angry” about a lot of things. But, I mean, what was I angry about? I took on 2 issues. One was the pharmaceutical industry using African Americans as guinea pigs and colluding with psychiatrists, who get $40,000 kickbacks, and how they use these drugs in Africa for testing. They are fully aware of the bad side effects when they produce these drugs. The other issue is how think-thanks front these people like McWhorter to push this line that “all of African American’s problems are self inflicted.”

This is what we’re up against. See, our intellectuals don’t know what we’re up against. They think this is all about getting on the Bill Maher show. There is an orchestrated campaign that is tied to the Eugenics campaign. I just had a dialogue with John Rockwell from the New York Times, because we’re in the same anthology together. I said, “Look, the Eugenics movement came out of the United States.” “Where? Where? Where?” he said. So, I had to send him a book on this.

Let’s talk about Mumbo Jumbo your most famous novel. Many say this novel was about the forces of “rationalism and militarism” versus the forces of “the magical and the spontaneous.” Today, we find extremist groups rooting themselves in piety, religion, spirituality and faith. In the 1972 version of the novel, Abdul Hamid, a Black Muslim fundamentalist, burns the “Book” which contains the “key” to these ancient traditions of magic, dance, and creativity. If Mumbo Jumbo took place in the 21st century, who would burn the “Book”?

IR: I think there are fundamentalists all over the world. I think all religions have fundamentalists who have different interpretations of scriptures that are very vague. These books are written in metaphor, they are written with symbolism. A lot of it is outdated and tied to the times in which the text was written. So, you can do anything you want to with religion. Unfortunately, in the world today, we have dogmatic people entering into politics. I don’t think the two mix. But, we always believed in separation of church and state. But, I predicted there would be a theocracy in the 80’s in my book The Terrible Twos, where I had a preacher running the White House in 1982.

You see, I think when you’re an independent intellectual you’re going to get it from all sides. I get it from the Left, the Right, the Middle. When I proposed that people said it was silly, but now we have Huckabee and Bush, and others. I mean they’re all still players. But, when I said it, they thought it was silly.

 

___
Book

Ishmael Reed Mumbo Jumbo
Scribner

‘Mumbo Jumbo is Ishmael Reed’s brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.’ — Scribner

 

