Ladies and Gentlemen: bienvenue. We are the Artfag.

And while we have not been gripped by election fever, it’s certainly been quite the eventful ride, has it not? Although, as usual, the United States has demonstrated their unparalleled knack for spectacle, completely outshining our penny-ante little horse race. (Did we ever have an election like that in the True North, Strong and Free?) And the Canadian cynicism regarding elections managed even to extend itself to our neighbours to the south; we were perambulating down Queen Street on U.S. election night, and overheard a young lass utter the following, while lazily (and perhaps, to be fair, drunkenly) dragging on a cigarette: “Yeah, it’s great and all that. How long before he’s assassinated?” The first agent of hopeful change in the U.S. since the turn of the millennium, the first black head of state in the Western world, not president elect for even 5 minutes, and she’s already over it.

What we like: rejoicing in the crisp autumnal air; wool peacoats; that delightful new twist on the classic brogue.

How we are: Over it, but still delighted.

What we don’t like: sunset at 4pm; raking; the herpes-like rash of benefit art auctions at this time of year (honestly, can’t these people write a grant proposal?).

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The opening of the Toronto Free Gallery’s All Power to the People! Graphics of the Black Panther Party, 1966-1974, was attended, albeit inadvertently, by a series of events: the announcement that the minority Conservative government would cut a number of arts-funding programs, the subsequent foundation of the Department of Culture, and the dissolution of the aforementioned government. The display of Emory Douglas’ posters had, of course, nothing to do with our national political to-ings and fro-ings, but the confluence of these proceedings lent a peculiar resonance to each other and began, in our fine selves, an extended bout of pontification.

But first, the art. We had yet to make our way up to the newest digs of the Toronto Free Gallery, in the newly upwardly mobile neighbourhood of Bloor and Lansdowne. Surely the most exciting thing about this vernissage was that we recognized almost no one. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, if an opening on the Queen West strip was packed to bursting by a mob of aged Portuguese homeowners. Surely the utter improbability of this attests to just how radically changed is this little ‘hood, and how at odds the conquering galleries are with its longtime residents. We mean nothing by this, other than to point out how shocking – and how refreshing, and how utopian, in some sense – it was to see a gallery opening attended by its forced adoptive community.

The content of the show surely had a huge part to play in this; we have a hard time imagining that same crowd having much patience for some abstruse video installation. And Mr. Douglas’ efforts as Minister of Culture on behalf of his party are as engaging and inspiring as the party itself. There is not much to dissect in these posters; they are all meant as propaganda, a call to arms, a means of fomenting indignation, fury, resistance in the face crushing poverty, social neglect and politically institutionalized repression. Needless to say, subtlety and (to use that most disgusting of neologisms) multiplicities of meaning were not the order of the day. They are bold and baldly confrontational, both graphically and in their content. Colour schemes (no doubt limited by the budget of an underground organization) are mono or dichromatic: black on white, black and red on white; blocky, thick all-caps (or block-lettered handwritten) typefaces loaded with multiple underlines and exclamation marks, frequent underlining and italicizing. Beyond the announcement of rallies, of conveying practical information, there is only one message: LOOK AT ME! THEY ARE KILLING US AND YOU HAVE TO LOOK AT ME!

There are touches of ‘60s psychedelic posters here and there (in the almost Op-Art application of LetraTone), some irresistible affinities with Cuban, Chinese and Soviet propaganda posters (viz. the recurring motif of radiating blocks of red, a streamlined, modernist sun), but the graphic mode that most immediately informs these posters is the comic book. This is not a coincidence; consider that, in its distillation of text and image, of time and action and narrative within a procession of discrete frames, the comic book is the form of literature that most of us come to first. Because of this admixture, it is also the form most suited to hyperbolic shorthand. Consider, also, that the comic book ultimately has its root in religious paintings and stained-glass church windows; they might be made of blown glass and wrought iron, but those vast processions of the Passion Play that line the stone walls of any medieval cathedral were essentially comic books; a means of distilling a complex narrative into a series of episodes that could be broadly understood. So too are the Black Panther posters.

