distraction

quotes from the art of cruelty by maggie nelson

"trecartin's 2007 feature-length video, I-Be Area, while nominally based on the concept of 'virtual reality,' is a riotous exploration of what kinds of space, identity, physicality, language, sexuality, and consciousness might make possible once one leaves the dichotomy of the virtual and the real behind, along with a whole host of other need-not-apply binaries (the everyday and the apocalyptic, the public and the private, the utopic and the dystopic, male and female, gay and straight, among them)."

"'i love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people,' trecartin has said, and his works aim to immerse viewers in this failed-to-upload state. the disorientation of this state is not that of grandpa befuddled by a fistful of printer cables, but rather the sort of psychological and physiological stupefaction more often associated with acid overdoses and schizoid breakdowns.

I-Be Area takes incapacity - to absorb, to make sense, to cohere, to sort, to concentrate - as its starting point. . . then it amplifies this incapacity by turning up the speed, the color, the hysteria, the flicker. image or speech overflow is no longer a problem, and certainly not one that art could or should aid in solving. . . it is our 'abstract plot of now,' as he calls it. trecartin's ability to sustain us here for some real time often feels like a miracle, in that such an ability seems as if it should be, by definition, also beyond the artist. that is to say, the art often feels as if it is moving faster than trecartin himself could be - which is likely why his films, when combined with his youth (I-Be Area was finished when he was twenty-six), have had something of an awe-inducing effect on the art world."

"koestenbaum notes that trecartin's work is about radical distraction. . . but recartin's brand of distraction doesn't rely on any simple use of the imitative fallacy - that is, 'contemporary life is mind-scrambling, fragmented, and distracted, so my art must be mind-scrambling, fragmented, and distracted, too.' it is too tightly orchestrated for that - too layered, too well performed, too purposefully edited, too intelligently perverse. however bawdy and hysterical, trecartin's videos draw tight rings of action: they are condensed, fast-moving world creations that make an intense demand on our attention. and the animating paradox of this world, as koestenbaum has put it, is that 'trecartin's characters concentrate on distraction.' however frenetic I-Be Area may be, its distraction is not of the same order as that of, say, the idiotic pop-up balloons and crawling tickers that have become staples of the television screen. to stay with I-Be Area all the way through - to listen to every word, to follow every decision and cut - requires a keen effort. you'll get the most out of it if you, too, can concentrate on distraction.

of course, you may not remember much of what happened; you may not remember any of the characters; you may not even be left with an image. if your experience resembles mine, you'll be left with something far more amorphous - a kind of vibrating memory of the unnerving psychic state the work induced, or captured, or invented (and, perhaps, a notebook full of scrawled lines that sounded great at the time, such as 'my personal really concise pussy is developing a very inner monologue which i will not reveal to you as i become dynamic')."

"both foreman and trecartin work from a conception of the human, or the 'real,' borne out of contradiction, fluctuation, incoherence, and perversity; both offer immersion in their vision without rehashing the avant-garde fetish of terrorizing the audience or the mainstream one of chaperoning it. 'we abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single, dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks,' foreman has said. 'but what i try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.'"