“Animating in Absentia”

Curatorial Statement by Katherine Behar

“On one hard evening, my father warned me “The daughter of the sentence will bring the death of Socrates.” The Death of Socrates, a painting by Jacques-Louis David, is one we regularly stop by together to view at The Met. His tone was dark, but the painting’s name marks a remembrance of our last visit compressed into his present fear of disappearing.”

—Lynn Sullivan[1]

The New Media Artspace proudly presents Lynn Sullivan: Daughter of the Sentence, a solo exhibition featuring a new four-part cycle of video works. In Daughter of the Sentence, Sullivan focuses on her relationship with her father, an analytic philosopher now suffering from Alzheimer’s disease with Sullivan as his primary caretaker. Anchored by her father’s specialization in the philosophy of language, the new works in this exhibition also extend Sullivan’s own career-long exploration of the materiality of language. Modeled out of quotidian ephemera culled from her art studio and her father’s office, Sullivan’s videos oscillate between tender, intimate portraits and withholding, analytic structures. Her father, an ostensible subject of these works, stays largely absent off-screen, while once-ordered formations of language are animated by forces of undoing: wind blowing, hands shuffling, letters cut loose only to obscure. Inevitable mortality inflects Sullivan’s elegy to intellectual rigor unraveling.

Simultaneously, Daughter of the Sentence is haunted by the legacies of two key figures: the famed artist Robert Morris, who was Sullivan’s mentor, and the prominent analytic philosopher Donald Davidson, whose pivotal work in the philosophy of language influenced both Morris and the elder Sullivan. The online exhibition incorporates Sullivan’s rubbing drawings. Created through the physical touch of a textured surface, her Gnaw Series utilizes a similar tactility as Morris’s influential Blind Time Drawings. Morris created these drawings using his inked fingers while blindfolded and paired each with a quotation from Davidson. Morris’s most direct engagement with Davidson, this series occasioned a written exchange between the artist and the philosopher. While Morris elected to disable his sight, Sullivan’s father’s diminished faculties are the result of disease, not volition. Thus, in Daughter of the Sentence, Sullivan’s meditation on mind and agency (themes her father studied in depth in the work of Davidson and others) also melds with its inverse: a deliberation on death and incapacity.

The in-person exhibition is contextualized by prints from Sullivan’s Gnaw Series, in which site-specific rubbings are digitally enlarged to evoke mountain ranges. The Gnaw Series prints, which result from physical contact with the environment, appear beside magnified marginalia from philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention that Sullivan’s father returned to over decades. Together, they show two poles from the artist’s context of reference. Her artistic practice is entwined in these two different ways of knowing about the world.

“Seeing as is not seeing that.”[2] Donald Davidson makes this claim while explicating his controversial theory of metaphor. Davidson insists that metaphors have no special “metaphoric meaning.” That is, they mean nothing beyond the literal meaning of their words. What if we translate this Davidsonian move from the philosophy of language to new media art? What happens when, in Sullivan’s video Usage for example, a twisted letter form appears in one area of the frame and, after a period of black, reappears in another sector? We would be wrong to imagine that it traveled continuously from point A to point B under cover of night. Rather, if we follow Davidson, every image needs to be taken for exactly what it is (namely a snapshot that records something that once occurred, thus operating mnemonically) and every black section of video should be taken as what it is (namely the disturbing experience of no image or no mnemonic recall). A black out of the screen would need to be understood as a literal black out (the black out of mnemonic recall where no recorded image exists) equal to the literal meaning of metaphor for Davidson. So, any space and time elapsing between images would need to be absorbed whole in the disarming duration of real time, as presence in absentia.

In Sullivan’s works, video black often provides a ground against which objects change position from one photographic image to the next. This technique is the foundation of stop motion animation wherein a series of still images, played back in sequence and at a sufficiently rapid frame rate, creates the illusion of movement. Nevertheless, our thought experiment with Davidson reveals that Sullivan’s works are the opposite of animations. Animations ask us to politely ignore the gaps between their frames. In contrast, the yawning chasms Sullivan leaves intact between images are impossible to overlook. Only by suspending disbelief and willfully not seeing those cuts, can we believe an animated image moves continuously. But when we take those spans of blackness at face value, the actual absent subject of Sullivan’s works is revealed. That subject is discontinuity itself: of memory (discontinuity between a mind and a minder), of movement (discontinuity between a body and a space), of language (discontinuity between a word and its referent), of agency (discontinuity between intention and action).

