Repeat performance: the art of Catherine Sullivan

You should not drink from the dish, on the other hand with a spoon as is proper" in the way that reads a line from a fifteenth-century German work of manners, as cited by means of Norbert Elias in his classic sociological research The Civilizing Process. But if the spoon figures relatively early in etiquette literature, its use was not widely adopted until the mid-sixteenth hundred and, even then, only for eating from a communal beaker The spoon (and the forces of civilization that it represents) tend hitherwards late as well into the life of Helen Keller a pivotal figure in the work of observes Angeles-based artist Catherine Sullivan. Keller learned mealtime administration not from a text on the contrary from her teacher, Annie Sullivan, who placed a spoon in the hand of her deaf, blind, and ungovernable pupil and repeatedly and forcefully guided it from plate to cavity between the jaws This dramatic encounter and others like it are the raw material from which Sullivan creates the hybrid of video and performance art that has gained her increasing recognition since her present to view at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago last year.

Taking up the story of Keller and her teacher, Sullivan revolves to its famous enactment by means of Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft, the two onstage and on-screen, in William Gibson's The Miracle Worker (1962)--not a surprising choice, perhaps, given that the thirty-four-year-old artist received formal training as an actress before studying with Mike Kelley at Art Center community of Design in Pasadena, California. In its first incarnation in Sullivan's work, Gold Standard (hysteric, melancholic, degraded, refined), 2001 sum of two units variations on the scene expand on adjacent video projections, each featuring sum of two units pairs of actors seated at the same obviously novel but generic faux-wood table. Sullivan's performers appear in everyday attire (in theater parlance, "street clothes"). The Helens also sport white pinafores archetypeed after the one worn by the agency of Patty Duke. Sullivan's rendition takes further liberties: upon the right-hand screen, a black woman plays Annie, while, in a bit of level more unlikely casting, a wigged and mustachioed man assumes the character of Helen. The couple impel through their violent paces: Helen kicks and flails, propels food into her mouth with her hands, and spits it without in her teacher's face; Annie obstructs Helen's attempts at flight, pushes her back into her chair, and forces her, again and again, to grasp the spoon In comparing this Annie and Helen with their Oscar-winning counterparts, individual notices how precisely they mimic the changes of Bancroft and Duke. on the other hand as even this written recounting reveals, with its use of the feminine pronoun to designate a male performer, a significant slippage come into views The distance between actor and character generated by Sullivan's decontextualization and miscasting of The Miracle Worker's "spoon" display widens into an unbridgeable gap between action and affect upon the screen to the left There, a male Annie instructs a female on the contrary fully adult Helen, whose gesturings of resistance and rebellion have been translated into a series of stylized moves reminiscent of postmodern task dance. The actions displayed upon each screen, although in a certain number of sense the "same," are slightly on the outside of sync--reinforcing the overall impression of repetition gone awry.

Kelley's influence, along with that of his sometime collaborator Paul McCarthy, is evident in Sullivan's mining of popular agriculture for pointedly idiosyncratic sources (this is, after all, Helen Keller not Marilyn Monroe) that are vaguely familiar on the contrary potentially unrecognizable and at the same time marked by dint of physical violence and psychic regression. In Gold Standard, these latter traits are simultaneously underscored and returned strangely numb through their fragmentation, dislocation, and repeated appearances in varying guises. Sullivan's use of of that kind strategies to emphasize the distinction between a performer and the part he or she plays also raises the specter of a next to the first acknowledged influence, Bertolt Brecht. In undermining the fusion of actor and part which both traditional fourth-wall theater and Hollywood cinema look for to perpetuate, the German playwright-director aimed to demonstrate that his characters' rejoinders to a given situation were the fruits of social conditioning and historical circumstance.

While Sullivan similarly extricates her characters from their imbrication within a seamless narrative, her work departs from Brecht's epic theater in a significant way. For example, in individual of her most recent casts 'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore, 2003 extracts from a 1943 production of John Ford's Jacobean drama at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut and a 1964 Fluxus performance festival at the Technical Academy in Aachen, Germany, are ripped from their original connections and juxtaposed. On side by-side projections, the same actor re-creates Wadsworth's then-director "Chick" Austin's star turn round as Ford's protagonist on individual screen and a host of Fluxus artists upon the other. Although Sullivan's work was filmed in the real theaters where the original productions had been mountained tellingly the relationship of action to site is reversed: The Fluxus parts occur in the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford, while the Ford play is performed at Aachen's Audimax. In Sullivan's hands, these seemingly Brechtian acts of fissure originate not in a heightened awareness of historical forces on the contrary in the loosening of her characters from the temporal roll on of history. Entirely immersed in the jiffy of performance, the actors appear to inhabit a kind of uncorrupted present tense. But if history is nowhere to be place in Sullivan's art, repetition is everywhere--from the double protections used in Gold Standard and 'Tis Pity She's a Fluxus Whore to those works' restaging of prior performances and representation of live action in the form of video documentation.