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Please excuse any effects from my considerable jet lag this morning. ** rewritedept, Hey, man. It’s been quite a while. I’ll go follow your instagram if I’m not doing that already. I think tricks are good but I’m very sleepy this morning so I can’t be sure. ‘RT’ will tentatively start the streaming and BluRay portions of its life in July. If you do want to bring it to Reno it would need to happen fairly soon. Thanks! Iowa City was great, actually. Falco? Huh. I need sleep too, so maybe see you in my dreams that I never remember. ** jay, Hi! Trecartin is incredible. So worth exploring. I hope you had a great four days although I guess they’re pretty much in the rear view by now. How was the rest too? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks! The trip was really terrific. How was your homebound trip? And nice that you lifted that slave phrase. I was very envious of it. Love please letting me sleep later than 3:30 am, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, right, I remember your article. Everyone, Master _Black_Acrylic and his chums at the late, much missed zine Yuck ‘n’ Yum put together a great article about Ryan Trecartin back when that remains highly worth reading. Here. ** A.R. Johanson aka DennisCooperIsASadisticPedophile, etc., etc., You have had more than a week to attack me and other people here. Your points such as they are and your hatred are beyond crystal clear. I won’t allow you to disrupt this place any longer. As of now, I will block you no matter how many times you change your fake email address. And if any comments get through, they will be immediately deleted. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I was so incredibly happy to read about your retreating cancer. Such a huge relief, and I hope that sticks permanently. The new Sunn0))) is gorgeous of course. Much love, pal. ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, T! I don’t remember seeing any written script-type stuff of Ryan’s, but I am very hazy this morning. Oh wait, I think he did show me some graphs. I hope that work you were intending to do is flying now. Great, I’ll read your Morrissey thing. Everyone, the great Thomas ‘Moronic’ Moore … well, I’ll let him tell you: ‘I also wrote an essay/review about my recent shitty bout of heavy and annoying depression and linked it to the new Morrissey album and more so the power of whatever art gets you through the days when you need it to. Philip put it up at his Substack without paywall if anyone fancies a look’. Here. Sure, let’s FaceTime. Let me know when is good. xo. ** Hugo, Hi. No, I have yet to go to Ryan’s compound. If we’d been able to go to the film festival in Athens where RT is playing that’s just about to happen, we could’ve, but alas. I’m not a Robert Pattinson fan, so unless a film has some other selling point, I won’t angle to see it, and ‘The Drama’ is not calling to me. Blowing up at me is not going to help him get published. Arto Lindsay is a vastly under-sung complete master of the guitar, so a thing on him would be most welcome. Thanks. And for the hugs. My head is a cloud, but I can sense them. ** Adem Berbic, Hi. Iowa City was great. There’s a really vibrant scene there of adventurous young filmmakers, video artists, writers, zine makers and more, and it was a total thrill to get to hang out with them and talk about their work and our film. London launch, understood, makes sense. Hopefully you can do a reading here at some point. I think we’ll be back from Berlin by the 23rd, yes, great. I can’t wait to read Tadhg’s long poem. RT in London is pretty much a dead possibility unless something unexpected happens. ** Steven Purtill, Hey! Thanks, Steven. Yeah, he seems to have a lot of hot steam he needs to blow off. Love to you. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, Hi, pal! I’m happy your day was great. I hope today is too. Great luck with the work on the tracks. I’m completely brain dead this morning due to miserable jet lag, but I’ll be good again. You sound great. I don’t know the Tokyo Pop movie. How was it? ** kenley. Hi, kenley! He’s so great: Trecartin. Joy central. Iowa City is terrific. I guess it’s like this oasis of coolness and vibrancy in the middle of an otherwise Trumpy state. That was my impression. Enjoy Newfoundland! Wow! Let me know what you got up to. ** Steve, Hey. It was my first trip to Iowa period. The reading got cancelled because we had multiple cancelled flights, and I didn’t get there in time. The screening couldn’t have gone better. My jet lag is unfortunately severe this morning, but we’ll see about tomorrow. Everyone, Steve’s fantastic radio/podcast show has a new episode for y’all. Here he is: ‘The latest “Radio Not Radio” show is up now, with music by Neo Geodesia, Serokolo 7, Fire-Toolaz, Laibach, Yonu, Underscores, Googly Eyes, Cabaret Voltaire, Maurice, Phuture, Pan Sonic, VV Pete/Deela/Lisha G/Utility, Yeat & Swizz Beatz, Lifeguard, Harriet Tubman & Georgia Anne Muldrow, Irreversible Entaglements, Janel Leppin’s Ensemble Volcanic Ash, Leila Abdul-Rauf, Marilyn Crispell & Anders Jormin, Gregory Uhlmann, Ashra, Peter Baumann, Larrison, If Not Then, Neurosis and Leila Boudreuil & Kali Malone.’ ** Charalampos, Hi. The screening went really well, thanks. ‘The Same Place the Fly Got Smashed’ is lovely, of course, I agree. Bye from very hazy me. ** julian, Hi, julian! Is that true about Prada? That would be great, although all thanks to them for letting him build his compound. I was really good in Iowa, and now I’m temporarily zonked by the time change. The new film script is very, very close to finished. People can be blocked, but they can change their email address and get back in, but I’m going to be prepared. ** HaRpEr //, Hi! Thanks, the trip was great. Me too about what Ryan and Lizzy are doing at the moment. I guess they just did some big show in LA, but I don’t know much about it. Very happy birthday belatedly! I would never say that ‘Salo’ is a bad film by any means, I just don’t think it works for me. Pasolini’s stuff just doesn’t reach me in general. I know it’s my problem. The problem with doing an IP block is that others might get blocked too. But, yes, I will do that if I have to. All the ultra-best to you! ** Uday, Hi! Good to see you. I don’t know if Ryan influenced my stuff, but it wouldn’t surprise me. ** Bill, Hi, B. Apart from big plane problems and delays in stopover Chicago re: getting to Iowa City, it was wonderful. How is the Lee Bul show if you saw it? ** Okay. I can’t believe I made it through. Be grateful that you don’t have my brain this morning. So I decided to return by turning back on the spotlight that fell on a great novel by Ishmael Reed. Have at it, please. I’ll see you tomorrow.

* (restored/expanded)

 

‘The term ‘post-internet art’ has emerged in recent years to acknowledge the profound impact hyper-connectedness, abundance of information and collective conversation has on our lives, subjectivities and art. It groups together artistic practices clearly influenced by the proliferation of the internet into everyday life. Although it is a contested term, little-loved by many artists associated with it, and a confusing one (at first suggesting art created after the end of the internet, rather than that ushered in by the arrival of web 2.0), it has a certain usefulness.

‘Of the many artists associated with post-internet art who are ‘digital natives’, Ryan Trecartin (born 1981, United States) is one of the most lauded. The narratives and editing of his moving-image works – which he refers to as ‘movies’, in defiance of the widely adopted terms ‘videos’ or ‘films’ – question traditional film and television programs and the ways such material is consumed and navigated by a generation raised with the internet, multiple screens and communication devices ever present. This is achieved in part by the aesthetic character of Trecartin’s movies, which often employ cacophony as a guiding and structural principle: the acting, editing, sound and sets are constantly in excess and operate at a high-pitched register echoing that of the information age. In this cacophony, digital natives see a representation of themselves and their everyday lives, while older ‘digital immigrants’ recognise the technological clamour that has come to surround them; Trecartin’s movies reflect each group’s experience to some degree.