The show was also expertly curated, juxtaposing the posters with other literature and ephemera of the Black Panthers, and it included what is, for our money, the single most important document to come out of the American radical left in the 20th century, and that has yet to find its equal. We refer to Huey P. Newton’s letter to his fellow Panthers, professing the importance of fellowship with the feminist movement and the queer rights movement. Not only is its logic inarguable – a civil rights movement is a civil rights movement is a civil rights movement – but, in its plain-spoken deconstruction of homophobia and misogyny, it is a document of shocking vulnerability. Mr. Newton minces no words: hatred of queers is a terror at the failing of one’s own masculinity. Hatred of women is an excess of faith in one’s own masculinity. Mr. Newton is also candid about his own feelings: he has homophobia and misogyny within him, but the recognition of a common humanity, and far more importantly, the need to strive to even be considered as human, must eclipse these petty jealousies of self and power. If the utter chic and flawless fashion sense of the Black Panther uniform weren’t enough of an incentive, that letter always makes want us to don a beret and pump our fist in the air.

It occurs to us that that particular strain of American-left civil resistance has died. That willingness to break the law and risk confrontation with the force of a government seems dissipated in North America. Watching the news after George W. Bush was elected for his second term, we felt sure that there would be massive, widespread rioting; nary a peep. And then, when the second Iraq war was declared, the giant protest march that made its way through Manhattan seemed to signify nothing more than everyone’s desire to chant and comfortably go home. Of course, the real irony lies in the fact that the Black Panthers were a perfect embodiment of the spirit behind the Second Amendment to the American Constitution. The reason that every citizen of the United States has a right to bear arms is that the founding fathers wished to build into their country’s legislation a very basic means for citizens to overthrow their government, should the need arise. Thus, in its own bizarre way, violent resistance is entrenched as a constitutional right.

To shift focus above the 49th parallel: with the news of impending funding cuts to Canadian arts, what brand of resistance has emerged? There was the “Faceless For the Arts” “campaign,” wherein deeply concerned souls bravely and selflessly went without their Facebook profile pictures. Ooh, the sting, the bite of righteous anger! Conservative MPs nationwide (who, of course, were friends with these faceless souls, and thus had access to their profile pages) wept with soul-wracked regret – what hath they wrought?! – reeling from the shock that only a picture-less Facebook profile could instill! We were told that theatre people thought this up; hell hath no fury like a thespian scorned. We were curious to see what the Department of Culture would get up to, or, in the best of cases, get themselves into. The lightning speed of their organization, and the crowd that attended their inaugural meeting at the Town Hall on Queen St West, seemed the stuff of great promise. Arts funding to be cut! An election looms! What is to be done? Make videos! Wait: make videos? Really? Organize a music concert! Are you sure?

And that is largely what the Department of Culture did. While video-making isn’t in and of itself a bad idea (in another format, we believe they are referred to as campaign advertisements), the kind produced by the Dept. and their ilk were, in fact, in and of themselves a bad idea. YouTube overfloweth with Department-sponsored 30-second anti-Conservative spots, and a few gorge-raising 1 minute videos which, along with their breathtaking condescension to suburban voters, are paragons of the kind of fanciful entitlement, simpleminded stridency and glib smugness which people use to caricature and discredit the Left (and which apparently plagues Canada’s theatrical community). Instead of spending time convincing voters why exactly they should be funding, for instance, artist’s travels abroad (which, to our mind, is not a hard case to make) Darren O’Donnell & Co. accuse Stephen Harper of not liking other people’s children (because he opposes the Kyoto Protocols). And in yet another stunning display of kindergarten debating skills, they call him “a little stupid, a little bit of a bigot [and] not fit to govern this country” because of a bit of verbiage attributed to Mr. Harper in which he might have insulted Asians, recent immigrants and the urban, cosmopolitan left (only in Canada would one passive-aggressively temper a blatant insult with “a little bit”). We say “might have” because said verbiage was neither quoted nor cited, and thus, according to current MLA rules, does not even pass muster as a paraphrase. In effect, Mr. O’Donnell said that Mr. Harper said that; mere tattle-tale gossip. Each of these videos ends with the ever-so-pithy phrase “Not Him. Not Now. Not Ever Again” juxtaposed over a photo of Mr. Harper wearing a cowboy hat. Did no one think that, should one want to sway Conservative voters, mocking their leader by showing him in a silly hat is counterproductive, as it only underscores one’s condescension to him, and by extension, them?

