Rhizome is proud to premiere Ready (Re’Search Wait’s) by Ryan Trecartin, 1/7 of the epic video installation Any Ever which opens at P.S.1 MoMA this Sunday. Watch the video now: Ryan Trecartin
Ready (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010
HD Video, 26:50
courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York In Ready, Wait, played by Trecartin, is introduced as the eponymous figure of the series. Wait waits. He forsakes a “career” in favor of a “job,” the execution of which Trecartin calls a “work performance.” A careerist like Y-Ready (Veronica Gelbaum) may call the shots, but she is locked in her own endless narcissistic ascent, whereas Wait can retire from his job at anytime, and does, only to come back from vacation marked for containment. A third type of worker, Able (Lizzie Fitch), more fluidly adopts and discards the gestures of job and career, positing herself as a hobbyist who contrives the situations and outcomes she needs to keep her wave going. “Transumerism,” or consumerism driven by experience, is introduced as a central theme of Any Ever and underlies the plight of JJ, a painted pant-suited guru with an addiction not mood enhancers, but intangible products that offer transcient psyches wholesale. As JJ imbibes different personalities, a battery of digital filters lifted from commercial editing programs conjure a kaleidoscopic havoc that guides the characters toward calamity. Meanwhile, clashes between painting and digital art and between careerism as a means of actualizing and subverting the self, establish the voice of creativity as a vulnerable protagonist that is taken under fire by the chaos See the other three installments of Re'Search Wait'S this week on DIS magazine, and up next on The Awl and Huffington Post.