OFF THE GRID
American artist Isaac Sullivan tells Sangeetha Sagar about creating alter egos for artwork, how the desert inspires him, and why art can inflame as much as it can pacify
American artist Isaac Sullivan has had installations exhibited at various galleries – here he tells us about how art can heal.
Isaac Sullivan is assistant professor of Visual Art at Zayed University in Dubai. Along with his latest installation Mastaba at Abu Dhabi’s Manarat Al Saadiyat, his installations, collages, and sound-based works have been exhibited at Tashkeel in Dubai; the Figge Museum in Iowa; and Beirut Design Week, among others.
What’s your favourite project been so far, in all your years of teaching?
I’ve been teaching for 10 years — in the US, Kuwait, and UAE. A project I love was to do with photographs and maps, which change what we see in our mind’s eye when we remember something. Students worked with this phenomenon by drawing a place they remembered, appropriating satellite imagery of it via Google Earth, and splicing it all together.
Has the city you live in influenced the way you teach?
Both the city and the surrounding landscapes have influenced the way I teach. The desert inspires me because of its radical silence. Dubai inspires me because it conceals the desert, or celebrates it by calling forth technologically controlled visions of it. I like Dubai like I like Los Angeles, and I like Los Angeles like I like a French garden…
Tell us about a few of your own projects.
I recently finished a commission at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi. It’s an installation combining collages, video, text, and UV prints on aluminium and acrylic. The work began as a dream about a geometric form, a specific kind of triangle, that had puzzled me and resonated across several years. I found that by adopting the right triangle as an object of concentration while unfolding and reconfiguring the architectural form of the mastaba, I could better envision geometric forms as both maps and territories. This impulse, I think, builds loosely upon a previous project in which I lived nomadically out of my car for awhile, attempting to trace giant cursive letters that I had drawn upon a map, and indexing these traces using time-lapse photography.
What role does technology play in art education? Practically speaking, contemporary art has become increasingly immaterial, and often exists multiplied within digital networks. Therefore, material and conceptual engagement with technological innovation is integral to art education. In principle, art is fundamentally technological. Drawing, for example, is dialling into what it is for a hand to pick up a tool and experience how the tool does and does not feel like a part of the body.
What’s the most stressful part of your job?
I help people understand how illusions work, which isn’t really stressful at all.
What project had your students most excited? It was when each of them created an alter ego, developed and performed it via social media, and created new artwork under this assumed identity. One of the students had adopted an imperious, unhinged persona called DJ Mercutio, then painted a very rough Art-Brut-style self portrait. He’d been in the habit of probing for new avenues of provocation ever since I first knew him, and here I think his instinct was maybe to goad others by making a show of painting carelessly. In this case, however, there was no line to cross – because that’s what DJ Mercutio would do. As a result, he found himself in a productive state of confusion (also painting an excellent mohawk). It was interesting to see him catch himself in an accidental moment of panache, and riding a razor’s edge of caring and not caring.
What role does art play in developing a person? Art helps us understand, for ourselves, what we actually desire.
In your experience, does art heal?
Art can pacify, and it can inflame; these are both a part of healing. On the one hand, of course, art can give non-violent expression to aggressive, transgressive, and chaotic energies that arise inevitably as a response to embodiment. On the other hand, art can open up new intensities of feeling, and expand which thoughts are possible – which can make the present unacceptable.
How do you handle messy situations in the classroom?
I am, as many are, silently amused by the wildness of a mess.
How do you manage a work-life balance?
For me, art and life are inextricable. That said, work I’ll take anywhere is work that permits me to surprise myself. Work that stays on campus is anything meant to predict, construe, or manage a foreseeable future.
If not an art teacher, what career path would you have taken?
I used to be in love with a strange American sport, baseball. If I were a much better athlete, and had never injured my shoulder – that would be the one. I like baseball because: it consists of long periods of leisure, occasionally interrupted by absurdly precise efforts; it is not timed by a clock, and therefore each game is potentially infinite; and one of its greatest players was a flabby, cigar-smoking lout whose name sounds like baby.
One thrilling trend in your field at the moment. A thrilling trend in contemporary art is work that tangles with or deploys artificial intelligence.
An art-related film that has influenced you.
I love Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio’s collaboration with Philip Glass, for its merging of technological and ecological imagery, lyrical repetition, and the altered sense of time it evokes.