While Triangle of Need incorporates historical documents, these materials originate in pseudo-histories, realities that are part of history. They are factual and real, and yet incidental to the master narratives. Such is the case of the document which gave inspiration to Triangle’s primary narrative thread—the junk mail letter from Dr. Obi; as well as the Deering mansion, which would seem not unlike the Xanadu of Orson Wells’s Citizen Cane, or the estates of our current billionaires and superstars. While these places exist in the “real world,” they also exceed history—like Disneyland exceeds history, or the Trade Towers once seemed to.

As one makes their way from the four-channel installation at Metro Pictures they encounter the final room of Triangle’s three-part installation. Here we see grainy 8mm footage of a woman, seemingly on her wedding day. Could this be Eulalie? The footage appears taken in a foreign and tropical place (the Deering mansion in Miami?). The graininess and hand-held feel of the footage provides the viewer with something warm, and yet distant. The footage has the feeling of being shot in the past, a past we might like to travel to. The footage of this woman on her wedding day is, in other words, nostalgic. There is something soothing about this footage, however disturbing in concert with the videos we have just watched.

Mixed with this is black-and-white film 16mm footage of a figure skater. The camera tracks around a skating rink, and then zooms on the skater, as he performs twirls, spins repeatedly. Close-ups of the figure skater reveal his musculature and long hair. When I spoke with Sullivan at her opening, she told me she had asked the skater to perform these twirls for their dramatic effect. While the moves of the figure-skater are graceful and hypnotizing, the skater himself is an ironic kernel around which the rest of Triangle’s works move (triangulated?). For the skater is the element of kitsch that Sullivan’s works always risks including: “Adding additional infromation is in a sense forcing the viewer away from the reductive and mutually congratualatory aspects of the kitsch experience of reference. For me kitsch is only offensive when its function is to affirm a nostalgia for the original thing or a pedigree necessary to its recognition. I think the end result bears some anxiety about this question, the specter of kitsch looms over every work of mine...” (Secession, 24) As such the skater is a figure of abjection and pathos. The “real story” behind Sullivan’s employment of the skater, Rohene Ward, is that she “found” him in Minnesota working for certain ice shows (akin to "The Ice Capades"), and was hard-up for money, though he was once an Olympic hopeful, and is listed as such in Sullivan’s character description from the Walker catalogue for Triangle.

This tongue-and–cheek inclusion (not at all apparent from the footage of the skater himself, or anything in the Walker catalogue) reminds me that in Sullivan’s art, questions of burning ethical and political importance are necessarily being approached through the sidedoor. Through what is minor, pseudo-historical, if not mythopoetic and/or entirely “made-up”. This ability to play effectively, effusively, between the real and the imaginary, History (with a capital “H”) and history’s “bit-parts,” may finally be the most important contribution of Sullivan’s art, and her latest and most elaborate work to date.

Works Cited:

Artforum February, 2006. “Catherine Sullivan Talks About The Chittendens, 2005.” ed. Tim Griffin.

Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. London/NYC: Continuum, 2005.

Sullivan, Catherine. Secession 7.7.-4.9 2005. London, Tate Modern/Secession, 2005.

Toufic, Jalal. (Vampires): an Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (2nd ed.). Sausalito: Post-Apollo press, 2003.

All images courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.