Ryan Trecartin. Junior War, 2013; video still; HD video; 24:08. Courtesy of The New Inquiry, New York.

The first work, Junior War, consists of repurposed footage shot during the artist’s senior year of high school in Ohio. Inspired by The Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin used a Handycam with a night-vision lens to film the euphoric vandalism that occurred during the bacchanalian ritual of Senior-Junior War, which is exactly what it sounds like: classes battling each other in a series of drunken misdemeanors. The footage is edited with Trecartin’s signature freneticism, and as we are jarringly bounced between the greenish frames, an ominous bass line increasingly hints at the approach of an impending catastrophe. But this never materializes, and much of the destruction we witness is either futile (kids repeatedly bang on metal mailboxes that just won’t break) or funny (television sets get thrown out of car windows and shatter on the sidewalk amid the laughter of boisterous, intoxicated perpetrators). The film is a quasi-anthropological investigation into the unleashing of human nature’s animalistic side (destruction as a creative act is a recurrent theme in Trecartin’s work) and how the presence of the camera, right before the era of ubiquitous self-documentation on social-media platforms, affects the behavior of these teenagers.

Ryan Trecartin. Comma Boat, 2013; video still; HD video; 37:42. Photo: Allegra Krasznekewicz.

This exploration of the camera’s presence and the type of performances it induces is continued and deepened during Comma Boat, in which Trecartin plays a garishly painted and ludicrously controlling director in the process of shooting a movie. In this extravagant, grating parody, a character holds a camera in nearly every frame, and visual communication is the only means of individual expression and validation. “I don’t believe in journals anymore—I write things on the back of my eye,” declares Trecartin’s character, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with an eye and the words “WITNESS © 360,” in a particularly potent one-line manifesto. Though the behavior of Comma Boat’s characters is an exaggeration of today’s brand of techno-narcissism, there is nothing that blatantly indicates they are not human. This changes in CENTER JENNY, in which Trecartin transports us to an ambiguous, post-human future in which a horde of squealing, screaming, singing tweens (most named Jenny and all descended from animations) are enmeshed in a competition–audition that fuses a video game with a sorority rush. The ultimate goal is the imitation of a paradigmatic Jenny who has transcended to a higher existential plane. In this bizarre caste system, these aspiring, uniformed imitators are distinguished and ranked by how far along they are in the Jenny-becoming process; here, self-actualization is achieved through totalizing homogenization. But in characteristic Trecartin style, this “plot” completely abandons linearity and logical causality; instead, it is horizontally hyperlinked and aggressively nonhierarchical. Post-production editing reinforces this overarching drama of manic metamorphosis, cutting up and splicing together the action at a breakneck speed. Dialogue is largely supplanted by monologic rants and bombastic declaratives spat directly into the camera, oscillating between nonsense and profundity. However, amid this anarchy we are given a loose historical timeline that locates us more firmly in this semi-apocalyptic future. During one scene, a male professor delivers a history lesson of sorts to a gaggle of Jennys in green bikinis, and evolution is a key theme of their conversation. “Back during the human era, dinosaurs evolved into chickens. This is a fact,” spouts the professor. “We have evolved from animations, those are our ancestors.”  In response, one Jenny states: “Like, the further we all move away from humanity, sexism just becomes, like, the coolest style.” The chunky television sets and mailboxes of Junior War mirror the now-irrelevant human constructs and classifications in the grotesque humanoid world of CENTER JENNY; both are relics of a bygone era.

Ryan Trecartin. CENTER JENNY, 2013; video still; HD video; 53:15. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Item Falls, the most atmospheric and seemingly plotless of all the movies, takes this Trecartinian evolutionary scheme to its most extreme, as the work seems to be a representation of the next existential level to which all Jennys aspire. Constructed sets give way to virtual environments where characters’ avatars walk silently through air like zombies. We repeatedly watch human forms dissolve into animations as the boundaries between the technological and the human explode and disintegrate. The evolution of our relationship with the camera parallels the evolution of humans into animation-based cyborgs. In Junior War, protests against the camera’s presence are rampant, with variations on the line “Don’t film me!” insistently puncturing the action’s flow. At the same time, individuals are also motivated by the desire to act for the camera, but these performances are awkward and uncertain (“Let’s fuck shit up…that’s the phrase, right?” a boy asks), representing a gangly evolutionary hybrid somewhere between dinosaur and chicken. Over the course of the next three works, hyperconsciousness of the camera becomes characters’ default state, and its presence does not inhibit but rather intensifies animalistic behavior. This continues to the point where technology is completely internalized and the objective of existence is to successfully audition for the camera. The ultimate implications of this progression are sinister; a techno-skeptic Trecartin seems to suggest that the product of this constant surveillance (and consequently, constant performance in front of surveillance devices) is collective brainwashing and cultural homogenization. This is a much darker view than the one reflected in the artist’s earlier works, where the technology-afforded, post-physical freedom of endless mutability is celebrated as a way of eroding and transcending the confinement of historical and societal constructs. For Trecartin, technology has now become another means of entrapment.

