In the three-channel, black-and-white video installation of Triangle, one sees characters gathered at a tenement house in Chicago. Here any number of dramas unfold, including the schemes of a gypsy family who exhibit their comatose daughter, Eulalie; neighbors bickering; a missionary who seems to have designs on Eulalie and her family; and a cast of dancers who dance around Napoleon and his unfaithful wife, Josephine. The scene of mourners gathered around Eulalie takes place in a typically Sullivanesque fashion, as Eulalie is played by three different actors: one a black man, the other a white man, and the third a white woman. The fact that Eulalie is played by actors of various cultural signifiers once again proves Sullivan’s commitment to an identity-bending that plays upon a contemporary logic beyond identity politics. Identities are substitutable among Sullivan’s actors, and this substitutability creates an incommensurable play of difference within our current global economic culture—with the terrain of identity fluctuating in conflict.

The figure of Eulalie is a figure of exploitation. Like the orphan Neanderthals who populate the 4-channel, color installation of Triangle, she is asleep, and can therefore not speak articulately for herself. When she wakes, she is replayed by her father, who would continue to exploit her role for profit. In the figure of Eulalie, I am reminded of the Romantic American literary tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. There is something telling, if not uncanny, about Sullivan’s use of the figure of Eulalie in Triangle, as Poe’s poem allegorizes a problem of language itself, and the Romantic nostalgia for “Adamic” language—language “before the fall,” history, relationality.

This problem is commensurable with 19th century European and American industrial economies. Romantic literatures developed as responses to the mobilization of industrial forces, the rapid growth of urban and suburban centers, and the abject conditions of labor in places such as London and New England (Lowell, MA for instance). In lieu of these developments, Romanticism enacts a tension between a desire for return to “the way things were” (longing for antediluvian conditions of “natural production”) and a practical need to address social strife and contradiction (the revolutionary political commitments of a Wordsworth or Shelley come to mind here, as well as Emerson and Thoreau). Transformations of Anglophone poetic language in the 19th century bear-out these tensions through sonic longings—longings for pure music, a language likewise “before the fall” from imagined “grace.”

Eulalie: as in “eukulele,” or “euphony,” or “labia”—the lips which would pronounce a genital, desiring speech. The name rolls off the tongue, it produces pleasant sensations in the mouth when one says it. As in Poe’s more famous onomatopoeia, “bells bells bells bells bells bells bells,” the name “Eulalie,” repeated within the poem and reflected by the poem’s sonorous, “musical” language, embodies a state of language between “pure sound” and disciplinary cultural articulation (acquisition, training). In psychoanalytical speak (Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan), the poetics of “Eulalie” is between “the symbolic” and “the imaginary.” It articulates social meaning in relation to that which antecedes meaning as a nostalgic cultural wish for origin and reinstatement. Proto-semantics broaching “pure silence.”