Of course, the Conservatives maintained their minority government. We are not sure whom the Department of Culture attempted to convince or convert; from where we sit, it rather looks like their pulpits were squarely faced towards the choir. But aside from arousing a sense of solidarity amongst what amounts to a small collection of Torontonians, they have not accomplished much, save for further propagating the idea that artists are an isolated group of urban know-it-alls, contemptuous of anyone whose weekly schedule is not comprised of grant writing, gallery going, or theatre attendance. The real question is, what will the Department of Culture do next? Was their existence confined to a spasm of childish indignation spanning merely and only an election whose outcome was more or less certain?

To draw a parallel with the Black Panthers is mightily unfair and grossly impolitic, but we will say this, in the most general way possible: the Black Panthers saw a danger, and attempted to confront it by the most direct means. The Department of Culture recognizes a danger, too; certainly, there is enough evidence on public record to cast suspicion on Mr. Harper. He certainly finds little significance in the arts: famously, in a campaign speech in Saskatoon, quoted in newspapers Canada-wide, he justified his cuts by declaring the arts an elitist pursuit, a niche unvalued by “ordinary Canadians” (everybody but Heaven knows who they might be). If the activities of the Black Panthers were limited to Emory Douglas’ posters, they would not have accomplished much of anything. Similarly, a series of self-righteous YouTube videos will not convince a government (or its supporters) to alter their attitude to what they see as an overly entitled and overly sheltered micro-community, much less amend their economic legislation. Let us contextualize our comparison before it escapes us: arts funding cuts does not constitute systemic oppression, and one does not take up arms or damage property over them. The Black Panthers responded to their adversaries in kind. The question to be answered by the Department of Culture, and by all Canadian artists, is what is an equal and appropriate response to this government? And darlings, while you ponder, here’s a hint to help you on your way: they don’t spend much, if any, time on either Facebook or YouTube.

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The Pleasure Dome collective has a bizarrely expressed sense of ambition. As part of their juicy fall/winter season, collectively entitled “A Lower World,” and featuring such film and video luminaries as Mike Kelley (meh) and Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, they promised (and delivered) a screening of Ryan Trecartin’s latest feature-length opus, I-Be Area. Although for some reason, they scheduled it around dinnertime on Canadian Thanksgiving Sunday. Quite the gaffe, if you ask us, but still, we thought half-seriously to ourselves: anyone who enjoys Ryan Trecartin doesn’t really have a family anyway. Well, judging by the field of chairs at the Latvian House scantily peppered with people, that serious half was entirely wrong, at which point we began wondering just where the priorities of the young fags happen to be these days. While we wish we could castigate the Youth of Today for their banal familial mis-prioritizing, we can’t definitively declare that missing I-Be Area was a Dreadful Mistake. After all, it is available in full, on both YouTube and Ubuweb.

Providing a detailed summary of I-Be Area is much like providing a detailed summary of the rest of Mr. Trecartin’s oeuvre; certainly possible, but one runs the risk of sounding like someone given abrupt leave of their senses (“so there was a guy with a yellow face, and then he became a girl with a yellow face, but with long hair and gym shorts…”). By now, darlings, we have watched I-Be Area two and half times, and while we do feel like we’ve just been run over by about five rollercoasters, we are no nearer to providing a cogent synopsis. To say that the plot is loose is akin to saying that the Eiffel Tower is tallish. Still, there are threads and themes, the grandest of which is Command-C and -V (or Control-C and -V for those who are not goose-stepping along with the Apple army): the copy and paste functions; in other words, cloning, replication, avatars, multiple selves. It has also to do with the exercise and application of these themes: adoption, the internet, on-line profiles, and chatrooms. These latter two are especially important, as they provide what could loosely be described as the setting for I-Be Area. As near as we can make out, this is to what the title specifically refers. Each character in the video has their own allotted space, or Area, and much of the vertiginous atmosphere that engulfs the viewer like a fever dream comes from the representation of these spaces: at once claustrophobic and cluttered; tight, cramped little spaces, gaudily painted and garishly lit, each populated, if not by one or two people, then a single minded collective.

