Catherine Sullivan: Breaking Through and Forward

We all know the world is changing. We know that women in the film industry, and across all forms of the arts, are pushing through barriers as never before.

But how far have we come, really?

Women, as filmmakers, have been repeatedly sidelined, overlooked, or under-credited, even as Kathryn Bigelow seemingly ruptured the Academy Awards glass ceiling in 2008 with her Best Director win for The Hurt Locker. But Catherine Sullivan is one artist/filmmaker who continues to break through and forward with her searingly raw, often disconcerting, non-narrative films that probe the depths of American culture and simultaneously unravel preconceived notions of how we consume that culture. A student of the late American contemporary art pioneer Mike Kelley, Sullivan is a Los Angeles native whose experience in front of, and behind, the camera has fertilised her career as a practicing filmmaker. Running parallel to her professional work, she is a devoted educator, serving as an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. Sullivan received her BFA at the California Institute of Arts in 1992, and her MFA from the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in 1997. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at institutions including the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Tate Modern (London), The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Musée Des Beaux-Arts (Rouen, France), Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow). Group exhibitions have included her work at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The 11th Baltic Triennial of International Art at the Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA (New York). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Torino), Musée d’Art Contemporain (Lyon), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (Vienna), the Rubell Museum (Miami) and MOCA (Los Angeles). Sullivan lives and works in Chicago.

We are proud to present Catherine Sullivan, speaking frankly about her education, how we might rethink the grotesque as an important cultural framework, and just how important a box of Kleenex can be.

We extend our thanks to Catherine Bastide, who has made this interview possible.

I found out about you through Catherine Bastide (who, by the way, is a darling). The first thing I noticed is that you either worked with, or were under the direction at some point of Mike Kelley, is that right?

Yes, I studied with him in the MFA programme at the Art Center College of Design. He was on my thesis committee. After I graduated, I worked in his studio for about five years, until 2002. His practice was truly multimedia and he was extremely generous with information and could speak to a lot of things I was interested in.

For those who may not know – because you’re a person who probably knows better – to someone who has never heard of Mike Kelley, could you describe him?

Mike Kelley is an American artist, active between the mid-1970’s and what you’d call the 2012-ish times – when he sadly took his own life. He introduced different ways one could think about material culture, the things that we encounter in our lives as children or adults and the emotional values we attach to them. His sensibility was informed by musical subcultures and a way of thinking that was very strong in the mid-70’s which encouraged artists to put concept before materials. His interest in Americana created a tension with this way of thinking and drew him to concepts where our psychic relationships to materials was central.

In that realm, being so closely relatable to him, what did you feel was the kick-off point in moving to video-based or time-based media?

He was working in performance, but he also had a real appreciation of live theatre, all different kinds of live theatre; anything from classical works to avant-garde theatre to Halloween pageants as well as theatre one might find in a high school or middle school. Because I had a theatre background, I found him to be this great resource who could think both in terms of visual art and live theatre. So, I think that was the biggest thing. I was mixing video into my live theatre work and then when I started my MFA at Art Center, I started making stand alone videos. Mike worked in every medium, and so he could speak to painters as easily as he could speak to people working in performance of video, and it can’t be overstated that his expertise benefitted every student who worked with him. He was one of the few people in contemporary art who didn’t have a disdain for theatre, and that helped me feel confident that it was meaningful.

Who probably used or utilized theatre as not just a motif, but sort of an operating paradigm, is that fair to say?

Yes! Mike understood theatre beyond the term “theatrical” in the way it’s often used in the visual arts to describe anything that’s self-consciously presentational. He understood it as a complex system of bodies, materials, space and time. He understood its dimensionality.

You mentioned Americana: I’ve seen a few short edits of your films like The Chittendens (2005), Triangle of Need (2007), and The Last Days of British Honduras (2012). The placement of British Honduras transposes the former location from Belize to Chicago. Do you also share that emphasis on American culture in your own work, or is it coincidental?

I think I’m drawn to locations that have a significance, as sites that are uniquely possible in America. So, the pieces that you mention, Triangle of Need, that’s Vizcaya Museum and Gardens (Miami) which was a Disney-esque, castle-esque kind of sprawling place that an American industrialist built for himself to look as though an aristocratic family had lived there for 400 years. It has all these qualities of moving back in time in this very elaborate way. When I got the commission to work there, it was obvious that Vizcaya, as a place, is a kind of primal scene in the evolution of a set of values in American culture and society. The Last Days of British Honduras was filmed at a particular urban crossroad in Chicago which positioned Malcolm X College next to the United Centre Sports Complex, next to two small African-American churches in various states of disrepair. It’s cleaved by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway, and so you have the sense of things constantly in motion amidst the racial and economic tensions that remain.

How do you think that your works, such as The Startled Faction (a sensitivity training), fit into the larger socio-political landscape?

My socio-political concerns are expressed in different ways in different pieces, they address different histories, locations and nuances of problems. Sometimes, there’s a set of artistic choices that develop something from a misguided way of thinking, a historical misrepresentation that I realize I didn’t question. I don’t know where this fits in to the moment we’re in other than to say I don’t correct this stuff out of the work, for better or worse. In The Startled Faction I made a sensitivity training that included what I’m critical of, what I want to learn about and how I want to experience it. It’s a proposition, what is the most effective way to examine one’s symptoms, one of the things a sensitivity training is supposed to do.

