calendario eventi  :: 

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20/1/2005

Two exhibitions

Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich

Catherine Sullivan

The work by LA born artist Catherine Sullivan (1969) is based on qualities that the artist has fostered from both her educations, the realms of theatre and of fine arts. Since 1997, Catherine Sullivan writes and stages pieces that are based on theatre and which are presented within the visual arts context of video films and installations.

Simultaneously, she often implants her dramatic concepts within the local theatre scene by hi-jacking existing stage sets for her performances. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich will present for the first time in Switzerland a comprehensive survey of the artist's work, along with works such as the large 5-channel-video-installations «Big Hunt» (2002) and «Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land» (2004) and the multi-screen projections such as «Gold Standard (hysteric, melancholic, degraded, refined)» from 2001, there will be a range of sculptures, photographs and single-channel works The central theme in Catherine Sullivan's work are the encoded forms of expression. She applies these as confronting elements of communication between content, performer and audience, which through their formal as through their stylistic repetitions become effective. The selection of works shown at the Kunsthalle Zürich therefore emphasise the artist's striking interest in choreography.

Catherine Sullivan's interest is based on the emotional tension, which arises between the portrayed, the portrayer and the audience. She explores the principles of dramatic conventions and the mechanics of expression, which she filters from a large range of historical references. Sullivan calls her works «second order drama». Her material emerges from various sources such as cinema, theatre, literature, musicals or for example a Trisha Brown Choreography.
Point of origin in «Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land» (2004) is the brutal hostage take-over by the Chechens during the musical performance «North-East» at the Moscow opera in October 2002. «North-East» was seen as the first Russian musical, which reached an American format and attracted the Moscow audience in masses. The musical is based on the novel «Two Captains», a love and adventure story, which uses the Bolshevik Revolution and the Second World War as backdrop to portray an adventurous expedition into the Arctic region. As a symbol of Russia's expansion policy, Sullivan seems to affirm the musical's content as ideal symbolic target of the Chechens. Equally, this musical represented the charged relationship of adopting American entertainment culture. Catherine Sullivan took the novel «Two Captains» and developed roughly 50 pantomime-like actions from it, which all performers rehearsed, regardless of the character to whom the action originally was linked to. With a sequence of approximately forty archetypes and costume clichés, the artist evokes a system of representative impulses, which move in the realm of theatre but without "being" a musical. The work was filmed in the Polish American Army Veterans Association in Chicago, a social, multi-functional room serving the Polish community, which with their nationalistic and nostalgic emblems, military relics and the woodcuts by Polish artist Alex Kowalczuk spread a dark and dramatic atmosphere.

«Big Hunt» (2002) presents itself on five projection-screens, loops, each 22 minutes in length. In this work, Sullivan asks the question how and why emotional expression is of interest to us. In order to do so, she questions the role of the actor as central theme. How does emotional memory get formulated? What are the formal characteristics, which set the mechanics of the expressive and emotional content into motion? How does the body relate itself to the act of expression and how does this expression relate to the viewer's interpretation thereof? Her theory is, that the audience is less interested in the dramatic roles themselves but rather in the actors' virtuosity in transformation and empathy. Her starting points thus are normally based on film or real-life models, which can be homed in on through the skills of acting, conceptually or thematically. The scenes in «Big Hunt» relate to films like Arthur Penn's «The Miracle worker» (1962), which revolves around the mute and deaf Helen Keller and Robert Aldrich's «Whatever Happened to Baby Jane» (1962), which tells the story of a person's struggle between the glamorous "past self" and the degraded and desperate "present self". These films circle around the mental illness and derangement, whose dramatic essence is heightened through the contrast of the protagonist's physical beauty. In addition, Sullivan also makes use of true stories such as the one of the 25 year-old Birdie Jo Hoaks, who pretended to be a 13 year-old orphan boy in order to receive social security contributions. Sullivan develops dramatic tasks from this library of references, which stylistically have been influenced by pre-existing templates. Through this matrix, an ensemble of 30 performers executed a tightly strung web, leading to a grand re-organisation of derivatives of physical capacities of expression, which feed from a rich pool of potential constellations of conflicts: The conflict between content and form (the beautiful actress versus the pitiful character), between the symbolic power of the theatre and its representational forms, between hybrids of performative styles and their ability to emotionally involve the viewer into something, which has already been experienced through the codex of emotions displayed in theatre, television, or through the Hollywood movie culture. With this, Sullivan succeeds in creating a strange world originating from visual sources, which spread themselves through repetitive scenes, contents and performers assuming a form of decoding. This form of decoding lends her video installations and theatre pieces a quality, which stands apart from the normal content and referential systems, allowing the viewer a direct experience of emotional values.

In many of today's contemporary art practices, one can observe the reflection and exploration of transgressing the media in the '60s¹ & '70s'. In contrast to these historic departures where the deconstructive process of transgressing limits became the central theme, it now appears that the formal requirements, specific to each media such as the visual arts, exhibition, theatre, performance, music, literature, etc become the central role. This goes hand in hand with the reactivation of the physical presence of the self in relation to the existing formal definitions as with the subjective reinterpretation of seeing this "merging" of media. In Catherine Sullivan's work the relationship of the diverse media is not formulated as a deconstructive way of lifting this media-transgression or as a transportation of media specific expressions in a documentary mode from one context to the other, rather she infiltrates the forms of meaning and effects of the various media. Her video installations are impressive worlds, where the fascination of the theatrical gets transformed into the aesthetic form of a video-installation. Likewise, her theatre pieces build a form of piracy within the standardized theatrical context in which she implants aesthetic adoptions of her real-life experiments coming from performance and the visual arts and thus testing the potential impact physical expression holds. Sullivan addresses the transformation of the media itself by deplacing certain qualities, by inserting other formal existing codes, thus isolating, lifting and intensifying specific characteristics which allow the viewer a new, also different but direct encounter with the work.