Mr. Trecartin’s 100-odd minute opus jetés manically from room to room. The main narrative arc concerns the identity dilemma (or, in Trecartin’s southern-fag drawl, “diii-layeh-maauuh”) of I-Be 2 (Mr. Trecartin), the second in a series of clones named I-Be. He finds no affinity with his previous incarnation (who has become a woman, and rechristened herself You Me Me You), and his on-line avatar has taken on a life of his own. Although this distinction between what goes on in front of the screen and on the screen is virtually moot in I-Be Area. Thus, he embarks on a quest for identity. At its core, I-Be Area is a picaresque tale of self-discovery and self-creation, and bears a striking structural resemblance to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I-Be 2 cycles through identity after identity, and like Huck down the Mississippi, wanders from Area to Area, and so we meet a slew of characters: the den mother of the I-Bes (who, by the by, is the best actress of her generation – she is the only performer who does not attempt to mimic Trecartin’s über-queeny-sassy-fag-on-speed delivery; she translates the idiosyncrasies of his script into a kind of Tennessee Williams heroine performing beat poetry, and all we can say is that Meryl Streep has nothing on her), the I-Be Adoption Agency staff, Cheetah and Jammie (I-Be 2’s entourage), a young boy named Django (who grows up to become a clone named Pasta, also played by Mr. Trecartin, who looks like Linda Blair in a blonde page-boy wig), a preternaturally dramatically gifted baby named Polly, The Everymom (a troupe of adoption-crazy lesbians), a grating creature in pink gym shorts and six-inch platform heels named Ramada Omar, Jamie the pregnant drama teacher/goth band frontwoman who isn’t really pregnant, and on and on and on.

The introduction and subsequent disposal of these characters follows the narrative logic of channel surfing; they appear (or, more aptly, flounce) on screen suddenly, and disappear without warning. But we always see them in their Area, and as the film wears on, the Areas, and the boundaries between them, are violently destroyed: rooms are painted black, windows are smashed, objects thrown in and out, walls torn down in a grinning, laughing, wide-eyed orgy of hopped-up unleashing of frantic energy.

Trecartin’s pacing only goes at one speed: faster. Like a freight train chugging to life at the top of a steep decline, I-Be Area is languid at first; whole minutes go by without a cut. But as the movie progresses, scenes are choppier and choppier, dialogue (whose pitch is sped up and slowed down at will) overlaps more and more, until the final scenes end up as an anarchic riot of cuts and cacophony, a screaming blur of relentlessly jumping images, a Babel of crashes and shrieks and maniacal giggles. It’s exhausting.

So what is to be made of the hour and forty-eight minute stretch of I-Be Area? When we attempt to illuminate the vast and varied thematic territory that he traverses, one might easily be led to believe that Mr. Trecartin’s candied hysteria operates in the service of some sort of commentary. After all, the thematic core of his work is always tight as a drum; adoption, cloning, identity, the internet, profile pages: these are by no means wildly disparate subjects. Indeed, if Mr. Trecartin’s grasp of the conceptual map of his universe were not iron-clad, his videos would be unwatchable. Zany is as good a performative mode as any, but it is a poor organizational method. No: we the viewer are taken on a very carefully controlled path. Its iconography might be the nth degree of a highly individualized eccentricity, but it follows an internal logic. The one thing this is not, and must not be confused for, however, is a critical statement, and Mr. Trecartin is not a polemicist.

It is a mistake to ascribe politics, critical or otherwise, to Mr. Trecartin. If his characters flip in and out of identities (and baroque make-up jobs and dollar-store wigs and Salvation Army get-ups) with the ease of shuffling playing cards, zigging into another gender or zagging out of gender altogether, it is not because Mr. Trecartin is championing a kind of political consciousness. He is merely displaying his inner reality, where outer Reality (or, as Huck might have put it, “sivilization”) has no bearing. In the video-space he creates, there is no consequence to these characters’ queer transgressions; no one argues with them, no one questions them, no one even comments upon them. The people in his videos barely even talk to each other; they talk only to the camera and are subsequently reacted to. There is no outside world and so its conventions of time, space, narrative, and identity have no need to apply; Reality has been abandoned for the funhouse of Trecartin-land, where only the rule is the anarchic Wonderland logic of his internal universe.