‘Other crucial aspects of Trecartin’s practice have contributed to his recognition within this conceptual milieu. The sheer ambition of his movies is immediately striking, but never feels driven by a sense of singular achievement. There is the sense of the ensemble at work in them, in the tradition, unconsciously or not, of filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Paul Morrissey (at least while working with Andy Warhol), John Waters or Pedro Almodovar. While Trecartin writes the scripts (along with acting in, filming, editing and sometimes scoring the resultant movies), his creative practice is enfolded with that of artist Lizzie Fitch. Trecartin and Fitch have been collaborating since they were first-year students of Rhode Island School of Design in 2001, when Trecartin majored in Film/Animation/Video and Fitch in Painting. They formed a production studio together in Los Angeles and see their relationship as central to the creation of Trecartin’s movies. When exhibited as video installations, these ‘sculptural theatres’ are co-credited to both artists. Filled with bland carpet of the type found in cheap office renovations, and populated by quasi-designer flat pack furniture, the sculptural theatres mimic the bland ubiquity of the movies’ environments, complete with various props that appear in or are implied by them.

‘The Re’Search Wait’S series, 2009–10, for example, is one part of the project Any Ever, a diptych comprising seven autonomous but interrelated videos. The other part, Trill-ogy Comp., consists of the three works K-CoreaINC.K (section a), Sibling Topics (section a) and P.opular S.ky (section ish), while Re’Search Wait’S comprises four movies: Ready, The Re’Search, Roamie View : History Enhancement and Temp Stop. Whereas a certain visual mashup aesthetic characterises the montage technique employed by Trecartin in this series – similar to having multiple windows open on a computer, replete with computer effects, plug-ins and animated transitions – there exists a tension between the cut-and-paste, slapdash and disordered approach this connotes and the highly considered work required to create the sets, choreograph the scenes, direct the actors and crew and produce the scripts underpinning the seven movies.

‘The performances, too, provoke this tension, at first coming across as improvised due to their manic delivery and the mix of trained and untrained actors, but quickly recognisable as highly scripted in Trecartin’s very particular, punning language: a patois of text messages, ASCII art and corporate brand sloganeering. When viewed in written form4 the text’s link to concrete poetry is clear, about which Brian Droitcour has written persuasively in the journal Rhizome. Droitcour is at pains to point out the difference between Trecartin’s generative approach and the pure appropriation of found words and phrases:

Trecartin’s writing responds to the internet, but it defies an assertion made by Kenneth Goldsmith, poet and founder of UbuWeb, who wrote that flarf and conceptual poetry are the quintessential poetic responses to the digital age because they employ cut-and-paste techniques.

‘Droitcour asserts that this approach results in poetry by Goldsmith that, while often humorous, is ‘so sterile, it’s unreadable’, and that his technique of reconstituting nonsense phrases from found linguistic scraps ‘petrifies genre and meaning with it’.

‘Sterile is one thing Trecartin’s movies are not. Rather than the unordered (or randomly reconstituted) nature of the cut-and-paste aesthetic, his work engages a multiplicity that mimics and extends the sense of the internet as being an experience of information overload and noise, with various commentaries vying for the viewer’s attention. Flame wars in internet chatrooms, long-running hoaxes on multi-authored wikis, a teenage girl’s weekly YouTube program fictionalising her home-schooled life, endless viral attempts to remake the Harlem Shake dance style and performing tweens practising virtually anything in front webcams are now all very contemporary, narcissistic and neurotic phenomena. Re’Search Wait’S presents the legacy of such present-day activity, the movies’ gossiping, sniping discourse interspersed with karaoke-like performances to form a picture resembling the confessional, or talent-spruiking, personal webcam diaries of teens in ‘real life’ (with the intensity of a hyperactive child off their Ritalin).

‘Trecartin’s plotlines are not so much convoluted as they are polyphonic and fragmentary, embodying the nature of the internet itself. There can be multiple viewpoints, text and stock footage vying together on screen at the same time, cutting in and out in different rhythms. Characters’ voices from different scenes talk in unison, or in staccato counterpoint, at different speeds and pitches. Dramatically, we often do not see cause, only effect. When first encountering the movies, the plot can be difficult to grasp for these reasons, but they reward immersion and multiple viewing. Most of Trecartin’s movies are available on the internet, which allows them to be grazed by viewers in their own time, and the works’ spacious, immersive installation in the gallery offers a chance for non-contiguous viewing; the physical act of moving from one to the other acting as a form of editing. Rather than diminishing the experience of the work, dipping in and out of it in a non-linear way merely reaffirms its structural logic at odds with the traditional linear cinema experience.’ — Simon Maidment

 

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Stills

 

___
Further

Ryan Trecartin @ Vimeo
Ryan Trecartin @ Andrea Rosen Gallery
Ryan Trecartin @ Regen Projects
Ryan Trecartin @ instagram
Portrait of Ryan Trecartin
‘It’s Exciting to Be in a Swing State’: Why Artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch Moved to Ohio to Build a Rural Amusement Park
How Artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch Built a 32-Acre Queer Playground in Middle America
Neighborhood Watch: Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin
ROT THE MAP
Ryan’s Web 1.0
Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s B-horror version of America’s rural fantasy
RYAN TRECARTIN: THE REAL INTERNET IS INSIDE YOU
McMansion of media excess: Ryan Trecartin’s and Lizzie Fitch’s SITE VISIT
Ryan Trecartin – Metaphorical Puke
The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin
Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch STAGE the 2.0 society
Decoding the Cinematic Cyberworld of Ryan Trecartin
Ryan Trecartin’s Night Vision Sweatshirt
Experimental People
Past and Future Camera: Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s New Movies
‘Sound Design Is Sort of Everything’: Ryan Trecartin on Making Music, Live and Otherwise
Exploding the Frame: Ryan Trecartin’s Bad Language
Meet Ryan Trecartin, Art’s First Genius Of The YouTube Age
On Ryan Trecartin
“We Had Our First Red Bulls Together”: Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin on Their Dusk-Till-Dawn Collaborative Process
Ghost of the future past: on the work of Ryan Trecartin

 

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Extras

Dennis Cooper and Ryan Trecartin: Artists on Writers | Writers on Artists

Ryan Trecartin Interview: The Safe Space of Movies

Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin: Whether Line / Fondazione Prada Milano

Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin – Behind the scenes

Ryan Trecartin in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Ryan Trecartin Interview: Gender is Fluid

 

______
Interview

 

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer: Last time we talked, in early 2013 or something, you were in the middle of editing a new piece, as you are now. It’s a strange time to talk about the work because so much happens in editing. And about a minute ago you were telling me how, this past year, you moved studios and your home.

Ryan Trecartin: Yeah, we did a ton of moving. We moved our house to Burbank, and then we moved our Burbank studio to Glassell Park. We originally rented our last house to double as a studio, but for the Venice Biennale project, we needed a studio to create those particular sets. We ended up liking having a studio in which we could build sculptures and different things that don’t work in a domestic setting. We go in and out of wanting a separate studio space. Right now we want one, but I can feel us already going back to wanting a house and getting rid of the studio. (laughter) Moving’s fun.

SLG: Moving’s fun? Who says that? (laughter) Moving’s the worst.

RT: I was getting depressed about the fact that I lived in that Los Feliz house for five years. Even growing up, I’ve never lived in a house longer than that. I don’t like making projects in the same places.

SLG: Like a new place is inspiring and exciting for ideas, even if it’s just an empty warehouse?

RT: Yeah, even if there’s nothing culturally different about it. It can be architecture that changes and that’s it. We’ve been talking about moving to a different city again.

SLG: This makes me think of your interest in people born in the mid–’80s and their relationship to media. Now that generation is growing up. Maybe it’s not yet happening in your circle, but these past couple years, a lot of friends are having babies, you know?

So I wonder, Can ways of living stay the same? Do you want them to? This settling down, employing people, having a staff—is it part of getting older and your interest in the generational?

RT: Well, I’m not really interested in things staying the same.

SLG: Even if your mode is constant change.

RT: It doesn’t yet feel like settling down, but if it did, I might not like it. We’re not interested in the same things as before—I say we meaning a lot of different things, but right now I’m talking about Lizzie and me primarily. When it comes to youth, I’ve always enjoyed it as a topic or a mode, and not necessarily as an age-related thing. It’s more about the relationship to self and culture, and negotiations of freedom.

Although I do think about when people were born in sort of an algorithmic way. It’s interesting that people born at different moments in time have different relationships to ideas. It doesn’t mean everyone in that age group has the same relationship—there’s the general flow and then the margins.

SLG: Youth as an attitude or a relationship to freedoms or self-formation makes sense. This is a side note, but I want to say that reimmersing myself in your work reminds me just how much it affects me on the level of permissiveness and what’s possible. It’s amazingly generative.

RT: K-Hole, who were in the Triennial, wrote something on the youth mode that’s like what you’re describing.

SLG: You’ve busied yourself with looking at a wide range of practices and artists, having co-curated the Triennial. I would imagine that is very different from being in the studio. What was that process like?

RT: I’m still digesting the experience. Working with Lauren was amazing. She traveled a lot, and did so many studio visits. Then she would present them all and we would talk about them. She really allowed me to continue being an artist. I got to glean all this amazing research and have a huge say in it, which was incredible. And that opportunity came at a moment when the artists we were researching were not that far from me generationally. But my mind is far from that right now …

SLG: If it’s too far away, we’ll move on.

