Catherine Sullivan with a side of Mike Kelley James Stanfield

If you’re in New York you can go see the Mike Kelley exhibition, Day is Done, at Gagosian Gallery – and you should as it is a thorough re-rendering of his previous preoccupations – but don’t expect to find any soul. The show is a clutter of smaller projects – none of which has been treated with any special attention. No particular work stands out, and even though each piece is different in form – a monitor in this one, a simple sculpture in that one, a speaker emitting shrieks over there – I began to feel the sensation of standing in the McDonalds of post-conceptual Californian art. Each project was either a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder, Chicken Nuggets or a plain old cheeseburger. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the show, but only because I know that real nourishment is still available elsewhere.

And what do you know; good work was being served just down the street at Mike K.’s actual gallery, Metro Pictures. The Chittendens, by Catherine Sullivan, successfully created an alternative image-world. Two smallish movie screens stood side by side in the newly carpeted main gallery. Two different black and white videos were projected onto them. Both videos were shot in the same starkly lit business office. Characters from the office populated its rooms. The characters, mentally isolated, hardly ever interacted with one another; instead they twitched and projected guttural noises. One bare-chested man with an athletic physique wiggled and squirmed, and at first I was just positive he was Iggy Pop. Ghostly, this man faded from the room and was replaced by a man in a dark suit, who invited the audience into his office. There he tried to butter us up for the sale - unfortunately psychosis seemed to shatter his ability to speak. He then faded. A woman appeared on a couch; she mumbled and bobbed her head back and forth. It was all very Lynchian. People stopped representing people and instead seemed to represent personalities in the same head. Sometimes Sullivan projected three or more of the fidgeting characters all at once - layering the imagery to create the feeling that a brain (represented by the room) had stored each character’s movements and was now replaying them – doing its best to organize the years of personalities left in its schizophrenic mind.

Sullivan’s quotation of cinema - especially of the black and white, silver-screen, nostalgic strains – allowed me to slip out of the real world and into a trance. I wondered into the next showroom. There were two more videos, but this time they were projected on two opposing walls. You could not watch both at once. Here my attention was divided between a large projection of the same characters – again gesturing wildly, trying to communicate with non-speech – and a smaller, oval-shaped projection with a few of the characters milling about, possibly working, in an incredibly beautiful landscape by the sea. Here Sullivan combined the romance of 20th century cinema with the romance of18th and 19th century landscape painting. I could read, only, that the characters in the larger projection expressed desire to inhabit the scene in the landscape projection.

There was a third side room of projections, but it superfluous. Everything had already been accomplished in the main galleries. I spent a trance-blurred hour in the installation; except for the time that I was forced to patiently endure a Michael Snow mini epic (because the artist had planted himself right next to me) this is the longest I’ve ever sat to watch video art.