Serious Symbolism: Why I Hate Ryan Trecartin
Over the years I’ve had the displeasure of seeing some genuinely awful art. I’ve seen works that are ill-made, materials or subjects which made me recoil, and concepts that are over-played, but nothing compares to the absolute torment of “Whether Line,” an exhibition by Ryan Trecartin. On view at La Fondazione Prada in early 2019, “Whether Line” was a crushingly boring, gruelingly grating tour de fart. It was so bad that I spent the next few weeks researching Trecartin’s work and philosophy, trying to understand how anyone thought this exhibit was a good idea. What I discovered was a problem far worse than I could imagine, and bigger than just Trecartin; but first a trip through the “Whether Line”
After navigating a long, winding path of fences, evocative of an amusement park but really more like a prison, you end up in this warehouse-sized exhibition space. Built within was an uninsulated copy of a house which Trecartin and his longtime artistic partner Lizzie Fitch had built in rural Ohio. The house was entirely empty, save for ten rocking chairs and some projectors, all of which were playing scenes shot in and around the rural homestead-turned-artists’ studio.
The main movie of the installation, Plot Front, is, in a word, unwatchable. I think that I may have lasted five minutes, most of which was filled with unintelligible gibberish and screaming. Imagine the worst improv group you’ve ever seen performing an off-the-cuff rendition of the Blair Witch Project, only with more heavy-handed, pseudo-philosophical musings and a lower production value. The only thing more nauseating than the camera work was the acting and writing.
I truly cannot believe that anyone willingly watched the entire two-hour film, not only because it was somehow both incredibly annoying and mind-numbingly boring — a combination dubbed “stuplimity” by cultural theorist Sianne Ngai — but because it wasn’t even intellectually rewarding. If the art is a pain to even witness, then the least it can do is give you something to think about, yet Trecartin gives nothing.
In fact, after watching a number of Trecartin’s movies, a lack of depth is a common feature of his work, and one for which he’s actually lauded by other critics. He’s noted for his brazen handling of popular culture, creating over-the-top facsimiles of reality show drama, identity politics, and internet culture that grate on the senses. Moreover, Trecartin has shown again and again in interviews that he has little to no respect for the actual history or symbolism behind the material with which he works.
And symbolism is important. This is a fact that has been somehow lost an a large generation of artists coming up in post-modern thought. They’ve been convinced, truly, that nothing means anything, and that you can be as offensive or shocking as you want so long as you dress it up as ironic. Trecartin does blackface and says that there is no racial element to his work, which is the most privileged sentiment that I’ve ever heard. You cannot disentangle blackface and racism. Unintentional racism is still racism.
For those of you who perhaps wish to jump to Trecartin’s defense and cite artistic freedom, I am not saying that “Whether Line” shouldn’t exist or that it isn’t art. Of course it’s art, and Trecartin has every right to create anything that he wants. I just don’t believe that the ideology which Trecartin represents should inspire future generations of artists or define contemporary ones — for myself, “Whether Line” is antithetical to good art.
What I am arguing for is emphasizing a different kind of art. Art that is historically-aware and leverages symbols tastefully. Art that is forward-thinking and doesn’t glorify the worst aspects of our present culture. Art that makes you think, which makes you laugh, which makes you cry. Most of all, I want art that means something, unabashedly and unironically.
