I-Be Area

It became the law to go see Ryan Trecartin's video at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery. This happens in NYC sometimes in the Fall--a new film/video/art installation captures the zeitgeist and everyone is told to go--and often for good reason. A couple of years ago, it was the film Tarnation. Everyone went.

So F and I took the crosstown bus on 14th Street all the way to the last stop on the West Side. As F said the meat market now looks like Barney's with the boutiques outdoors. I did want to go to Alexander McQueen, but I knew we had to remain true to our destination.

The video is in the back room, on a large screen, with two large on the left and right wall, so if you sit directly infront of the screen on one of two couches, the images on the screen are partially reflected, but after awhile one barely notices the mirrors. The video is a jaw-dropping experience, funny, frightening, and capturing the exact moment in which people present and sell themselves on line, but videos on Youtube in hopes that it catches fire, and people are convinced that they can upload and download identity. I want to resist making sense of the video and discerning the narrative and the meaning of the video's clever visual effects, but I will admit that I-Be Area is transformative.

Leaving the gallery after watching the 2-hour video (we came in halfway through and stayed to see the beginning), the world had changed. Passerbys looked like they could also have been digital constructions, with profiles where they listed themselves as adoptible, and each was in a reality show where they could be voted off. The colors of the city looked painted on like his studio sets and the building appeared to be facades that could be crushed and smashed as the room and furniture in the film. The kind of meta-hypernarcissism that Tretartin depicts is so much in the air in the last few years of the Bush regime. It is scary and seductive and involving: to think that you can change name, identity, appearance, gender, and enter into some sort of defiant monologue about who you are and what you offer in a video. This is the piece of art that shows more than any other new technology afffects consciousness--what it enables and what it prohibits. Right now, there is nothing like it--it exxagerates the cultural moment and chops it all up and reconfigures it in such a dynamic way.

I left the gallery giddy, disconnected, feeling disembodied, elongated, and as if my face was heavily made up. F and I needed to use the bathroom so we found a nice elegant restaurant in dark colors that helped me come down a bit. But back on the 14th Street bus when people came on the bus they all looked temporary and in transition, on the way to adopting a new persona, flashing their online passwords instead of their private parts.