Catherine Sullivan, The Chittendens at Metro Pictures. Flash Art International (November 2005).
Catherine Sullivan, The Chittendens at Metro Pictures. November 19-December 23, 2005.
Reviewed by Melissa Friedling
Catherine Sullivan’s latest six-channel video, The Chittendens, features sixteen actors performing according to a complicated and abstract “script” that the artist generated by assigning fourteen performable “attitudes” to a series of numeric patterns. The resulting spasmodic gestures and random vocalizations appear to heighten and diminish in intensity, working rhythmically with Sean Griffin’s haunting score.
The piece was mostly shot in an abandoned office building and titled after a corporate insurance firm with a lighthouse logo employed, ironically, as a metaphor for self-determination. But, on location, Sullivan’s actors seem possessed by an unseen spirit and her use of ghostly superimpositions and floating specter-like camerawork suggests something gothic, supernatural, and uncanny.
Sullivan has described the work a “hysterical film noir” and, indeed, the actors’ gesticulations often call to mind Charcot’s iconic photographs of hysterical symptoms performed by his patients at Salpêtrière hospital. Certainly the look of film noir is cited in the moody black and white cinematography featured in several of six sections. But Sullivan also invokes a broader genre history by employing anachronistic costuming and an occasional spooky voice-over. The performers in period dress look like they had each been individually lifted out of separate movies, mid-scene, stripped of their context, and doomed to repeatedly play out their characters for all eternity. A chilly scenario, to be sure.
Sullivan engages the metaphor of the lighthouse, the office setting, archetypal costuming, and rule-based scripting, to extend her sustained investigation into the tensions between conformity and autonomy in a theatrical context. With the added impact of artful editing, the work offers analytical possibilities for considering performance as a signifying practice and exploring the variables that impact on theatrical representation. And, while Sullivan’s approach may be at times overburdened by the weight of its heady theoretical underpinnings, the overall effect is whimsical, mysterious, and thoroughly engaging.