Catherine Sullivan in BOMB Magazine
In a BOMB Magazine web exclusive, Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan (pictured top right) and choreographer Meg Stuart discuss mining the history of the avant-garde tradition and emotional overflow in ensemble-based work. BOMB’s Summer 2008 print issue will include the full-length conversation.
The magazine’s online art section, which currently archives 1,206 articles and interviews, features numerous Art21 artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Andrea Zittel (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Kara Walker (all Season 2), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).
Catherine Sullivan | Empathy
EXCLUSIVE: Excerpts from Catherine Sullivan’s film installations Big Hunt (2002), Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (2003), and The Chittendens (2006).
Catherine Sullivan’s anxiety-inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior. Sullivan’s appropriation of classic Hollywood filming styles, period costumes, and contemporary spaces such as corporate offices draws the viewer’s attention away from traditional narratives and towards an examination of performance itself.
SEE: More images, videos, and news for Catherine Sullivan.
LEARN: Catherine Sullivan is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Paradox of the Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.
DISCUSS: What do you think about this video? Leave a comment!
PHOTO | Catherine Sullivan, production stills from (Left) Baby Jane/Birdie Jo Infusion, from Big Hunt, 2002; (Right) Chittenden Office (The Virtuous Woman) from The Chittendens, 2005. © Catherine Sullivan.
VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Mark Falstad. Sound: Heidi Hesse. Editor: Monte Matteotti. Artwork courtesy: Catherine Sullivan.
Catherine Sullivan and Arturo Herrera in Adaptation in Chicago
While adaptation is a common practice in popular culture‚Äîfamiliar to moviegoers and booklovers who debate endlessly whether the film version is superior to the novel‚Äîit is perhaps less well known as a practice in contemporary art. The exhibition Adapation at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art looks at the use of this strategy in the recent work of Catherine Sullivan (Season 4), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), Guy Ben-Ner, and Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation. These artists have transformed source material to make their own adapted works of art, re-envisioning classic literature, painting, film, ballet, and even email as new video installations.
Adaptation is a tightly focused exhibition: each of the four artists is represented by one or two significant video installations. Arturo Herrera’s first-ever video installation, Les Noces (The Wedding, 2007; see http://adaptation.uchicago.edu/artists/herrera/ for a clip), enjoys its US premiere in this show, and is an animated adaptation of the ballet of the same name by Igor Stravinsky. Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need (2007; see http://adaptation.uchicago.edu/artists/sullivan/), builds from a notorious and ubiquitous type of mass e-mail scam, as well as a smaller-scale new work developed in collaboration with students from the University of Chicago.
Read more about each artist and their work and view video clips on the exhibition’s extensive website, http://adaptation.uchicago.edu.
Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need Heads to NYC
Nigerian e-mail scams, figure skating and a Neanderthal language all play a part in Catherine Sullivan’s traveling video work Triangle of Need, opening Thursday at Metro Pictures in New York City. The multi-channel installation, which is concurrently on view at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, continues her exploration of theatrical and performative conventions.
Sullivan’s ambitious project focuses on two main locations: Vizcaya, the sprawling Miami estate built in the 1910’s by agricultural industrialist James Deering, and a nondescript apartment building in an anonymous American city. Sullivan situates “vestigial narratives” at these locations, one involving a hominid species that is forced to reproduce by an industrialist; and a series of reconstructions from the Pathescope Films catalog, silent films screened by Deering at Vizcaya.
Triangle of Need is at Metro Pictures through March 15. More info here.
Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need Moves to Miami
First blogged about on this site back in August, Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need video installation is now on view at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, where part of it was filmed. The work premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis this fall, and will travel to A Foundation in Liverpool, UK early next year after its exhibition at Vizcaya (through February 28).
Read more about Triangle of Need here and here.
