May 23, 2009
“Sentimentoh, OK, U.S.A.,” the title of a poem by Sean Sullivan, is a place of unsettled memory, stalled time, and dreamlike spectacle, a ghost town where pianos go unplayed, faith resides in a numbers game, and “all the things you hold most dear weigh almost nothing.” One of a dozen or so poems typed out on 8 x 11-inch sheets of paper folded and stapled together into a booklet, it is a fitting commentary to Sullivan’s current installation at KMOCA, located at 103 Abeel Street (closes on May 30).
Walls are hung floor to ceiling with found objects–an unfurled player piano roll, a row of painted ping-pong paddles, the varnished side of a piece of furniture, pinned with a page from an old hymnal—and white-painted wood boards with geometric accents in red, black and ochre, recalling the minimalist abstraction of Russian constructivism and the elegant graphic designs of the 1930s. Leaf-like black or colored shapes suggest the spare decorativeness of playing cards or the curved forms of a musical instrument. A battered suitcase hangs in mid air, awaiting the visitor’s departure for Sentimentoh, while in the back room, a conceptual sculpture resembling an upright piano represents all those dusty instruments sitting in neglected corners of people’s houses.
Color-pencil drawings on aged newsprint depict the grocery store, trestle, flop houses and cannery described in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Stacks of sheets printed with a single black record sit on an old school desk, selling for $1 each; each label is marked with a different place name and decade—an alignment of space and time that’s code for a particular sound and era. There are also allusions to early electrification, silent films (a drawing depicting a stylish trouser leg in a hoofer’s graceful kick was inspired by Buster Keaton), television, and atomic missiles—technologies that were once considered marvelous, but are now either outmoded or so ubiquitous as to be invisible.
The mystical but utilitarian quality is compounded by the inclusion of texts and numbers, suggesting game boards, signs, diagrams and musical notations. Drawings are inscribed with evocative place names picked out from an atlas, and the margins of ripped pages of old books, their paragraphs crossed out, are scribbled with words overheard in a static radio broadcast. Somber messages are leavened with devil-may-care slang: “Bread. Soup. Line. Okie Dokie.” The show conveys a sense of latent possibility, as well as the vast empty spaces of the frontier, where it’s each family for itself. Humor, stories, the chattering of the TV, the chance of winning Lotto, and romantic love offer a reprieve.
The scuffed patina of the paintings—they are smudged, smeared, and accidently sliced with a knife—suggest they are not paintings at all, but rather discarded artifacts, which Sullivan happened to find in a Dumpster or condemned school building. Indeed, he is more spirit medium than artist, channeling the desires, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of common folks, circa 1935-55. He eschews expressive brushstrokes, covering his old paintings with cream-colored acrylic paint. He then employs tape, a ruler and a knife to create his images–an iron bed, a profile of a house and tree with a line of laundry, an upside-down car, the lower half of a nattily attired couple cropped at the shoulders, as if clumsily photographed—which are painted in with polyurethane. He isn’t fastidious. “Whatever happens sort of happens, and then you work with that,” he says. “It bears the marks of being made.”
Whiteness, wrote Herman Melville, “calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.” Indeed, Sullivan’s painted “incantations of whiteness” have a ghostly presence. The images, which float like folk-art figures and are barely distinguishable from the white ground, suggest absence, as if they were an echo of the actual artwork, their elusive physicality aligning them with the stuff of memory. More literally, their threadbare quality reinforces the theme of lack and making do with less. “I wanted to give a little information, but not too much,” Sullivan says. “It allows me to be a little more mysterious, because it’s not so specific.”
Sullivan, who is 34 and grew up on Long Island, notes that during the Depression and World War II, the government used graphic images to remind people to clean their teeth. Up through the 1950s, he says, American popular culture was infused with a sense of the collective, that “everybody’s in this thing together,” whether it was the Depression, World War II or the postwar boom. Sullivan’s sign iconography is an attempt to re-create a kind of communal language, to be deployed in case of emergency. The black or red geometric shapes in many of the paintings—a jolt of contrast to the muted white ground–could be read as a series of semaphores. For example, a painting of a stylized red image of a house, called “We Are Okay We Are Not Okay,” belongs to a simple communication system, according to Sullivan. “It’s a signal card for neighbors. You hang it on the outside of your house. If it’s upright, everything’s fine. But if there’s a problem, you hang it upside down, so [neighbors] would know.”
The first half of the 20th century was a simpler, but by no means easier, time for the average person. Perhaps there is a moral here: the familiarity with hardship, the propensity for sharing, and the spiritual yearning of our ancestors—one work records the Lotto numbers played by Sullivan’s grandmother, who betted “the way a devout person would pray”–evoked by Sullivan’s signs and palimpsests might ironically signal the anticipatory glance of our own times.