Consider Sullivan’s treatment in two works in the exhibition, Usage and Minders. In Minders, a black screen pulses with vestiges from a lifetime of reading. A row of well-worn paperbacks stands six abreast. (Sullivan has disclosed that these are her father’s copies of favorite texts by Davidson, Anscombe, Quine, and Peirce.[3]) Their curling yellowed pages and creased spines could stand for six heads of blonde hair, perhaps a reference to “daughters” born of the sentences they contain. Adorning their paper locks like barrettes or bows, makeshift bookmarks—a post-it note in one, paperclips in others—mark sections to revisit. The screen begins to pulse with cryptic configurations of paperclips and post-its: first a pile, then an array, then ordered horizontally, then vertically, then reordered, repositioned, spaced evenly, spaced oddly, always punctuated by rifts of unrelenting blackness. When the books appear again, they pulse on and off: like a beacon, like breathing, like a beating heart. A neat line of five paperclips flashes frenetically as if to convey a coded message, underscoring communicative urgency, but revealing nothing of significance.

Sullivan’s use of the word “minders” as the title of this work evokes mind as an embodied faculty that may come to require an external object to augment its capacities; reminders as placeholders that recall one’s reading to a select passage; and the job of minding, as when one submits to minding one’s business, minding one’s manners, minding one’s parent’s rules, minding one’s child or ward, even when that ward is a parent. I am becoming my father’s keeper, my father’s minder. The paperclips in Minders could stand-in for a father being minded. As minders that bind, they link him to his self-conception as someone whose existence is thoroughly wrapped up in language. Minders bridge these discontinuities, holding our mental, social, and linguistic selves together.

Sullivan credits her upbringing under her father’s influence with her ongoing artistic investment in what she calls “the strangeness of words” and her desire to “make words physical.”[4] In previous sculptural and installational works, she has positioned monumentally scaled words in landscapes and architectural contexts to show how language depends on—in these cases literally leaning against—its environment. However, in another video, Usage, the dark void of the screen shows the alphabetic material of language absent that support. Pulsing cuts to black flash on letters cut singly or in mutant combinations from white paper. Language is physicalized, rendered in material form, but with no context—environmental or social—to emplace an utterance or hold up a meaning. Devoid of such supports in Usage, words collapse. Curling up on themselves, they are utterly inscrutable.

Frontally illuminated, these buckled letters recall globs of snow falling in a car’s headlights. Ultimately, they begin to pile up like a snow drift, filling the bottom of the screen. As this word-substance accrues, Sullivan could be illustrating a late stage in Davidson’s theory of triangulation verbatim. In Davidson’s words, “language fills in and enriches the base of the triangle” that issues between two observers, each focused on an external object they both perceive while using language to “correlate” their responses to it.[5] It is precisely this communal, shared world that is absent in Usage. In aphasia (which often accompanies Alzheimer’s disease), brain damage erodes neurological links between words and meanings. It is as though the trajectories bonding observers to object (forming the sides of that triangle) are severed, leaving language to accumulate at its base without appropriate reference to the world. As substance out of place, Usage’s twisted words refute “usage” as language qua language.

With strobe-like pulses referencing Morse Code, a glitch in language conveys “Morse” to “Morris.” Robert Morris was Sullivan’s mentor, a professor with whom she worked closely as a graduate student.[6] In his well-known Blind Time Drawings, Morris inscribed quotations from Davidson alongside the instruction set he followed to create each drawing. The two engaged in mutual commentary in Critical Inquiry’s special issue on Davidson and his influence. In his contribution, Morris described a tendency to fail to see absence resulting from belief. “We always believe before we look,” he cautioned. “We always assume (theorize) a wholeness of the visual. We believe to such an extent that we do not ‘see’ the absences. Can seeing something obscure dark reason?”[7] These words could not be more uncannily apt for the Morse-like disjunctions of Sullivan’s non-animations.

Morris sought “dark reason” in a literal manner by blindfolding himself to operate in darkness. The terse instructions he set out for himself to create Blind Time Drawings are every bit as opaque as the curt cuts in Minders or Usage. None of these works willingly reveal their dark reasons. Without sight, Morris resorted to touch, a tactile drawing method in which indexicality closes the temporal delay that preoccupied Donaldson. Sullivan’s own indexical drawings from her Gnaw Series use rubbing or frottage so that the physical world informs its own image as texture. Unlike Morris’ Blind Time Drawings, which are accompanied by texts, Sullivan’s rubbings are non-verbal counterparts to her enigmatic works with words: indexicality obviates exposition. Sullivan’s Gnaw Series appears to extend Morris’ interests, as if to rub away a burden of signification. Simultaneously, her mark-making seems in sympathy with her father’s “fear of disappearing,” striving to leave a trace of her existence as a body in space. As Sullivan “mashes” herself against what she sees, like language propped against environment, rubbing makes her mark on (and of) the world.[8]