RT: I think it’s important not to be too focused on past work when you’re creating new work, so I have purposely been trying to forget stuff temporarily. Like, I practice forgetting things, and then I have to try to remember them again later.

SLG: How does that work?

RT: Something’s a thought-loop, so I picture it and then I remove it.

SLG: Can you do that all in your head? Or do you keep a notebook?

RT: I do, but I don’t go back and read my notes much.

SLG: At least once you get an idea down, then you can let yourself forget, because it’s down somewhere.

RT: I mean, I love remembering, too—but sometimes you have to forget in order to grow. Or something will reemerge because you pushed it away, and it comes back in a different form. That’s a big part of the way we make movies. Things that we thought were over sneak back in a different form, even just words and phrases.

 

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16 of Ryan Trecartin’s 29 videos

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Valentines Day Girl (2001)
‘Trecartin crafts a fantastical narrative about a girl whose obsessive personal utopia is disrupted. Trecartin’s collaborator, Lizzie Fitch, plays a girl obsessed with Valentine’s Day. Everything in her hyperactive, sped-up world revolves around Valentine’s Day: red, white, and pink love-themed decorations cover every surface; heart shapes abound; Valentine’s Day treats are everywhere. Her private festivities suddenly go awry as a hoard of Christmas-themed intruders appear and take her hostage in her own apartment. Gagged and bound, she is forced to watch while her ecstatic but sinister captors stage a frenzied Christmas intervention.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

Watch it here

 

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Wayne’s World (2003)
‘Trecartin and his collaborator/co-star Lizzie Fitch ponder the messages delivered by the most banal forms of mass media and pop culture in their own unique version of a music video. They voice questions in song and dance segments that feature a deliberately ill-fitting pastiche of discarded fashions of the past two decades and recycled pop-music clichés. Totally immersed in their meticulously crafted private universe, Trecartin and Fitch coyly point at the gaudy artifice surrounding us in our own.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

Excerpt

 

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What’s The Love Making Babies For (2003)
‘In What’s the Love Making Babies For Trecartin employs digital manipulations, extreme editing, and chaotic dialogue in a way that is characteristic of his artistic style, creating a world that is “hyper-saturated with media.” More relevant to the concerns of this program, he also engages with ideas of authority, expertise, and the dissemination of information, as his characters forward their often warped and sometimes indecipherable ideas surrounding “reproduction, sexuality, and contemporary moralities” by engaging with traditional formats such as the TV commercial. However, Trecartin roots his movie in the digitized Internet landscape, thus evoking questions surrounding how modes of communication and information transmission transform and morph in the digital age.’ — Calvin Tomkins

the entirety

 

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A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)
‘If A Family Finds Entertainment can be reduced to a thumbnail description, this might be it: Trecartin stars as Skippy, a clownish but terrifyingly psychopathic boy who has locked himself in the upstairs bathroom of his family home during a wild party. Ignoring his siblings’ and friends’ pleas that he come out, he paces the little room, cutting himself with a knife and musing opaquely on his existential dilemma in a kind of King Lear-style delirium. Downstairs, the partiers are experiencing wild mood-swings and having complex, disassociated conversations (mostly about him) that are constantly interrupted by bursts of visual effects and animated sequences that disorient the cast of characters like so many lightening strikes. Eventually Skippy emerges, borrows money from his creepy, sexually inappropriate parents, and heads outdoors, where he runs into a documentary filmmaker who decides to make a movie about him; but then Skippy is immediately hit by a car and, apparently, killed. Back inside the house, a hyperactive girl named Shin, also played by Trecartin, gets a call on her cell phone with the bad news. She spends twenty or so hysteria-filled minutes trying to focus and construct a sentence linear enough to tell her friends what has happened. When she finally does, a band plays music that seems to magically raise the young man from the dead, and everyone runs outside and sets off fireworks. Then everyone runs back inside before the police show up. A wonder of Trecartin’s videos is that his approach seems as intuitive and driven by a mad scientist-style tunnel vision as it is rigorous and sophisticated, grounded in his expert editing and inordinate gift for constructing complex avant-garde narratives.’ — Dennis Cooper, Artforum

Watch it here

 

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(Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me.) (2006)
‘Trecartin describes (Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me.) as a “narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail.” Trecartin’s intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an ultra-modern hotel room; Tammy and Beth, who live in an apartment filled with installation art; and Tommy, who is seen in a secluded lake house in the woods. Pam, Tommy and Tammy are all played by Trecartin, who, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

the entirety

 

