You Feel Me?
May 8 - June 20, 2009
Opening Reception: Friday, May 8, 5:30 - 7:30
In his first show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Tim Sullivan gets serious about playing his favorite role—the artist Tim Sullivan. That should be easy. The 34-year-old has a face right out of central casting—part Andy Warhol, part David Hockney—and he has made his performing self the subject in most of his previous work. Yet in many of those images he is also strangely absent. This is the paradox that fuels his art and in a new body of work Sullivan has engineered a process that dissects this contradiction with new clarity, producing a stream of photos and videos that conjoin the narcissism of art stardom with the slipperiness of personal identity.
Sullivan starts with a movie performance such as James Dean’s in Rebel Without a Cause, then breaks it down into its sequential emotional moments—anger, happiness, resentment, whatever. He then reenacts those emotions one at a time inside a photo booth until he has captured the entire performance in a series of self-portraits. These end up as long, elegant strips, crisp, analytical grids and thick, monotonous flip books, representing both Sullivan’s performance and the original—the presence and the absence in this work.
With no story to bind them, the stills only hang together by force of their new decorative arrangements. One strip dangles from the wall like a snake, coils pooling in a film canister on the floor. Another strip runs 18 feet across. The books reference screenplays and cheesy film novelizations. The grid arrangement looks to rationalize the images but the effort seems to mock itself.
There is something ridiculous about the way Sullivan boils these performances down to pure affect and then uses the remaining essence to fuel his own feelings and actions. And there is something delightfully creepy about his Frankenstein take on personal identity as something that can be paused, freeze-framed and reanimated. We look at his face and wonder if he is just a robot operating off an artificial download, like some Phillip K. Dick character.
Deconstructing Hollywood celebrity is blood sport in the artworld. Bruce Conner’s Marilyn Five Times may be the ultimate San Francisco take on it. However, you must look to Douglas Gordon’s 24-hour Psycho to see narrative content and its hypnotic spectacle peeled away from a film as artfully as Sullivan does here. But while Gordon creates a big, dark, temporal space for the audience to grope around in, Sullivan is busy strip-mining Hollywood’s Mount Olympus for the raw materials to feed his own emotional furnace and ultimately to produce a mock vision of stardom. Like Francesco Vezzoli, who also uses Hollywood as a readymade to explore celebrity, Sullivan is both on-the-make and uncooperative. Like a lot of artists he hectors his masters when not ingratiating himself with them.
Underlying these self-portraits is the increasingly obvious situation in which emotions are now so mediated by language, technology and culture that we can no longer even categorize them as personal. They’re second hand, outsourced and only original in the way that a Sherry Levine photo of a Walker Evans photo is original. Except here Sullivan, who appropriates liberally in his work, is not investigating issues of reproduction and authorship but those of emotional ownership and presence. The question is no longer did you create that image, it’s did you originate the feeling that made you laugh or cry.
From watching reality TV we know that performance has become personal. Shows like Extreme Makeover and The Biggest Loser have transferred everyday people cleaning house and breaking diets from the home to the screen. From looking at Sullivan’s self-portraits we are reminded that, more relevantly, the personal is now also being performed. What began as a trickle, when a character in Woody Alan’s The Purple Rose of Cairo abandoned his movie for real life, has become a torrent. On Youtube and Facebook comedy routines and pornographic come-ons that used to occur only on screen are suddenly being acted out in the home, alone. Unlike Cindy Sherman’s film stills of the 1970s, Sullivan’s portraits do nothing to help us rethink their source material, they only assist us in rethinking ourselves as producers of ourselves in what Neil Gabler calls our “Republic of Entertainment.”
Sullivan nibbled at these ideas for years before finally sinking his teeth into them. In one early photo we find him dressed as a Hollywood cowboy quick on the draw; in another he’s naked but for some vanilla frosting in a pose from the cover of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights. In the most prescient work, he photographed himself in a shirt that reads George Kuchar across the front while the real Kuchar frames him with picture moulding as though he were a painting.
The presence of Kuchar and Sullivan’s reliance on male method actors like Marlon Brando doing Street Car Named Desire, suggests that in addition to all the other binaries at work in his art, the oedipal contest is in play too. At one time the object of desire would have been artistic legitimacy or emotional authenticity. However, the days of the avant-garde browbeating pop culture and the media like some moralistic older brother have come to an end. Now art is merely content to blind Hollywood and have sex with its trophy wife—fame. If Paris Hilton proved to us once and for all that everyone is a celebrity then Tim Sullivan is here to say that everyone can have a celebrity identity crisis. Heads up Scientology Celebrity Centre International! You’re gonna need to expand that reception area.
Steven Wolf Fine Arts
49 Geary Street, Suite 411
San Francisco, CA 94108
415-263-3677
www.stevenwolffinearts.com