Spotlight on Paradox: Catherine Sullivan
Catherine Sullivan was born in Los Angeles, California in 1968. She earned a BFA from the California Institute of Arts, Valencia (1992) and an MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California (1997). Sullivan’s anxiety inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior. Under Sullivan’s direction, actors perform seemingly erratic, seizure-like jumps between gestures and emotional states, all while following a well-rehearsed, numerically derived script. Unsettling and disorienting, Sullivan’s work oscillates between the uncanny and camp, eliciting a profound critique of “acceptable” behavior in today’s media-saturated society. A maelstrom of references and influences -from vaudeville to film noir to modern dance- Sullivan’s appropriation of classic filming styles, period costumes, and contemporary spaces such as corporate offices draws the viewer’s attention away from traditional narratives and towards an examination of performance itself.
Sullivan received a CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts (2004) and a DAAD Fellowship (2004-2005). She has had major exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2007); Tate Modern, London (2005); Vienna Secession, Austria (2005); Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2005); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2003); UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2002); and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2002). She has participated in the Prague Biennial (2005), the Whitney Biennial (2004), and La Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). Sullivan lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
Watch a clip from Sullivan’s Art:21 segment:
About her work, Sullivan says,
“For me, politics is a choice. I don’t live in a world where I’m forced to align myself ideologically with a particular regime or think on a daily basis about where my soap is coming from. So, engagement with these issues is a choice. And my choice is to reveal that freedom and privilege to think about certain things without having to suffer their consequences…My imagination can bring together a lot of very painful things and a consideration of different kinds of consequences. I’ve thought a lot as an artist about what it means to operate with any information I want and with the privilege of using that information in any way I want. If I were to make a different choice, then I would be a journalist…But I’m an artist. I’m interested in these things in an artistic sense. The end result is art.”
(taken from the companion book Art in the Twenty-First Century 4, p. 162).
Read more about her work and watch additional clips on her Art:21 webpage here.
Have you experienced Sullivan’s work in person, or did you have an opportunity to view her segment in one of the hundreds of Art21 Access ‚’07 events that have been taking place all month? Share your thoughts on Catherine Sullivan by leaving a comment below.
Art:21 Preview - Catherine Sullivan
From the forthcoming Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4.
Premieres on PBS Sunday, November 18, 2007, at 10:00 p.m. ET. (Check your local PBS station for details)
Catherine Sullivan’s anxiety-inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior. Sullivan’s appropriation of classic Hollywood filming styles, period costumes, and contemporary spaces such as corporate offices draws the viewer’s attention away from traditional narratives and towards an examination of performance itself.
This segment is also currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in tandem with the exhibition Catherine Sullivan: Triangle of Need.
Catherine Sullivan’s Triangle of Need premieres August 23 in Minneapolis
2007 artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and featured artist in the upcoming fourth season of Art in the Twenty-First Century, Catherine Sullivan premieres her new video installation at the Walker this Thursday. In this work, Catherine Sullivan: Triangle of Need, Sullivan orchestrates complex sets of ideas and participants to weave a nuanced story about evolution, class, wealth and poverty, and the inequalities and injustices in our global economy.
The story unfolds in two main locations: Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami and a nondescript apartment in an American city. In these two starkly contrasting sites, Sullivan situates what she calls “vestigial narratives,” one involving a wealthy industrialist trying to force the last remaining members of a hominid species to reproduce, and the second, a series of reconstructions of scenes from the catalogue of Pathescope Films, the company from which Vizcaya owner and turn-of-the-century American industrialist James Deering ordered silent film reels for screening at Vizcaya. Also involved to varying degrees are Nigerian cinema aesthetics and email scams, figure skating choreography, and a complex performative language called Mousterian taken from theories of Neanderthal speech.
Art21’s profile of Catherine Sullivan, featured in Season 4’s Paradox episode and premiering on November 18 at 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), will play continuously in the Walker’s Orientation Lounge, beginning September 13 (the day Sullivan gives a talk at the Walker) and running through the duration of the exhibition.
Triangle of Need is on view through November 18, after which it travels to A Foundation in Liverpool in October and Vizcaya in December.
Read more info and view additional images here.
