T’s Art issue looks at the iconoclastic artists who have found power in saying no.bet168

RYAN TRECARTIN WAS, for a time, one of the most ubiquitous and influential artists of his generation. He seemed to arrive fully formed at age 23 with the 2004 short film “A Family Finds Entertainment,” his senior thesis project at the Rhode Island School of Design. It follows a naïve but troubled character named Skippy as he struggles to escape the stranglehold of domesticity, gets hit by a car, and then is somehow conjured back from the dead.

ImageTrecartin (left) and Fitch, standing in the lazy river at their property in Ohio. Credit...Maddie McGarvey

It was not the film’s plot that would resonate with viewers so much as Trecartin’s creation of a wholly original style, one that looked at once psychedelic and camp, decadent and D.I.Y. Long before being an influencer was seen as a potential career path and TikTok became public access television for a global audience, Trecartin found a way to use digital culture to create his own reality; he seemed to offer the clearest window yet inside the ever-shortening attention span of a mind reared first on MTV and then hurled into the increasingly fraught confines of online discourse. He and his longtime collaborator Lizzie Fitch, 42, a friend he met in the hallways of the RISD dorms (she appears in “A Family Finds Entertainment” as a character called Cosmos Bitch), showed the promise of the internet as a creative medium — while also hinting at its eventual excesses. In the film, and in the ones that followed, Trecartin presents a delirious, disjointed stream of dialogue that sounds like language feeding back on itself until it takes on a new shape. At various points in the film, characters make pronouncements, in a kind of valley girl upspeak, like “I believe somewhere there is something worth dying for and I think it’s amazing,” and talk directly to Trecartin’s consumer-grade camera, vamping in a kind of proto-selfie. He and Fitch were also among the first artists to gain a following through social media: With the help of his mother, he burned and hand decorated hundreds of DVDs of “A Family Finds Entertainment,” and shipped them out to people he met on Friendster, a nearly forgotten pre-Facebook social media network. The film soon became an early hit on a then-novel website called YouTube.

VideoA clip from Trecartin’s 2004 film “A Family Finds Entertainment,” the artist’s breakout work.CreditCredit...Movie by Ryan Trecartin. Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers, and Morán Morán.

The DVD of “A Family Finds Entertainment” also moved through the art world in an almost viral manner. The artist Sue de Beer happened to see it at a party in Cleveland; she alerted Rachel Greene, then the head of the digital arts organization Rhizome, who gave a DVD to the gallerist Elizabeth Dee. She became Trecartin’s dealer and a co-producer of his films. After college, “I waited tables for one year, and then I just had an art career,” he says. In 2010 and 2011, his seven-movie installation “Any Ever” traveled to five separate museums.

For several years, Trecartin and Fitch moved from city to city — Providence, R.I., New Orleans, Oberlin, Ohio, Philadelphia, Miami, the Los Angeles area — setting up makeshift studios in houses they’d share together, filming with a roving group of collaborators and blurring the line between life and art. Before the age of 30, Trecartin had become the rare contemporary artist who was seen as a generational spokesperson, and whose work found an audience much wider than the usually parochial one that attends gallery and museum openings. The New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl described him as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s.” The curator Massimiliano Gioni called his work “a cultural watershed.” On the occasion of a 2011 show at MoMA PS1 in New York, art critic Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, praised Trecartin and Fitch for their forward-thinking style. They “[shred] the false dichotomies and mutually demonizing oppositions that have plagued the art world for decades — between the political and the aesthetic, the conceptual and the formal, high and low, art and entertainment, outsider and insider, irony and sincerity, gay and straight.” The art business is not known for consensus, and yet there was general agreement that Trecartin was one of only a handful of artists who’d changed how we think about art in the early 21st century.

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