ART
Every Name in History is I: Catherine Sullivan & The Triangle of Need
/ Thom Donovan
03.08.08
Do not take the Prado case seriously. I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father, I venture to say that I am also Lesseps. . . . I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new idea—that of a decent criminal. […]
The unpleasant thing, and one that nags my modesty, is that at bottom every name in history is I; also as regards the children I have brought into this world, it is a case of my considering with some distrust whether all of those who enter the ‘Kingdom’ do not also come out of God.
––Frederick Nietzsche, from a letter to Jakob Burckhardt, January 5th, 1889, quoted from Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
The hope is that neither the historical significance of a location nor the stylized theatrical action staged there is absorbed into the other, making a pure fiction. In the best cases character, action, and setting animate one another toward an effusion of meaning. This is the narrative “progress” of the work. And this is actually when I feel the work is most successful, somehow—when it serves as an occasion to present the desires of others, represented by aspects of the location and its décor, the individuals who perform it, and the cultural regimes that condition these performances.
––Catherine Sullivan, from “Catherine Sullivan Talks About The Chittendens, 2005”; Artforum, February, 2006
On January 5, 1889, Frederick Nietzsche wrote one of his most mysterious and widely interpreted letters to his colleague and admirer, the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, wherein he famously declared that “every name in history is I.” I think of this phrase encountering Chicago-based artist, Catherine Sullivan’s work, which, for me, embodies what Nietzsche may have been getting at through his inspired declaration. For Nietzsche’s point concerns how individual subjects—those who feel and behave in particular ways—relate to larger tendencies and events within narrative History. Events and personages pass “through them,” and the individual actor reacts to these historical moments: that is, one reenacts the “once felt” in order to make feelings active again. This reacting of subjective and intersubjective complexities is compulsory. As a seizure of one’s consciousness and bodily imagination it is the stuff of psychosis (tics, spasms, motor-sensory dislocation, aphasia, bodily resentiment). However it is also the stuff of performance—theater in the most ancient and recent of senses. Theaters of “cruelty” (Artaud) and “hysteria” (Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysterical Theater).
The unpleasant thing, and one that nags my modesty, is that at bottom every name in history is I; also as regards the children I have brought into this world, it is a case of my considering with some distrust whether all of those who enter the ‘Kingdom’ do not also come out of God.
––Frederick Nietzsche, from a letter to Jakob Burckhardt, January 5th, 1889, quoted from Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
The hope is that neither the historical significance of a location nor the stylized theatrical action staged there is absorbed into the other, making a pure fiction. In the best cases character, action, and setting animate one another toward an effusion of meaning. This is the narrative “progress” of the work. And this is actually when I feel the work is most successful, somehow—when it serves as an occasion to present the desires of others, represented by aspects of the location and its décor, the individuals who perform it, and the cultural regimes that condition these performances.
––Catherine Sullivan, from “Catherine Sullivan Talks About The Chittendens, 2005”; Artforum, February, 2006
On January 5, 1889, Frederick Nietzsche wrote one of his most mysterious and widely interpreted letters to his colleague and admirer, the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, wherein he famously declared that “every name in history is I.” I think of this phrase encountering Chicago-based artist, Catherine Sullivan’s work, which, for me, embodies what Nietzsche may have been getting at through his inspired declaration. For Nietzsche’s point concerns how individual subjects—those who feel and behave in particular ways—relate to larger tendencies and events within narrative History. Events and personages pass “through them,” and the individual actor reacts to these historical moments: that is, one reenacts the “once felt” in order to make feelings active again. This reacting of subjective and intersubjective complexities is compulsory. As a seizure of one’s consciousness and bodily imagination it is the stuff of psychosis (tics, spasms, motor-sensory dislocation, aphasia, bodily resentiment). However it is also the stuff of performance—theater in the most ancient and recent of senses. Theaters of “cruelty” (Artaud) and “hysteria” (Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysterical Theater).