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I-Be Area (2007)
‘The videos of Ryan Trecartin catapult viewers into a hallucinogenic alternate reality in which cybernetic avatars run amok, presenting themselves with gleeful sass as they play out a complex web of melodramatic fictions. I-Be Area (2007), a feature-length promenade through this universe, was written, directed, and edited by Trecartin, who also stars in no fewer than five roles alongside a troupe of friends and collaborators. The work’s elusive narrative, which revolves around the clone I-Be II and such cohorts as Jamie, RAmada Omar, and ONxy-Tonyah, is filtered through a distinctive do-it-yourself aesthetic that incorporates ramshackle sets, brightly colored homemade costumes, cheap off-the-shelf video and sound effects, and rapidly edited, jargon-filled dialogue. Through these means Trecartin creates a striking new vision of queer culture in America, wittily updating the carnivalesque style of avant-garde filmmakers like Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger for the era of YouTube and Second Life. Unlike Smith and Anger, however, Trecartin draws his audiences further into his virtual reality through sculptural objects and installations built from his sets, including Jamie’s Bedroom (2007), which is in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum. Over time, it becomes apparent how thin the line separating Trecartin’s world from our own truly is.’ — Nat Trotman

the entirety

 

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Trill-ogy Comp (2009)
‘Trill-ogy Comp consists of three movies: K-CoreaINC.K (section a), Sibling Topics (section a), and P.opular S.ky (section ish). The title of this piece of the Any Ever diptych riffs on the words “trill”—as in the rapid alternation of two notes, or the sound produced by rolling “r”s—and “comp”— as in “complement,” “comprehension,” and, especially in regard to music and digital editing, “composition.” Each movie follows the structuralist unity of form and content, self-reflexively building and demonstrating formal logic through narrative abstractions.’ — MoCA

K-CoreaINC.K (section a)

Sibling Topics (section a)

P.OPULAR S.KY (section ish)

 

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Re’Search Wait’S (2010)
‘Through their form as well as their content, the Re’Search Wait’S movies directly engage some of the most noted effects of the internet and social media on our lives and ways of being: the changing relationship between the individual and the collective; the global advancement of corporate brand consolidation (at the expense of diversity); rampant commodification; and the fluidity of identity. The manner in which Trecartin, with his collaborators, has fused these in the Re’Search Wait’S series as a future projection of the information age marks it as a post-internet artwork par excellence, being ‘about’, ‘of’, and ‘meta-’ these effects (and affects) simultaneously. In it we encounter the mutated embodiment of tomorrow’s promise, today.’ — Simon Maidment

The Re’Search

Roamie View : History Enhancement

Temp Stop

 

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CENTER JENNY (2013)
‘CENTER JENNY is one of four movies completed in 2013 by Ryan Trecartin, first shown as part of an installation at the Arsenale during the 55th Venice Biennale. For this movie and its related works, Lizzie Fitch and Trecartin created a modular maze of sets on a soundstage with the help of commercial set builders. Designing with Google’s open source 3D modeling programSketchUP, the artists along with these tradespeople built a functional system of environments. The space is rigged to radically adapt for different purposes, but shifting as a narrative one as well, guiding action much in the way that a written script does. No pun intended, the set in its various manifestations is a central feature of CENTER JENNY, where Trecartin fixates on notions of location and proximity but continually eschews any concrete grasp of them.

‘The cast ranges from collaborators familiar from previous works dating as far back as to A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) to professional actors from popular television sitcoms. Most belong to one of several groups of uniformed girls who are all named Jenny. One duo of Jennys wears earmuffs and pink hoodies branded “AUDITION;” another posse dons khaki shorts and tank tops covering up greenscreen-green bikinis; other, grittier girls are in sweats that read “W4$T3;” a more womanly group in neutral tones identify themselves as nameless proto-Jennys, held in limbo as they await matriculation into “The University.”

‘The various Jennys belong to a caste system in which iterations of the same, basic, archetypal girl differentiate themselves from one another based on how powerfully they have evolved. The notion of being “basic”, in fact, is a flattening condemnation the girls hurl back and forth at one another. There is a quantitative basis for self-actualization here, and, as if in a video game or any other kind of entertainment simulation, a level-based logic propels the Jennys as they graduate from nothing – “I don’t have a name yet, we’re not even on a level” – to level one, to level two, and beyond. This guides the plot as well, which shifts abruptly from one vignette to the next in an arc that escalates without concern for scenes that have been surpassed by more evolved ones.’ — Kevin McGarry

the entirety

 

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Comma Boat (2013)
‘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.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

the entirety

 

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Item Falls (2013)
‘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.’ — EAI

the entirety

 

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Junior War (2013)
‘In Junior War, a throng of high schoolers congregates at night for a party in the woods sometime in the year 2000. A band plays, the kids get drunk, the boys and girls tepidly flirt, and groups deploy into cars for the purpose of destroying mailboxes, tee-peeing houses, breaking lawn ornaments, and sparring with the police. The film is composed entirely of footage Trecartin took during his senior year of high school in exurban Ohio; as such, it baits the viewer with genealogical significance. The film is incontrovertibly source material dangling the possibility that we’ve finally unearthed Sarah Source–but it’s also rigorously repurposed, just as any social media #tbt marks the present more reliably than it renders the past.