I felt this thematic kinship with that film. Films by Isaac Julien and Steve McQueen who attend to their own experience of racial identity, usually through the other, not through self. Similarly, Gillian Wearing’s We Are Here (2014), also attended to that, very much beyond herself. When you say that you’re examining your own symptoms but you don’t actually have an appearance in the work, where does your voice appear?

My voice appears through the set of artistic choices I’m deploying in an ensemble-based medium constituted by lots of other people their artistic choices. If you look at something like Afterword via Fantasia (2015), it’s a collaboration with George Lewis about the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) a Black composer’s forum created in 1965. The question was – well, this is so distinct from my own history – what are the forms of mediation that I can bring to this work that will create (not distance) respectful distance? As in, I’m conscious that I have a gaze and that gaze isn’t going to be removed from the work, or hidden. I staged the material on the sets of other productions about Black experience chronologically paralleling the AACM. These are highly mediated worlds and I hope that the effect of it is that you are looking at the material through a prism or a particular ecology that I’ve orchestrated.

Butoh (dance) was a product of World War II; ballet of the ashes from the Japanese devastation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You’ve also worked with this very, very specific art form. How do you deploy it?

I think most major cultural centres have people who are inspired by Butoh, or have taken courses, or there are workshops, or there’s Butoh pedagogy that exists internationally. I went to Japan in the early 90’s and wanted to study with Kazuo Ohno. He was available sometimes, sometimes his son Yoshito would teach the workshops. But I was always just trying to absorb workshops and different kinds of things in Tokyo that were Butoh-based. I really liked the sense that the movement was not choreography, but was this kind of conjuring of physical sensations; prompts that you could give yourself to invest in, focus on, and the more you transported yourself there, that would create a way of moving. It wasn’t so much an aesthetic affinity that I had with Butoh and the look and feel of it, it was more the concepts and practice that I found useful and that I also found actors really enjoyed. It really tapped into the actors’ capacity to conjure an elsewhere in the immediate present.

I understood it to be present in The Chittendens, in types of movements that some of the characters were employing, especially with this non-linear, temporal mosaic. Is that true?

I think there’s some truth in that. They were each given these wild prompts that really drew on their physicality, and asked them to imagine things across space and time. I think that did generate a certain kind of grotesque effect that might be linked to Butoh because it’s so extreme. The difference would be that in The Chittendens, their behaviour and performances are numerically scored, for the most part, similar to what a percussionist would be working with. A lot of that was driven by the composer I worked with at that time, Sean Griffin. There’s this combination between something very, very physical and open cutting across things that were patterned and numerical that the actors had to contort to execute.

Certain filmmakers have so many varying degrees of how they process and present grotesquery. But I think that it’s no less important, especially now, when it’s almost laughable how it’s communicated to us. What are some of your thoughts about the concept of grotesque in media and in film?

Any kind of space that allows for expression outside dominant, normative patterns, is healthy. I guess it’s the best way I can put it. There’s the perennial problem of these expressions then becoming conventional and normalised, and that’s certainly true of the grotesque, so I guess it depends on who is behind it ideologically. I think that meme culture has put gestural culture in overdrive creating something grotesque. These GIFs that focus on gesture and body language in short deliciously infectious repetitive bits. We experience each other’s endlessly mutating gestures decontextualised in these little boxes. All of these gestures then mutate quickly and people perfect them and build on them, and I’m totally unclear if this is productively liberating because the means of self-presentation are in everyone’s hands, or if its creating more regimentation.

Or, perhaps it’s a way to violate the sense of “false calm”, as filmmaker Johan Grimonprez puts it…

Yeah, if I look at the grotesque as not so much a kind of transgression, but more as a way to create shapes that are coping with expectations and behavioural patterns. Or, as a way to see tensions in the combinations of how people can speak and move.

So you’re elevating it from being abject into an adjective, something descriptive?

Yes, I would say my investment in it is less in creating something that’s sublime or abject, and more in seeing it as something that creates possibility. It’s creative dimension [that] interests me.

Maybe grotesquery is evolving in some way. Can a younger generation of viewers really know what it’s like to be shaken loose from that beautiful paradigm that they know?

That’s a really interesting question. There’s something that might be interesting about cataloguing or archiving. I mean, my daughter is fifteen, so I’m trying to put myself in the mindset of what might shake her or inspire her. There’s the raw power of mimicry that a lot of younger people have: they have this incredible archive of culture and gestures at their disposal. They can absorb and internalise a lot more information than, say, my generation could. Perhaps the power to be able to mimic something or to process it very quickly might be distributed in an interesting way; to work with imitation and the fact that the means of production are in their hands in a way that they never were before. On the other hand, if I were to think about it (because I do work with some teenagers), I’m thinking about the kinds of things that they do and don’t like to do, and they do gravitate toward imitation. I’m thinking about what spaces are set up for them where it’s just pure improvisation and instead of mimicry, it’s becoming comfortable with the unknown.

