- Venue
- Elizabeth Dee Gallery
- Location
Plastic isn’t very precious. It’s commercially inexpensive and synthetic – partially why it is so phenomenally widespread. The famous property of plastic is it’s ability to accurately appropriate any conceivable form – it is the physical manifestation of ‘potential’. As such, the term plastic is commonly also used to express versatility in things beyond material substances. Could there be something about the nature of this property itself that constitutes to the perception of cheapness or superficiality about plastic? The point at which versatility and potential fall from grace to become formlessness – a hollow, nondescript void.
Formlessness as an idea has many negative personalities. Formless is muddy, wishy-washy and indecisive. What is the value of a thing without structure? A sprawling landfill site might rival a Gothic cathedral in terms of sheer excessiveness but without rhythm, pattern and logic how could it ever feel ‘magnificently excessive’ the way that Gothic architecture does? This said, I recently discovered an artist called Ryan Trecartin. For me, his work somehow disreputes, or at least confuses this analogy. Is it even a useful analogy? Trecartin makes videos that appear to be extremely superficial and trashy. They’re cheap and throwaway in every possible sense, yet because they’re so overwhelmingly excessive and structureless they somehow transcend this superficiality. They become epic, even magnificent, plastic landscapes.
Upon viewing his video, ‘I-Be AREA’ (107 minutes, 2007) I found myself having difficulty trying to follow the story or understanding the visual language. I think that the issue wasn’t caused by the absence of narrative or style (it’s by no means an ‘abstract’ film) but rather it was from an excessive saturation of these things – they effectively spurt out all over the place. The characters seem to maniacally prattle out hundreds of stylized ‘ways of talking’ throughout the video and the sets and costumes are a similarly epic mishmash of styles. It’s like all the cheesiest low-brow mannerisms of internet and blogging culture have been fudged together and condensed. The internet itself could be seen as the epitome of formlessness – a vast unrelated mash of human perspectives. But maybe it’s just such a deep and accurate account of these perspectives that they’re too much to bear when considered together as a whole, and they fall into incomprehension.
Trecartin has done something that I have been cautious about doing with my work – he has posted the entirety of ‘I-be AREA’ onto Youtube.com (although his video has also been widely screened in galleries). Because of this, both the video and it’s medium, the internet, appear to be in a state of osmosis – ideas and forms flow freely between them through a semi-permeable membrane. In the video, for example, the action revolves around a central area that Trecartin describes as:
“…a bedroom/classroom/drama-department/blog-space/internet-community site where the characters malfunction in the face of everything being everything and come to act on their own creative potential.” 1
So this focal ‘area’ is quite eerily undefinable. Like trying to grasp water, it’s runny and it slips through your fingers. It may be more useful to think of it as a landscape. For instance, it’s generally taken for granted that landscapes are composed of many different types of terrain and are in themselves formless. They require inhabitants and terraforming before being named and defined as ‘landscapes’ at all.
The characters that inhabit Trecartin’s landscape are endemically nascent. Constantly on the cusp of discovering some utopian futuristic epiphany but never quite there. Perhaps their plasticity is manifested literally too. The characters are so extensively decorated with superficial colours and nylon wigs that they become like plastic caricatures of themselves. As Roland Barthes describes, “Plastic is wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used…The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself…”2 The implications of Barthes statement are potentially quite frightening. What do we really end up with when no real material truth is possible beyond it’s own facsimile?
Perhaps I’m relying too much on there readily existing a binary divide between slippery formlessness and solid structure. It seems impossible to create something structured or formless beyond the perception of them being so by an audience. I can easily differentiate the tone of Trecartin’s videos from that of the television sitcom Friends (1994-2004) because, on the face of it, Friends appears to ‘make sense’ to me where Trecartin’s videos are instead mysterious. However, were Friends shown to a 1920’s audience, it would be perceived as highly ambiguous material, verging towards nonsense. So is the structure, or lack of it, actually dependant on structures already fabricated within the viewer?
This is not to say that structures simply ‘don’t exist’. Instead, it might be more practical to approach their construction and re-construction as an on going process or a continual strive towards some central point of sorts. Jacques Derrida suggests that “…the whole history of the concept of structure…must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre”.3 Admittedly, I’ve found Derrida’s essays to be highly ambiguous, but so is their subject.
Is it then possible at all to discover the internal structure of my own work? If the structure can so readily evade the microscope of analysis and form a new centre, is it worth refocussing? I’ve found that these issues make it very difficult to quantify the successes or shortcomings within art practice. Still, I really like plasticity, at least as a metaphor, because in a liberating way it allows even the most garish superficiality to become epic and magnificent. Things may collapse and reform at such a rate that they transcend their medium. It’s clear that Trecartin’s videos are ‘only videos’ after all, but this constraint dissolves into irrelevance upon realization that they are part of an elaborate ongoing dialogue.
1 ‘Pica event details’ http://www.pica.org/festival_detail_new.aspx?event… [accessed 9th January 2009]
2 Barthes, R. (1957) Mythologies, Les Lettres nouvelles.
3 Derrida,J. (1967) Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge.
I-Be Area online:
