Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, 2004
5 channel video installation
16 mm film transferred to video then DVD
B/W with sound
27 minutes, 36 seconds per loop

Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land uses as its point of departure the Chechen takeover of the Russian musical Nord Ost which occurred in Moscow in October 2002. This event struck me as a very brutal example of the real confronting the ideal. My research into the event generated a variety of issues related to notions of cultural regimentation and the final work considers the Chechen event through a stratification of brutality, nationalism and exoticism. The piece is also a statement about the theatre as a site of emotional transcendence.

The first item of consideration for me was the Nord Ost musical which was based on a classic Russian novel, Two Captains (Dva Kapitana by Venyamin Silber 1944), a love and adventure story about the real life search for a lost expedition in the Russian Arctic. Ultimately it is a patriotic novel with an unknowing affirmation of Russian expansion as progress and one can easily see why a popular musical based on this book would be of symbolic importance to the Chechens.

I began by selecting sections of the original novel, Two Captains, which I saw as embodying either iconic or idiosyncratic details of the story. These ten parts of the novel generated roughly 50 pantomime like actions, and each actor learned all of them.

The hope here was to create a system of representational impulses found in musical theatre without having to make a musical. What you see is a series of roughly forty archetypes or clichés from the novel played out over time. For example, one character, a young girl, is a sophisticated geologist digging trenches in Leningrad, is manifest through several actresses and several costumes at times all in the same scene.

I was very fortunate to shoot this piece at the Polish American Army Veterans Association in Chicago, Illinois. The interior is replete with a compelling combination of nationalistic regalia, military photographs and portraits, and original artworks by local Polish artists from Chicago.

Catherine Sullivan
2004

Five Economies (Big Hunt/Little Hunt), 2002
5 channel video installation
B/W and Colour with sound
over 100 minutes, 22 minutes per loop

I began the piece by choosing a series of models which animated either performatively, conceptually or thematically how the mastery of the actor is demonstrated through the physical or mental afflictions of the character they play. These scenes are re-enacted by an ensemble of thirty performers in a variety of styles. The scenes come from the following sources; The Miracle Worker [1962] the story of Helen Keller and particularly the scene where she is taught to eat with a spoon instead of her hands; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane [1962] a story of a glorious past struggling within a degraded and decrepit present; a constellation of characters from films having to do with mental illness but are characterized by the physical beauty of the leading actors (inside a beautiful body lies a damaged mind); the true story of Birdie Jo Hoaks, a 25-year-old woman who posed as a 13-year-old boy in order to be admitted into the social services system in Utah. This seemed too to be a story of ascension through transformation, but it is a story of failed assimilation and ultimately oppression. From these models I worked out a set of stylistic principles and then applied them to one another.
Catherine Sullivan
2002

Gold Standard (hysteric, melancholic, degraded, refined), 2001
2 channel video
colour no sound
12 min 27 minutes, 36 seconds per loop

Gold Standard, like scenes from Big Hunt/Little Hunt, is based on a scene from Arthur Penn’s movie The Miracle Worker (1962), the story of the deaf/blind child Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan. The scene depicts a prolonged struggle between the two characters wherein the wildly resistant Helen Keller is forced to eat with a spoon instead of her hands. The film’s leading actresses both won Oscars for their roles, and subsequently, the real biography of Helen Keller has expanded to include the cultural phenomena of its Hollywood dramatization. Helen Keller is an American icon for her own accomplishments, but also because The Miracle Worker set the gold standard for the actor’s virtuosity.

For this work, I restaged the above scene drawing an analogy between the actor’s compulsion to perform, to transform themselves, and the visible manifestations of hysteria and melancholia. The actors that play Helen Keller in this work are hysteric and melancholic, violently seeking flight from an oppressor or simply resigned to the fact that escape is physically impossible. The basis of the piece is comedic, laughter is a contraction of the muscles of the diaphragm using the same muscles which are used for swallowing food.

Catherine Sullivan
2001

Unspoken Evil III 1996/2001
Two channel video installation
colour sound
38 Minutes

Unspoken Evil III was produced after I placed an advertisement in a film industry trade paper calling for actors to audition for a family drama about a father’s battle with alcoholism. Each actor arrived at the audition and was given a series of scripts to perform on camera, alone, with no instruction. Some of the texts loosely related to a family drama, but the script featured in the video is an ecstatic and repetitive guitar lesson about a Gibson Les Paul, a particular model of guitar designed by musician and recording arts innovator, Les Paul. In a second set of advertisements a call was put out to local guitar players who play the Les Paul guitar.

The piece is a double projection which consists of the actor’s readings and performances of four guitar players. The actors are seen struggling to make sense of the text and they often have no idea who or what a Les Paul is. What is interesting is that they proceed as if they do know and react with the excitement demanded by the script. The piece engages much of the confusion and embarrassment which follows from the actors’ desire to please and entertain. The guitar players, while authenticating the Les Paul guitars and the actors, whilst performing for the camera, are both presented as objects for the viewers consumption.

Unspoken Evil III is the final piece in the Unspoken Evil trilogy which also included a performance and a short video using a puppeteer.

Catherine Sullivan
2001

Date Palm Dance 1999
2 channel video
colour sound
2 min. 14 seconds

Date Palm Dance is an excerpt taken from a longer video work The Chirologic Remedy, a chamber drama inspired by a 17th century manual for public speaking called The Chirologia or the Natural Language of the Hand, and Chironomia or the Art of Manual Rhetoric. Written in 1644 by John Bulwer, this manual is the first thorough and systematic treatise on the movements of the hands and fingers, first in relation to natural significations, and then in relation to artistic usage in public address. Through a series of theatrical scenes and speeches, The Chirologic Remedy explores the pathology of Bulwer’s philosophical premise that "the hand is an index to the mind". Date Palm Dance uses the original gestures from the Chirologia but puts them to Bollywood music. In this way, the dance is used to question the integrity of the original gestures testing them in a completely unrelated system of signs and codes.

Catherine Sullivan
1999

Grisly Notes and Tones (performance) 1997
© The artist

Grisly Notes and Tones (performance) 1997
Grisly Notes and Tones began as an investigation into the nature of theatrical representation and its relationship to the subject of violence and trauma. I was first inspired by an American TV series featuring real footage of animals attacking humans. I was particularly struck by one clip in which a trained grizzly bear spontaneously attacked a female volunteer, the woman smiled strangely and the bear went nuts. I regarded the attack as a kind of pure form of conflict and it got me thinking about the presentation of violence, in particular distinctions between the way violence is presented in theatre versus film and TV.

The action of the piece involves a bear attack which is re-staged in three distinct performative styles; German Expressionist drama, Naturalist theatre in the manner of Chekov, and Minimalist dance, including direct references to the choreography of Yvonne Rainer. I was interested not in quoting these styles, but rather in their opposing views on the nature of theatrical space and the politics of artifice, and the problems they present to the actor who must embody them.

A wooden ‘bear pit’ served as the staging arena. The piece was performed in the orchestra pit of a proscenium theatre and the audience sat on-stage.

Grisly Notes and Tones was originally performed with three professional actors, and three performers not professionally involved with the theatre. My hope in using performers of various levels of ‘skill’ was to call into question the notion of mastery.

A musical score for the harp was composed and performed by Sean Griffin upon its premiere in Pasadena, California.

Catherine Sullivan 1997