So, it could be the code breaker for the imitation game that they play.

Exactly. Even positively reflect on imitation as a feature of having absorbed a lot, internalised a lot. But there could be some sort of power in being able to redeploy actions, gestures, narratives and all of this stuff in a dense and perhaps critical way. Again, when I speak to my daughter, I’m sometimes actually impressed by the kind of criticality that’s possible. That might be something, as well, the kind of ratio between information to capacity to be critical.

What do you think is missing in the landscape of your medium, whether it’s performance, or integrated, non-linear film? What do you wish that you’d see more of?

Certain types of spaces that could better accommodate the moving image. It would be helpful if there were more hybrid spaces in galleries or museums. Not every film I make is connected to a staging or installation, and it would be nice to have screening rooms be a bit more flexible. There’s no shortage of creativity anywhere, and my hope would be that there’s more attention to the diverse creativity that exists outside of the more economically-connected aspects of the art world. Less consolidation around a few artists and institutions. Especially in music composition, dance, and theatre. Particularly in Europe, there’s a lot of consolidation around a few voices. In the States, consolidation feels like the normal way of doing things; artists don’t enjoy a safety net, we have huge creative industries, but few projects and venues secured by taxpayers. When compared to other elements in society, there is little value assigned to what we do. It’s only when you have the opportunity to meet a lot of younger artists working in the States that you realize that many of them will go to a Portland or Detroit or Miami and build their own art-making culture. For me, that geographical shift is really encouraging and worth supporting.

Many young artists are at this very tense and critical juncture on how to go forward with their own work. I think that this question, I tend to see a lot of comfort in it for young readers: what was, at either at the start or during your career, the most challenging or the most difficult point that you can recall?

It’s such a hard question, because I think by comparison, there was nothing like COVID [for example]. There just was nothing comparable in terms of having to think about this complete void of audience and presentation. So, I share a lot of that with them, now. Given my own economic story, it was always having to find the time to make art and support, just economic survival as an artist, particularly in the United States. That’s not one moment, but more a kind of sustained condition that in the years before I was able to support myself; having to make that decision that it was going to be something I was going to do regardless, I may always have to have another job. Coming to terms with the reality that art, alone, wasn’t going to be something that I could draw income from. I was conscious of it from a really early age. Then, once there was a decision to go to graduate school, having to make that choice, not to become a technician. There were other things that I would have done more in the technical world of filmmaking. I was in Los Angeles, and I worked on a number of films in different roles. I saw that that would have been an option, maybe to become an editor. I think just living constantly at that threshold was hard.

As a child, I grew up with James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future. Pure pop fantasma. How about you? What do you watch to escape?

I know what you mean. With me, it’s political blogs, that’s my mind-candy. When I was younger, it was definitely The Carol Burnett Show. I’ll do a lot of grazing on stuff that I remember from when I was a kid. John Oliver, HBO, I’ll watch some Netflix. I don’t have a favourite series. People in my generation held thin lines for memories for long periods of time. Now, there’s the Internet, which allows us to bear out some of these experiences by going down particular rabbit holes. My next one would probably be The Rockford Files. Also, the Rocky movies. All this really masculine culture that I was obsessed with as a child, I’m interested to understand in an unsentimental way, what the draw was for me.

Regarding women pushing through the film industry, I haven’t heard a lot of dialogue about someone like Kathryn Bigelow breaking through with The Hurt Locker. It didn’t feel like there was a lot of celebration in the “room.”

What’s less forgivable is the small fraction of access for women and people of colour to most positions behind-the-scenes, those cultures are extremely homogenous. It’s reflected in storytelling that appeals to men and prevents diversity. It’s taking too long to change the production ecosystems where people only train their own. While everyone can make a film, the creative resources and specialisation is not widely shared and the milieu of specialists has a thousand excuses for it. I have an ongoing project in Chicago that addresses this and tries to shape different access points for kids who are interested in filmmaking.

What was the best piece of advice you have ever received, and consequently, what was the worst?

I have known so many amazing people who’ve been super well-meaning, and one of the things that they did was let me make all my own mistakes, and didn’t judge me. So, that’s actually very cool. I don’t know if that stands in for good advice, but it’s that person who understands what you’re doing, so the things they say have value. Worst piece of advice? Well it’s, in fact, kind of the same, the non-advice I got. I really feel like I was allowed to make all my own mistakes for better or worse. My grandfather taught me to never get married. I think that was good advice, but I ignored it.

Last formal question: if there are seven things in your workspace or your environment that you must have, what are they?

Kleenex. I’m talking about my sixteen inches of somatic and physical comfort, because that’s what allows me to move around and work. Kleenex for allergies. Mechanical pencil, a good one, a heavy one. A write-and-draw notebook. Phone, obviously. Camera nearby. Computer. The Cloud would be another thing, the Cloud which now over the last few years houses most of my thoughts and work. Chewing gum. Saline spray. I’m a camel, actually. I have more of a camel kind of metabolism. I can go for long periods of time without food. It’s the sinuses that need to be vanquished, more than the appetite.