The surest signal of this lack of polemic drive and political intent is the kind of dialogue that Mr. Trecartin, in the span of two feature videos and one short, has made utterly his own, to the extent that we find it hard to accurately describe. It is a goulash of slangs and affectations: campy gay, Valley-girl, southern belle (and southern redneck), urban black. It is a babble dialect consisting entirely of abbreviations, shorthands, in-jokes, punchlines, soundbytes and song lyrics, whose syntax is mannerism, and whose grammar is artifice. It even has registers, like Cantonese, only its registers are the gradient between the highest and lowest limits of a pitch controller. Every utterance of every character in Mr. Trecartin’s videos is in this mode. Seriousness, drama, import: these are, if not anathema, then certainly alien to Mr. Trecartin’s language. His dialogue clips along like a series of rapid-fire text messages; there is no time, but more importantly, there is no space for genuineness of affect, or meaning, or any kind. There is only a back-and-forth of one-liners, whose inanity slowly vanishes as it becomes familiar, and habitual.

The result of the anarchic logic and flip, mannered dialogue that are the principal components of Mr. Trecartin’s universe is that any meaning is delivered as if it were meaningless. Thus, because of this misfire, this gap between the spoken word and the substance it purports to communicate, there seems to be a yawning void that lurks behind the colour and the shrieking and the mania. But Mr. Trecartin is not a nihilist: one does not create these varied sets, establish these elaborate narratives that branch and twist and lurch, assemble a vast troupe of people, have them perform like an overloaded synapse, and edit the entire lunatic happening into an hour and forty-eight minute feature for nothing. Things of import do happen in I-Be Area, and in Trecartin-land. Concepts are, if not elucidated, then fenced around, poked at, pulled like taffy, and turned inside out. In short, politics, thematics, concepts: they are all subject to the same gravity as Mr. Trecartin’s dialogue, and the same physical laws as his characters – that is to say, none. They might be meaningful, but they are also infinitely malleable.

I-Be Area is not uniformly engaging, nor consistently good. Mr. Trecartin has yet to master the pacing of a feature-length video; there are parts that lag, parts that are flabby, parts that pedal as fast as they can but go nowhere. This is in some respect due to his performers. He himself is a captivating and energetic presence, but in a style this mannered and manic, one bleary routine can ruin a scene. Mr. Trecartin’s videos are ensemble pieces, after all, and thus, he is heavily dependent on his actors, and not all of them operate or captivate at the same level. There are those who can meet the demands of his dialogue and his situations, and there are those who simply can’t, who do not have the force of personality to play to the camera at a fevered pitch that is difficult to sustain. Rapid cuts and a twitchy finger on the pitch control can only compensate for so much. But this is only his second feature, and it already marks an evolutionary step beyond A Family Finds Entertainment; his universe is being further fleshed out, and one is beginning to get the hang of Trecartin-land. The subtleties of his dialogue are beginning to emerge. A Family Finds Entertainment was basically an elaboration of a simple set-up; I-Be Area does far more daring and complex things with narrative than its predecessor; a storyline that branches and re-branches and circles back on itself, lurching forward and backward in time. The reaction to Mr. Trecartin via A Family Finds Entertainment was fuelled by the shock of its discovery; here was something startling, something dazzling and effervescent that issued forth like the shrill screech of a banshee from a hitherto-unknown; here was some dizzy child of Jack Smith spewing out his frenzied choreographies out into the maw of the internet. But shock and novelty cannot sustain careers. If anything, I-Be Area is a profoundly encouraging sophomore move from Mr. Trecartin, for not only does it signal that his principles – the insistence on his sprawling cast of friends, on a dumpster-drag aesthetic – have thus far survived his art world translation from nowhere to epicentre; in its honeycombed conceptual structure, its narrative sprawl, it signals that his vision and his ambitions have expanded, and it signals that he has yet greater, yet more hectic things in store for us.

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