Catherine Sullivan in "Paradox" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.