SITUATION #1

With Ryan Trecartin’s Junior War we enter the world of “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties” (New Yorker), virtually through the back door. The film was produced in 2013 as a frenetic re-montage of scenes that Trecartin shot with a handheld camera during his last year of high school. The night-vision lens transforms dancing, drinking, speeding, and joking adolescents into green, shimmering beings with spooky eyes that almost seem to be from another world. They are the radical and real precursors to Trecartin’s post-human, composite beings that later appear in his films and who, part-machine, part-flesh, seem to suffer from verbal diarrhea. The images stem from the time before everyone constantly made films with their smartphone. With alcohol-driven euphoria, the human offspring of Junior War give us the finger and smash a number of things up, all in perfect time with the repeating, happy battle cry: “Let’s fuck shit up!”

Download “Freedom in a Bad Light”, Dietmar Dath’s exclusive essay on Junior War: bit.ly/2rS2GWD

More by Ryan Trecartin/Lizzie Fitch: vimeo.com/trecartin