Repeat performance: the art of Catherine Sullivan

ArtForum, Oct, 2003 by Margaret Sundell

If the term "image" suggests something static or fixed, this could not be further from the truth; rather, the actual and virtual exist in a state of continual exchange. For Deleuze, the emergence in postwar cinema of "time-images," such as the "crystal-image," signals a radical shift: the ascendance of time over movement. No longer subordinated to movement's unfolding, time is unmoored from the empirical succession of past-present-future and becomes "out of joint." The result is time in a pure and unmediated state. Instead of considering Five Economies as a belated version of modernist medium-specificity, one might view Sullivan's interplay of doubles and her work's strangely suspended temporality in Deleuzian terms. On a sprawling multiuse soundstage containing various generic-looking sets (sunroom, basketball court, proscenium stage), a group of performers enact the various possibilities of Sullivan's system: twenty-five permutations derived from applying each of the five styles to the five different tasks (Annie and Helen in Birdie Jo Hoaks style, Charlotte Corday in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? style, and so on). In five side-by-side, silent, black-and-white, twenty-two-minute video loops, actions and styles compete, momentarily coalesce, break apart, and then repeat, never moving toward resolution.

The smaller-scale companion piece, little hunt, is similarly mysterious and hypnotic, and the organic relationship between action and time is similarly askew. Here, a heavyset male, trained in ballroom dancing, and an athletic female post-modern dancer navigate a tennis court littered with props from Les Miserables. During the course of the fifteen-minute video, the scene abruptly shifts from night to day and back again, as if the passage of time and the performance of action were taking place in two different dimensions. All the while, the dancers remain in self-absorbed isolation, interacting not with each other but with the objects they encounter, which they attempt to assimilate into the distinct vocabularies of their respective dance techniques (he sashays around a coffin; she windmills a shotgun in her outstretched arm). At first, Sullivan's rationale for pairing little, hunt with its black-and-white pendant seems almost as inscrutable as the works themselves. Aside from their shared status as videos documenting performances that are physically stylized and temporally disjointed, little hunt and big hunt appear largely unrelated. What links them, however, is the demand Sullivan places on her performers to repeatedly transform themselves in order to accommodate a shifting set of external impositions (in the case of big hunt, the stylistic variations; in little hunt, the props).

To return to the example of the spoon, the implement, as stated by Canetti, who also took an interest in its use, is a direct descendant of the hand. But ultimately Sullivan's art seems concerned less with an analytic reduction of theater to its underlying principles (to the point, one might say, at which the spoon's origin in the hand is revealed) than with the illumination of a foundational indeterminacy that allows substitution to occur. It is at precisely this moment that Sullivan poises her practice--when the hand endlessly becomes the spoon and the spoon forever the hand.