CATHERINE SULLIVAN: I walk to the center of the room and then change places.
It’s a singular figure and then the group.
(SINGING)
SULLIVAN: I was always interested in the body’s capacity for signification.
What was this kind of potential for infinite transformation?
SULLIVAN: Pivot. Pivot, okay, very nice, good.
Okay, get some air.
That looks really like experimental theater from the 70’s...
ACTOR: The ‘70s. SULLIVAN: Totally.
SULLIVAN: Even though by the time I was eight years-old
I had never seen a piece of live theater,
somehow I had some idea that acting would be an interesting thing to do.
So I originally went to school to study acting and you know,
I was very dedicated to learning stagecraft.
When I begin working with actors, it becomes all about creating behavior.
The bulk of the process is tasks and
particular kinds of choreography that they have to master
or a way of speaking that they have to master.
It’s pure task.
My family had no interest in theater.
When I was younger we never went to see theater.
My mother worked at the famous lithography studio, Gemini G.E.L.,
so I was exposed to visual art before I was exposed to theater.
And I had contact with Richard Serra, Jasper Johns,
so on the one hand there was this interest in the medium of theater,
uhm, but in ideas that were more situated within the fine arts.
My head was in both arenas all the time.
Because I came from theater,
I really enjoyed the pleasure of the eyes to look where they wanted to look.
In an installation context, there’s actually opportunity for
different kinds of content to be present in different ways.
At some point it’s a direct engagement with one single image.
Other times it’s an engagement with a lot of different images
all competing for your attention.
The installation in Avignon was a private house turned into an exhibition space.
There were a lot of mirrors so as you walked through that particular space,
you saw screens in front of you but you saw
also reflections of screens in these various mirrors.
The space had a lot of opportunity for
different kinds of vignettes of an oval screen
tucked into a closet or another room
would seem more presentational
and have a lot more decorative detail.
I’ve always loved that you can have so much information that exists for you
but really sort of invokes your judgment about what you like to look at.
The project FIVE ECONOMIES began with work with several sources,
some coming from popular film,
another coming from real life
and another coming from research that I was doing on popular ritual.
The filmworks included WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE,
an Australian film called TIM, the MIRACLE WORKER,
the story of Helen Keller,
the real life story of a woman named Birdie Joe Hoaks,
a twenty-five year-old woman who tried to pass as a thirteen year-old boy
so that she could obtain social services in Utah,
and also these games played at wakes in Ireland in the 17th and 18th Century,
“wake amusements,” very cruel and kind of brutal, violent games.
These were all sources or models which in some way or another
had to do with this paradox having to do with
pleasure at the misfortune of others.
There’s one actress in particular who is engaged with
a number of different kinds of roles and a number of different styles.
What becomes fascinating to me in that case is this one person
can ascend, transcend, transform,
not only through the roles that she plays,
but also through the styles through which those roles are filtered.
It was much more interesting to me to work with actors
that didn’t need things to be motivated by narrative.
I was so disgusted with the political situation that I started reading
Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class.
At the same time, I was working on the movement sequences for THE CHITTENDENS.
These choreographies that were all automated by numerals,
by these numerical sequences.
It’s what happens to the movement once it’s in this office environment.
With this ensemble of middle management types
and 19th Century leisure class archetypes.
There’s a place in the work where the kind of automation,
mechanization, et cetera,
there’s like a kernel of mindlessness which is
meant to be scary because it’s arbitrary.
I hope that that point is continued to be made with the work.
It’s not so much a framing of the figure,
it’s the figure sort of in the face of something greater.
It’s another kind of humanism, I would say.
Often there’s a kind of experimentation that happens
in terms of what I want the photography to be
or what I’m kind of looking for.
What I’ll do is go out and just practice in different conditions.
For me, camera is really a sort of preparation
and research tool so that I have something to demonstrate
to the cinematographer what I would like the shot to look like.
I thought about this a lot.
Whether or not it’s a good idea.
(LAUGHS)
To...to make a work that has to do with places that
I’ve never been and things that I have no direct contact with.
As a kind of foundation for a project, that’s enormously unstable.
ICE FLOES OF FRANZ JOSEPH LAND
began with my interest in the hostage crisis in Moscow in 2002.
A faction of Chechen separatists stormed a Moscow theater.
The directness of that conflict is not something
that I would feel capable of touching on,
you know however, you know where things kind of start to fan out
and if I can set up a situation that engages those ideas, certainly.
That’s for me more interesting and
I think allows a kind of maybe more complicated political discussion.
SPEAKER: I am the princess of the Arctic Sea.
CHORUS: You are the whore of the Arctic Sea!
SULLIVAN: The musical playing onstage at the time was called Nord-Ost.
It was based on a novel from the ‘40s about
polar aviation and the Russian arctic.
In this case we extracted a series of pantomimes which came from the novel.
These pantomimes were brutal or mechanized.
It requires very quick transitions between one gesture or another.
You know as the performer, you must go.
You simply must go from A to B and if C is there,
then you must get there even faster. (LAUGHS)
You know it’s really not that I’m trying to create this sense of suffering.
The content itself suggests other kinds of oppressive cultural regimes
that I would like the movement to be analogous to.
It really is in this kind of calculation of character, action,
setting, context that the work ultimately happens.
This troop of actors pantomiming this novel throughout
the rooms of this Polish-American social hall in Chicago
generated a content outside of anything that I could have initially conceived.
And to me, that’s a very exciting relationship,
when you can have this heightened theatrical activity
but it can encounter a space that has a very particular rationale.
In a sense, kind of generating then that third thing,
which uhm is…
is my art and…
and isn’t in some ways.