‘In the context of the tetralogy, Junior War looks like a time capsule from “the human era,” otherwise known as high school, where themes and phrases from the other three films–searching for keys, smashing, farting–uncannily recur. All of Trecartin’s trademarks are here–frenetic pacing, musical punctuation, carnivalesque destruction, adolescent dialect–but this time the Ryanverse is forged out of actual co-eds. “We found a golf ball, a tennis ball, and a baseball,” a boy proudly declares, underlining the male brain’s infinite capacity for pointless taxonomy. Other teens display aptitude for legalism, complaining about a policeman who was “wrongfully accusing” and “didn’t have probable cause to fucking pull us over.” Another boy at odds with law enforcement combatively declares, “I’ve been riding these woods since I was three years old. I know all these woods! If anything I’m going that way,” yielding a stream of teen poetry whose peculiarity might go unnoticed but for its resonance with the rest of Priority Innfield’s unruly syntax.

‘Are these the formative experiences that gave rise, a decade later, to the artist Ryan Trecartin? To the extent that Priority Infield is an exercise in retroflection–in revisiting the past and also reshaping it–Junior War looks more like the diary of a time-traveler who has re-entered a historical moment and turbulently restructured it.

‘All remembering is editing–an attempt to create what scholars call a ?usable past.? In Junior War, the editing is intentional and aggressive–but is the past it creates usable? Most of the footage is recorded in night vision, a style that recalls both The Blair Witch Project, which came out in 1999, a year before the footage was taken, and Zero Dark Thirty, which came out in 2012, a year before the footage was released. The youth in Junior War are expressly militarized, but they’re also innocents who venture into the woods in search of the supernatural.

‘The arrow of time–whichever direction it points–is fraught with guilt. To age is to decline: this we’re told. To trace is to blame: this we fear. To the extent that Priority Innfield confounds our understanding of sequencing, iteration, and cause and effect, it also lets us off the hook for crimes of chronology. By the end we may feel confused, exhausted, and epistemologically spent, but we also feel exonerated. “Nothing is documented.” We all believe that, don’t we?’ — Chris Glazek

the entirety

 

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Mark Trade (2016)
‘Distraction, of course, remains the mise en scène. In a time when millions of videos on the Internet vie for users’ attention, I get the feeling that Fitch and Trecartin’s characters would much rather be checking their phones than doing anything else—including appearing in a Fitch and Trecartin video. In Mark Trade (2016), the titular protagonist, a drunken and off-putting man with long hair and oddly colored contacts, says, “This used to be a lake, but I can’t get any fucking service anywhere now.” The artists’ faithfulness to the Internet’s hysterical diversion renders the characters mysteriously underdeveloped.’ — Alex Greenberger

the entirety

 

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placebo pets (2016)
‘Every autumn, W Magazine dedicates one cover story to the world of contemporary art. The resulting imagery never falters in its ability to cause commotion, as the periodical succeeds in uniting the worlds of high-fashion, celebrity and art into one. Past covers have seen Angelina Jolie photographed by then-beau Brad Pitt and Linda Evangelista through the lens of Maurizio Cattelan. This year, W Magazine does it again, with Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid – arguably two of fashion’s most buzz-worthy figures – gracing the magazine for its 10th anniversary art issue. Working alongside video artists Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, the supermodels have been transformed into human-animal hybrids through heavy digital altering. Entitled “Placebo Pets”, the editorial creates an alternate reality that asks us: “Who would survive if a superior alien humanoid species came to earth?” Dressed in the latest trends by Philipp Plein and Hood by Air, the royal heiresses of reality television each tackle the role of a post-gender, post-biracial being. The visuals are reminiscent of Snapchat’s ubiquitous face-altering filters, with Jenner’s features exaggerated to create a bunny-cat and Hadid’s amplified to morph her into a lion-fox. New identities in tow, both women live in an imaginary future created by Fitch and Trecartin. This new universe is not far from the one we inhabit now, with the creative duo hoping to offer a critical eye into our present-day human behaviour.’ — SLEEK

the entirety

 

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Panderson Heights (2020)
‘Colony Panderson and Reverse Stacy take watch tower knocks.’ — Letterboxd

the entirety

 

