Repeat performance: the art of Catherine Sullivan

ArtForum, Oct, 2003 by Margaret Sundell

Sullivan's work is often discussed in modernist terms, as an elaboration on the language of theater that locates the medium's essence in the actor's expressive body. This is certainly the case with Five Economies (big hunt, little hunt), 2002, Sullivan's most ambitious project to date, which takes its inspiration from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power--a text that traces contemporary manifestations of power back to the dual origins of humans as both hunter and prey. The two-part installation, composed of separate video works titled big hunt and little hunt, traveled to the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and to Metro Pictures in New York after appearing in Chicago. In big hunt, Keller's acquisition of the spoon appears again, this time as one of five tasks culled from disparate sources. Sullivan drew one task each from The Miracle Worker and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and one from Persona, Tim, and Marat/Sade collectively. The remaining two tasks came from the real-life story of Birdie Jo Hoaks, a twenty-five year-old woman who disguised herself as a prepubescent boy in order to collect welfare from the social-services system in Utah, and the conventions of traditional Irish wake amusements--physically rough, at times cruel games that were played at wakes before being banned by the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century. From each of the sources, Sullivan also distilled a single stylistic logic, five in all--ranging from subdued naturalism to broad slapstick, which she then applied to all five tasks. Certainly, an element of formalism is at play in Sullivan's codification of the stylistic principles driving various theatrical genres, an echo of Vsevolod Meyerhold's early-twentieth-century effort to establish a "grammar" of acting rooted in physical gesture. Still, there is something counterintuitive about applying a reductive modernist logic to work so deeply engaged with transformation, which, by its very nature, defies categorization.

As Sullivan explains of big hunt in a catalogue interview with UCLA Hammer Museum curator Russell Ferguson, "The actor's task is to be transformed by the affectations that have currency within a given stylistic economy." For Sullivan, this capacity for transformation is key. Indeed, even the dramas that Sullivan has selected involve a metamorphosis of some sort, from Birdie Jo's failed bid to join the welfare rolls by altering her appearance to Baby Jane's descent from child star to deranged persecutor of her sister Blanche. Transformation also plays a pivotal role for Canetti, as a means of both pursuing prey and avoiding capture. Over his broad, quasi-anthropological schema, Sullivan layers a second, specifically theatrical notion of transformation inspired by a former teacher's description of an actor's approach to a physically or emotionally demanding lead role as "big-game hunting." What in fact happens when an actor succeeds in the "hunt"? Fame and glory, to be sure, and perhaps the offer of better pay or more challenging parts to play. But these are only residual gains. In the moment of triumph, an exchange occurs--between two realms that might be termed, as in Gilles Deleuze's formulation, the actual and the virtual. "The actor," he writes in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, "is bracketed with his public role: he makes the virtual image of the role actual, so that the role becomes visible and luminous." In that same instance, the actor's actuality (his or her bodily presence and idiosyncratic gestures) assumes a shadowy condition that one normally associates with unreality. Deleuze christens this coming together--or the crystallization--of the actual and the virtual the "crystal-image."