In Catherine Sullivan’s 2004 work, D-Pattern, developed with composer Sean Griffin, the viewer/audience member encounters a group of actors walking upon a wide staircase on an open stage. The actors immediately appear “weird”—their movements are odd, they seem to be “freaking-out” or possessed. In this work, Sullivan pioneered what has come to be one of her primary techniques as a visual artist both invested in theatrical and cinematic problems. The D-Pattern is a numerical pattern for performance, whereby actors develop a set of gestures repeatable within numeric-serialist patterns. As Sullivan explains of D-Pattern in a statement about her 2005 work, The Chittendens:

Each performer had fourteen base attitudes and each “set” animated different combinations of the base fourteen. The “key” is a guide for how the attitudes are to be treated throughout the phrases, minimized in dramatic stakes, reduced in physical form, abbreviated in time etc., these treatments of the attitudes could be combined, ultimately giving each attitude countless permutation. The attitudes and sets were given to the performers as a script, the only direction which followed was toward the articulation of the “dynamic range” of the score. Along with the attitudes themselves, most of the performers also generated their own graphic interpretations of the five sets. (Secession, 28)

While D-Pattern may be a means of Brechtian estrangement—a way of getting an audience beyond catharsis and identification with the character’s psychology—it seems more so a means of calling forth the condition every name in history is I as a condition essential to theatricality. By every name in history is I “acting” is reducible to a series of gestures that recall different events (or “attitudes”) in intersubjective histories. The recombination of scored gestures performs the unfinished business of a bodily unconscious conditioned by a complex of social and economic forces, and regimes of discipline and of power.

When I encountered Sullivan’s The Chittendens in the fall of 2005 at Metro Pictures gallery, I was immediately enthralled by what I took to be a case of every name in history is I—a phrase I was thinking about at the time. Seeing this multi-channel installation at Metro Pictures, Sullivan’s use of actors was striking; that these actors were psychotics and, withdrawn from reality as such, experiencing historical events as affectively recurrent, traumatic and unresolved. Through Sullivan’s use of sets (an abandoned office building in Chicago and the ironically named Poverty Island in Wisconsin), and costume (contemporary, early 20th century, and 19th century) I recognized Sullivan to be saying something about the nature of psychotic realities as they concern coeval subjectivities.