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Collected Songs [More Complete] (2022)
‘The experimental and fast-paced nature of his movies has gotten him the title of “video artist”, but Trecartin rejects the term, saying his films are nothing but films. For his films, Trecartin will usually make his own soundtrack. This compilation is a collection of nearly every original song he has made, either for his movies or just as music by itself. All the tracks were made in between 2001 and 2014.’ — iced out helix

the entirety

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Starting tomorrow the blog will be on vacation for a week while I’m in Iowa City showing ‘Room Temperature’ and doing a reading there. It will return live on Friday, April 10th. I’ll catch up with any comments you leave between now and then upon the blog’s and my return. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, yes, I’ll be legal in France for another year at least. I don’t think I have any physical drawbacks that’ll change their mind, but, hey, we’ll see. Your love picked a fave of mine too. Have a great week! Keep talking, love, your mind is beautiful, G. ** jay, Hi. Drone is an increasingly popular identity among the slaves or at least an increasing aspiration. ⬡-8781 seems like a slave influencer, but let’s see. Exactly on publishers’ evolutions. There are plenty of newbies to pick up their slack, like I said. Lionising the past is just a way to get yourself stuck. Lots of love back and have a really fruitful week ahead. See you soon. ** Poecilia, Hey. Maybe the problem is thinking of publishing as an industry. Generalisations are always wrong in my opinion. There will always be people who publish books at different levels. It sounds like the naysayers are really saying you can’t make big bucks having your books published like one used to, but I don’t even think that’s true. Very few writers ever made big bucks. I don’t know. Philip Best is such a great, generous guy for all kinds of reasons. Cool. Thanks! ** DennisCooperSucks, No interest in engaging with your hostile bullshit. ** Hugo, I’m pretty sure Michael never got Pynchon on his show, but I’m certain he tried as hard as one could. Not impossible that a slave could make a second appearance. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. ‘Belle De Jour for the British’: I think I have to see what that’s about. Thanks! Have a lovely next days. ** Adem Berbic, Hey. There’s a remote new possibility for ‘RT’ in London, but it’s remote. Just keep me informed, yeah, launch-wise. And go all James Joyce on ‘penis’. It needs that, and I dare you. ** Carsten, Haha, yeah, it does seem like maybe good timing on the vacation. I can’t even remember the last time I hit the heartland. Chicago doesn’t count, right? Well, we’re showing the film and I’m doing a reading at the university and there’s a party/techno event in our honor and we’re doing interviews and stuff and I guess we’ll just be seeing what the place is like. Is it Easter or almost? I can’t keep up. Bon week, bud. ** Steve, Thanks! My physical is on the 15th. That is surprising about the new Laibach. I kind of wrote them off at a certain point. I’ll peek at it, thanks. And all pleasure for you this coming week. ** kenley, Thanks!!! Well, technically, I still have to pick up a residency card thing at the police station in the next month, so it’s real but it doesn’t feel totally real yet. So delayed celebration of some sort. You have glory in your week+ ahead, I hope? I want to hear all about it. ** HaRpEr //, Oh, yeah, butoh. I was kind of quite into butoh at a certain point. The butoh masters even did US performance tours. In the 90s, I think. I haven’t read the Big Toe interview. I need to do that. I guess I said something disparaging about ‘Salo’ in the interview, and I’ve seen that there are people who are really pissed off about that. I seem to be pissing people off at the moment for some reason. I’ll go see/remember what we said about interiority. I’m honored by how whatever it was inspired you. Yep, leaving early tomorrow morning. Hoping the vaunted TSA airport hell is over by then. I look forward to catching up with you in, what, 7 days, 8 days? Take care. ** Bernard Welt, Oh, good, I’m glad that you and Taylor connected. There are a whole bunch of really good young poets that I’ve seen/read. Yeah, strange and almost miraculous how rarely trolls decide to come in here. I think it’s been over a year since the last hater popped in and unleashed. Counting my lucky stars. Huh, I also have phases where I scribble down porn to sort of cleanse my writing’s palate and protect its content. Have that kind of fun. ** fish, Hi. Yes, the unabashedness is a big draw for me too. Or the combination of spilling and trying to be alluring at the same time. The writing can be really exciting because of that push/pull. Have a terrific week, and I hope to see you on the other side. ** Laura, Thanks, pal. Hm, I think I see extravagance as inherently opaque. A difficult to solve puzzle. But I’m not extravagant at all. Thanks so much about ‘ZDB’. I think it and ‘Zac’s Freight Elevator’ are my peak gif fiction works. Wow, did you make that gif stack/fiction? Impressive. Honored. As am I and theoretically the slaves if they weren’t composites by your reading of them. Your brain seems to be doing just fine. Don’t let your novel act all hoity-toity on you. Bring it down to size. You can if anyone can. Make the world (and your novel) your oyster until I see you next. <3 ** Okay. You lucky people get to spend whatever time you spend on this soon to be temporarily dormant blog in the company of the sublime genius of Ryan Trecartin. One of the greatest artists working in any medium these days in my opinion. But you might well feel differently. I’ll compare notes with you on the 10th. Take care until then. See you soonish.