Ryan Trecartin. Item Falls, 2013; video still; HD video; 25:44. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Junior War (2013), Comma Boat (2013), CENTER JENNY (2013), and Item Falls, all films by Ryan Trecartin, were screened at LACMA on March 25, 2014.

Allegra Krasznekewicz is a recent graduate of Yale University, where she majored in art history with a focus on new media art and wrote her thesis on Ryan Trecartin. She currently lives in San Francisco and works at Pier 24 Photography.

David Altmejd. The Flux and the Puddle, 2014; Plexiglas, quartz, polystyrene, expandable foam, epoxy clay, epoxy gel, resin, synthetic hair, clothing, leather shoes, thread, mirror, plaster, acrylic paint, latex paint, metal wire, glass eyes, sequin, ceramic, synthetic flowers, synthetic branches, glue, gold, feathers, steel, coconuts, aqua resin, burlap, lighting system including fluorescent lights, Sharpie ink, wood; 129 x 252 x 281 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

In the fractured landscape of the labyrinth, Altmejd’s figures exist in a mirage, suspended simultaneously between past, present, and future (1). The vitrine is populated by fantastic archetypes of werewolves, clay golems, and profane angels, but the mythology of the landscape is undercut by uncanny touches such as a partially disembodied, blue-sequined dress framed by sculpted pineapples. As if teleported from the wreckage of a copacabana, the blue dress is a signifier of our world—it appears as if pulled out of close time. In Altmejd’s vitrine, time itself becomes spatial, three dimensional, repetitive, redundant, twisted, and folded back in upon its own permutations. As Altmejd’s sculpted human forms work to create more copies of themselves, and as clear plastic becomes mistaken for mirrors shattered with a terrifying deliberation, the viewer’s sense of any kind of primary referent is irreparably distorted.

I happen to have a personal neurosis about fruit that colored my reading of the exhibition. Fruit is a kind of repulsive substance to me, most likely because I associate it with rapid decay. Fruit has a very limited shelf life, and due to personal-hygiene obsessions, I am often paranoid that it is already spoiled before I even put it in my mouth. I think the kind of “juice” of Altmejd’s fruit is wrapped up in this sense of hyper-tactility and aliveness that I often feel when I consider fruit. In the absurd web of my unconscious, personal anxieties about fruit are connected to anxieties about bugs—and fittingly enough, many of Altmejd’s fake melons, seemingly left out to spoil behind the gaping vitrines, are crawling with cartoon-like ants. Decay is cartoonishly removed from the rancid, revulsive process of decay itself. Decay is, as it were, preserved, and Altmejd’s resin starts to appear more like formaldehyde.

David Altmejd. The Eve, 2014; Plexiglas, polystyrene, expandable foam, quartz, epoxy clay, epoxy gel, synthetic hair, glass eye, resin, coconuts, steel, sesame seeds, synthetic flower, synthetic branch, flock, metal wire, lighting system including fluorescent lights, thread; 119 x 96 x 157 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery.

The vitrine is a fraught cultural object intertwined with the legacies of science and the freak show. Vitrines have been historically used to showcase biological samples both for research and for the practice of exploiting medical oddities for the purpose of entertainment. Altmejd’s figures, who often possess fully formed human-like hands attached to amorphous bodies of clay, are in the process of making themselves. As if at work in some kind of factory, two dark gray figures bend over a third dark body laid upon a clear work table and play with rivers of semen: a creation myth. Are they at work creating new bodies? Conducting genetic experiments? Like a scenario straight out of The X-Files, some unknown and not-quite-inhuman logic motivates the factory’s production. Altmejd’s factory workers are caught between a specimen’s jar, a freak’s cage, and a ringleader’s circle, the vitrine a house for hackneyed creators arrested in the process of fabricating their own world.

These humanoid figures are sometimes so realistic as to convincingly imitate life, and sometimes appear as Frankensteined cartoons with melting faces and gaping, crystallized head wounds. In this alternate myth of evolution, the end point of growth seems to lie where Altmejd’s glass-eyed heads morph into organic crystal formations in places where they have been hacked open and caved in. As his figures decay, they glitter into magic matter. New Age crystals signify transcendence, metaphysics, but also an organic connection to deep earth. Do these figures evolve toward a hyper-celestial realm, or further downward into the earth’s core? Without a published press release, and with the exhibition’s title scrawled childishly on the wall by the artist with a ballpoint pen, we are left on our own to embellish Altmejd’s cryptic, fractured fantasy. Between illusions and allusions we cannot be certain. We can only consume in awe, awash in the anxiety brought on by Altmejd’s simulacra of ripeness.

Juices will be on view at Andrea Rosen through March 8th.

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(1) As Altmejd explains, for example: “The ‘bodybuilder’ is a body that shapes itself by moving matter around with its own hands. He can grab material from his thigh and drag it up to his head to make it bigger. If he displaces a lot of matter upward, and makes it accumulate behind his shoulders, he will create wings and become a ‘watcher’ (angel). The ‘werewolf’ is a body, inside of which I can explore and create tensions. I find that kind of body/space very energetic. The ‘giant’ is a figure that becomes a space (architecture, landscape).”