In many of his poems, Wallace Stevens also imagined and embodied usages of language that should preclude social conflict and struggle. A primordial silence before time and space: “This world, this place, the street in which I was, / Without time.” In this endeavor, Stevens reflects Poe’s own desire to compose a poem between pure sound and social utterance. In Stevens’ poem “Martial Cadenza,” he imagines a “silence before the armies”. In contemporary American poet Susan Howe’s telling slant of Stevens’ poem through her own proem, “THERE ARE NOT LEAVES ENOUGH TO CROWN TO COVER TO CROWN TO COVER,” she proposes, oppositely, “For me was no silence before armies”.

History is always noisy, it is a language (to paraphrase Stevens elsewhere) that only becomes “muddier” with time, history and the mediations time and history necessitate. That they are gypsies—a diasporic people stereotyped as “shifty” and economically distrustful—who should bear this burden of exploitation in Triangle only complicates Triangle’s noise through winking stereotype. No one is a cause of this noise per se (Sullivan is not after causes), only an effect among effects, what Sullivan recognizes as an “effusion” of meanings. In one of the final scenes of the 3-channel installation, after the nymph-like dance of three players in front of a backdrop of artificial snowfall, someone rolls a heavy, wooden barrel which sounds prominently in the soundtrack. This barrel I take as a signal for exit—Exeunt!—but it is also the noise of history itself, a noisiness which gives principle shape to Triangle of Need.

Throughout Triangle we hear Sullivan’s characters communicate to each other in a made-up language. This language developed by Sean Griffin, one of Sullivan’s collaborators, is a language based on pseudo–scientific theories of “pre-human” language acquisition Griffin calls Mousterian. Hearing Mousterian uttered throughout Triangle, I was originally reminded of Modernist attempts to develop a poetics of “pure utterance” (Italian and Russian Futurists, German Dada, Primitivists). While Griffin would pose Mousterian critically as a language contrived after German Race Theory in the statement he includes in the catalogue to Triangle, it is also poignant as a contemporary instance of an avant gardist wish to develop language uses which should transcend cultural differences while enacting its central burden of historical renewal. As such, this use of language and its connection to a historic avant garde, is yet another level of meditation which Sullivan and her collaborators enact, a side glance at an avant garde’s complicity with the “powers that be.”

At the center of Triangle’s 4-channel color installation are the “orphans” of a supposed “Neanderthal race”—the “last of their kind.” Shot at the Miami estate of agriculturalist James Deering, the Neanderthals are subjected to “breeding experiments.” Through the Neanderthals, Eulalie, and the proto-semantic language of Mousterian, Sullivan brings to the foreground problems of discipline and genealogy as they occur through language. Posed against the Neanderthals are the nefarious schemes of their captors—agents of the academy, religious wisdom and the state alike—who would like to both study the Neanderthals, and continue their existence albeit through processes of “civilization.”

As one considers these experiments in relation to historical social experiments—those at the Nazi concentration camps and of various American eugenic research projects, for two such examples—the stakes of Sullivan’s project are raised. Competing are two groups that would like to subsist, yet one through competition (“need” so called), the other through something else. This distinction between “need” and an alternative to need is articulated in a scene of the four-channel installation where one sees the orphan-Neanderthals conferencing about whether they should continue their race. The Neanderthals recognize they are of “desire,” and so would oppose the “need” of their captors as a drive towards social competition, success, and unpropitious domination. It is telling of a larger cultural dilemma, that the ultimate decision of their conference is to discontinue their race.