Private View: Friday, 21 January, from 6 p.m.
Press Preview: Friday, 21 January, 10.30 a.m.

Catalogue: A catalogue will be published in collaboration with the Neue Aachener Kunstverein and the Kunstverein Braunschweig, which will illustrate Catherine Sullivan¹s exhibitions in 2004 in the above mentioned institutions as well as the one at the Kunsthalle Zürich, documenting the oeuvre with a manyfold of texts and images.
Texts by Sebastian Egenhofer, Catherine Sullivan, Karola Grässlin, Beatrix Ruf and Susanne Tietz.
«Catherine Sullivan», Ed. Kunsthalle Zürich, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Kunstverein Braunschweig and Le Consortium Dijon. JRP|Ringier, 2005

Image: a work by Catherine Sullivan
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Daria Martin

The films of American artist Daria Martin (born in 1973) map out newly interpreted images of modernistic ideals and tendencies within the performative arts. A constant interchanging of performer and object challenge the viewer to re-define their perception in a world of artifice, cheap materials and alarmingly real fantasies. For the first time united, Daria Martin will be showing her 16-mm films, «In the Palace» (2000), «Birds» (2001) and «Closeup Gallery» (2003), conceived as trilogy, in the parallel-room at the Kunsthalle Zürich. Also, on 20 March 2005, the artist will give a lecture on her films and present as a one-off special screening, her newest 16-mm film «Soft Materials», which was made in November 2004.at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the ETH Zürich.

Daria Martin's film-trilogy seduces and irritates through its exaggerated theatrical artifice as well as through its blunt exposure and its concurrent hermetic hiding of emotions. In «In the Palace» performers and objects are united in an indefinable dark interior, where on the one hand, motionless dancers hold classical poses and on the other, find themselves interlaced in a web of tubular steal constructions which through the ever rotating camera create always fresh outlines and hence trigger the viewer to perceive the space anew. Daria Martin's pays homage on Oskar Schlemmer's modernistic theatre performance "Slat Dance" of 1927, which exemplified the watershed point in 20th century theatre practises where performance and the "act of looking" was sharply re-defined. The cold dark geometry of the stage-set and the soft thunder and rain noises lend «In the Palace» an uncanny feeling that mirror the modernistic perfection, which only gets broken by the playful, simple and sometimes banal costumes such as aluminium foil necklaces and head coverings.

In «Birds» Daria Martin changes the mood masterfully from bleak to gleeful without changing the formal structures too much. As in «In the Palace», the space stays indefinable but instead it is light-flooded white. The tubular frame structures return in form of smaller and partly mobile elements, interspersed with furniture-like Plexiglas objects. The camera moves quicker, sometime panning from left to right, other times turning in circles, capturing the transiently edited scenes that are underlined with a pulsating electro-soundtrack. The costumes resemble a sort of absurd retro-futuristic fashion, more artificial and more colourful, they remind one of the theatre and performance pieces of the sixties. An aesthetic, Kubrik-like cocktail between Odyssey 2001, Clockwork Orange and a Cage-Cunningham-Johns performance from 1968, where objects and performers melt into one. The distance between performer and viewer gets reduced through the constant zooming in and out of the camera through which we can get a glimpse of a performer's little smirk or an unwanted look directly into the camera, signalising that everyone involved, the performer as the audience are aware of the fact that they are caught in an open game of self-exposing actor versus voyeuristic gaze of the viewer.

«Closeup Gallery» raises the formalistic scenario to a higher level. A card magician and his student, four deck of cards, blue, red, black and green and a rotating, circular table with three Plexiglas tabletops stacked on top of each other, form a kaleidoscope of colour-coordinated interpretation, like a card-game, which repeatedly gets get shuffled and laid out. A man and a woman, dressed in shirts that adapt in colour to the various card scenes. They smile at each other, play tricks to impress one another but in the end they simply act as a plastic extension of the cards themselves. Both card players direct their objects on the table, which is their mutual stage, like puppeteers who become one with their surrounding.

This aesthetic scenario is escorted by the hypnotising melody «My Little Diamond» by Egill Saebjörnsson. Image and music fuses into a carousel of feelings of various perceptions that oscillate between reality and the game of artifice, between the playful allusion to modernistic abstraction and the deceptive qualities of the act of seeing. Daria Martin's filmmaking process lays bare the methods and elements involved and more often highlights them by applying seemingly unprofessional and quasi-documentary moments. Through this she emphasises artifice and naturalness, the illusion of the disillusioned room and separates the masks of performance, theatre and film clearly.

Event:
Sunday, 20 March 2005, 2 pm
Daria Martin will speak about her work and will present as a one of special screening her newest 16-mm «Soft Materials» (2004).

Public guided tours:
New guided tours on Sunday afternoon at 2 pm: 23.1. (Beatrix Ruf) / 6.2. (Samuel Leuenberger) / 13.3. (Samuel Leuenberger)
Lunch time guided tour: Wednesday, 2.3., 12.30 pm

Kunsthalle Zurich
Limmatstrasse 270 8005
Zurich
Opening hours:
Tuesday / Wednesday / Friday 12 am – 6 pm,
Thursday 12 am – 8 pm,
Saturday / Sunday 11 am – 5 pm, closed on Mondays

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