Ryan Trecartin

Contributions by Christopher Glazek, Bridget Crone, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Ossian Ward. Edited by Paul Luckraft, Maitreyi Maheshwari, and Isabel Venero 

The only book devoted to Priority Innfield, the multi-room installation first exhibited at the 2013 Venice Biennale, this volume offers a number of entry-points into an in-depth consideration of Fitch and Trecartin’s practice. Ossian Ward interviews Lizzie Fitch to draw out the finer points of the artists’ collaborative process and discuss the crucial role of materials and objects in the creation of atmospheres and narratives. Bridget Crone considers the bodies that populate the movies, and how they might symbolize the desire to reach for an allusive freedom from ‘swampy’ structures of control. New York–based poet and teacher Kenneth Goldsmith’s draws attention to the connections between Modernist language experiments and Ryan Trecartin as a writer for the digital age. Christopher Glazek’s close knowledge of the Fitch and Trecartin process allows a reflection on the complex way the contents of their art intersects with real world locations and histories, both personal and political.

Edited by Ellen Blumenstein; essays by Ellen Blumenstein and Thomas Miessgang

On the occasion of the debut of Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin’s sound and video installation Site Visit (2014) at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, this volume features essays by curator Ellen Blumenstein and critic Thomas Miessgang expanding on the work’s themes, structure, and complex sonic composition, as well as an image-based presentation of the exhibition and video.

The six-channel video component of the work was shot in a former Masonic temple in Los Angeles. Inspired by its unusual organization and structure—a five-story warren of large, cavernous rooms akin to a convention center—the movie’s protagonist is the building itself. Echoing the game-like narratives from the movies comprising Priority Innfield (2013), it is the premise-driven context that locates agency and meaning in Site Visit.

Starting as a spatial soundscape, Site Visit unfolded over a number of anterior rooms and evolved into a complex installation in the exhibition hall. In this part of the exhibition space, the artists presented a six-channel video on projection screens situated in a way that mirrors the video’s own 5.1 surround sound, engaging the visual, sonic, and physical fields as a combined object.

Hardcover, 10¼ x 13¾ inches, 160 pages
Published by Walther Koenig, Cologne (2015)

For his first artist book—published to coincide with the exhibition The Los Angeles Project at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in 2014—Trecartin compiled over one hundred composited images he created by mining his personal Instagram and Snapchat feeds, screenshots, and photos, all captured and archived in his phone. While developing several new bodies of work that encompass video, sculpture, and installation (which debuted in Berlin and Los Angeles in late 2014) Trecartin collected images which functioned as both reference material and conceptual pivot points for these expansive group of works. While Yet started with the premise of communicating visually with an audience who does not share the same language or cultural references, it evolved into a creative document of the images and ideas that fuel Trecartin’s artistic process.

Paperback, 6½ x 9 inches, 96 pages
Published by UCCA, Beijing/Walther Koenig, Cologne (2015)

Edited by Kevin McGarry, Foreword by Jeffrey Deitch, Contribution by Lauren Cornell, Kevin McGarry and Linda Norden

“What [Trecartin] has unleashed is larger than himself, which is why both his sudden appearance and continuing evolution are such cause for hope.”—Roberta Smith, New York Times

“The most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties, he is being hailed as the magus of the Internet century.” –Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

Since the debut of his first feature-length video, the 2004 A Family Finds Entertainment, Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) has been hailed as one of the most exciting artists of his generation. His movies layer the visual and the aural in virtuosic combinations of color, form, drama, and montage to produce a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life. This volume, the first monograph on Trecartin, includes extended illustrated sections on his seven-part epic Any Ever, 2009–10, as well as I-Be Area, 2007, and A Family Finds Entertainment. A trio of essays by curators Lauren Cornell, Kevin McGarry, and Linda Norden focus on Trecartin’s repurposing of language, his open-source approach to personality and gender, and his extended amplifications of consumer culture. An interview with Trecartin by artist Cindy Sherman provides a revealing glimpse into his collaborative process.
 

by Lauren Cornell  (Author), Ryan Trecartin  (Author)

Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Skira Rizzoli (March 10, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0847845206

"God bless the New Museum’s tantalizing triennial." —Jerry Saltz, New York magazine

The Generational Triennial is a signature initiative of the New Museum, one of the world’s leading institutions devoted to contemporary art. This acclaimed exhibition of work by emerging artists from around the world provides an important platform for a new generation of artists who are shaping the current discourse of contemporary art and the future of culture. Featuring over fifty artists from thirty countries, the exhibition extends to performances and site-specific projects throughout New York to explore how artists are engaging diverse audiences through their work.The accompanying catalog includes artist statements and their biographies, as well as substantive essays by curators Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin, along with contributions by other international art and cultural critics.

Since the turn of the millennium, the Internet has evolved from what was merely a new medium to a true mass medium-with a deeper and wider cultural reach, greater opportunities for distribution and collaboration, and more complex corporate and political realities. Mapping a loosely chronological series of formative arguments, developments, and happenings, Mass Effect provides an essential guide to understanding the dynamic and ongoing relationship between art and new technologies.

Mass Effect brings together nearly forty contributions, including newly commissioned essays and reprints, image portfolios, and transcribed discussion panels and lectures that offer insights and reflections from a wide range of artists, curators, art historians, and bloggers. Among the topics examined are the use of commercial platforms for art practice, what art means in an age of increasing surveillance, and questions surrounding such recent concepts as "postinternet." Other contributions analyze and document particular works by the artists of And/Or Gallery, Cory Arcangel, DIS, Cao Fei, the Radical Software Group, among others, including an essay by Michael Wang on Ryan Trecartin.

Mass Effect relaunches a publication series initiated by the MIT Press and the New Museum in 1984, which produced six defining volumes for the field of contemporary art. These new volumes will build on this historic partnership and reinvigorate the conversation around contemporary culture once again.

MIT Press and the New Museum of Contemporary Art; 2015; Hardcover; 6.75" x 9.5"; 528 pp; 32 color and 99 b&w illustrations; ISBN 9780262029261