Repeat performance: the art of Catherine Sullivan

ArtForum, Oct, 2003 by Margaret Sundell

You should not drink from the dish, but with a spoon as is proper." So reads a line from a fifteenth-century German book of manners, as cited by Norbert Elias in his classic sociological study The Civilizing Process. But if the spoon figures relatively early in etiquette literature, its use was not widely adopted until the mid-sixteenth century and, even then, only for eating from a communal bowl. The spoon (and the forces of civilization that it represents) comes late as well into the life of Helen Keller, a pivotal figure in the work of Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Sullivan. Keller learned mealtime conduct not from a text but from her teacher, Annie Sullivan, who placed a spoon in the hand of her deaf, blind, and unruly pupil and repeatedly and forcefully guided it from plate to mouth. This dramatic encounter and others like it are the raw material from which Sullivan creates the hybrid of video and performance art that has gained her increasing recognition since her show at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago last year.

Taking up the story of Keller and her teacher, Sullivan turns to its famous enactment by Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft, both onstage and on-screen, in William Gibson's The Miracle Worker (1962)--not a surprising choice, perhaps, given that the thirty-four-year-old artist received formal training as an actress before studying with Mike Kelley at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In its first incarnation in Sullivan's work, Gold Standard (hysteric, melancholic, degraded, refined), 2001, two variations on the scene unfold on adjacent video projections, each featuring two pairs of actors seated at the same obviously modern but generic faux-wood table. Sullivan's performers appear in everyday attire (in theater parlance, "street clothes"). The Helens also sport white pinafores modeled after the one worn by Patty Duke. Sullivan's rendition takes further liberties: On the right-hand screen, a black woman plays Annie, while, in a bit of even more unlikely casting, a wigged and mustachioed man assumes the role of Helen. The couple move through their violent paces: Helen kicks and flails, shoves food into her mouth with her hands, and spits it out in her teacher's face; Annie blocks Helen's attempts at flight, pushes her back into her chair, and forces her, again and again, to grasp the spoon. In comparing this Annie and Helen with their Oscar-winning counterparts, one notices how precisely they mimic the movements of Bancroft and Duke. But, as even this written recounting reveals, with its use of the feminine pronoun to designate a male performer, a significant slippage occurs. The distance between actor and role generated by Sullivan's decontextualization and miscasting of The Miracle Worker's "spoon" scene widens into an unbridgeable gap between action and affect on the screen to the left. There, a male Annie instructs a female but fully adult Helen, whose gestures of resistance and rebellion have been translated into a series of stylized movements reminiscent of postmodern task dance. The actions displayed on each screen, although in some sense the "same," are slightly out of sync--reinforcing the overall impression of repetition gone awry.

Kelley's influence, along with that of his sometime collaborator Paul McCarthy, is evident in Sullivan's mining of popular culture for pointedly idiosyncratic sources (this is, after all, Helen Keller, not Marilyn Monroe) that are vaguely familiar but potentially unrecognizable and at the same time marked by physical violence and psychic regression. In Gold Standard, these latter traits are simultaneously underscored and rendered strangely numb through their fragmentation, dislocation, and repeated appearances in varying guises. Sullivan's use of such strategies to emphasize the distinction between a performer and the part he or she plays also raises the specter of a second acknowledged influence, Bertolt Brecht. In undermining the fusion of actor and role, which both traditional fourth-wall theater and Hollywood cinema seek to perpetuate, the German playwright-director aimed to demonstrate that his characters' responses to a given situation were the product of social conditioning and historical circumstance.

While Sullivan similarly extricates her characters from their imbrication within a seamless narrative, her work departs from Brecht's epic theater in a significant way. For example, in one of her most recent projects, 'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore, 2003, excerpts from a 1943 production of John Ford's Jacobean drama at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut and a 1964 Fluxus performance festival at the Technical Academy in Aachen, Germany, are ripped from their original contexts and juxtaposed. On side by-side projections, the same actor re-creates Wadsworth's then-director "Chick" Austin's star turn as Ford's protagonist on one screen and a host of Fluxus artists on the other. Although Sullivan's work was filmed in the very theaters where the original productions had been mounted, tellingly the relationship of action to site is reversed: The Fluxus segments occur in the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford, while the Ford play is performed at Aachen's Audimax. In Sullivan's hands, these seemingly Brechtian acts of fissure result not in a heightened awareness of historical forces but in the loosening of her characters from the temporal flow of history. Entirely immersed in the moment of performance, the actors appear to inhabit a kind of pure present tense. But if history is nowhere to be found in Sullivan's art, repetition is everywhere--from the double screens used in Gold Standard and 'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore to those works' restaging of prior performances and representation of live action in the form of video documentation.