That tactility translates into Cling and Daughter of the Sentence. In Cling, paper letters swarm a stack of three stained coffee mugs. (Sullivan considers the coffee cup “a key object” for her father, “a chronic drinker of coffee.”[9]) These quotidian objects bear his touch; his traces streak their surfaces. However, Sullivan’s father is not the instigator of action in this work, and his mugs get gradually buried behind a cloud of letters that fills the screen. The letters flutter illegibly, moved by the video’s true protagonist: gusts of air. A breeze may blow to clear away cobwebs, but this unseen wind works as a magical force to draw clutter in. As letterforms cling to one another and the cups, the threesome are defamiliarized, then swallowed.

In the exhibition’s titular work, Daughter of the Sentence, we see Sullivan’s father for the first time. His hesitant hands maneuver grey letters on a wooden table, searchingly stirring spellings. Unlike in previous videos, the letters lie flat, inviting comprehension. They appear on the verge of spelling something, but never cohere as sense. His calmness indicates that sense-making isn’t a concern. Instead, tactile experience guides his gestures as he explores the letter’s textures gliding on the tabletop. This action alternates with scenes of obscure clusters of letterforms, tenuously adhered to white orbs. The tumbling word-balls waft loftily in and out of frame, alphabetic appendages fluttering. Tossed in the air or rolling along the ground, soft winds enliven them.

If Sullivan’s non-animations alternate stasis and nothingness, Daughter of the Sentence and Cling are in constant oscillation, moved by gusts of air. Air caresses objects, blows words. Sullivan has identified ground and air as two prime sites of language’s vulnerability.[10] Surely, these two materials—air and ground—are also common imagery for the end of life. A ghostly soul floats heavenward through air. A body is laid to rest underground. When air pours out of our mouths like wind, we speak. When air escapes out of our lungs like wind, we suffocate. This exhale pertains even where it doesn’t explain. Morris was described as having “deflationary objectives” in his exchange with Davidson,[11] and Davidson in turn asked himself whether there might not be “something sinister . . . in [his own] views that [he had] failed to recognize, something that portends . . . dissolution.”[12] A sigh escapes us.

Having opening his essay about Morris with this dark question, Davidson pondered how “alienation” bars an artist or writer from their externalized creation. He quoted Plato on “the gulf between talking to a person and reading his words.”[13] Just as an artwork, when questioned, “maintain[s] a most majestic silence,” so too, “written words . . . go on telling you just the same thing for ever.”[14] For Davidson, elapsing time isolates artworks and frustrates immediacy in all communication. Sullivan shows us how this incapacity at the heart of communication extends beyond the remit of language to the human condition. Time spoils synchronicity between any two people, bringing as it does the advent of age, disease, and that ultimate discontinuity, death. Daughter of the Sentence opens withering channels of communication that stretch between daughter and father, across isolation. These artworks triangulate a relationship that grounds them, animating closeness, even in absentia.

Lynn Sullivan: Daughter of the Sentence is curated by Katherine Behar, Professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, CUNY and is produced by the New Media Artspace Student Docent Team. The exhibition is made possible by further support from the Student Technology Fund (STF), the Baruch Computing and Technology Center (BCTC), the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the Newman Library. All images appear courtesy of the artist.

Artist Bio

Lynn Sullivan is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, sound, and video. Her work has been included in national and international exhibitions such as Exposed (The Current Center, Stowe, Vermont), Slip, Shift or Spill, as commissioned by Burlington City Arts (Shelburne, Vermont), Crevice Bouquet, a performative installation at the Inside-Out Museum (Beijing, China), and Sky Hold at Lipani Gallery, Fordham University (NYC). Residencies include Edwin Way Teale Center (CT), Carving Studio and Sculpture Center (VT), and the Apex Art Fellowship in South Africa. Curatorial projects have been included in Spring/Break Art Show (NYC), Present Company (Brooklyn), and an ongoing short run series of Four Letter Word Projects that take over the spaces of artist homes and studios. Collective projects include groups such as Build, FIPCA, and Placeholder, with actions performed at spaces such as Momenta Gallery (Brooklyn) and NYC parades. Born in Ozone Park, Queens, Sullivan received a BA/BFA from Cornell University, and an MFA from Hunter College. She now lives and works between Brooklyn, Hartford and Vermont. She is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Trinity College in Connecticut.

[1] Lynn Sullivan, personal correspondence with author, August 6, 2025.

[2] Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 47, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342976.

[3] Lynn Sullivan, personal correspondence with author, September 24, 2025.

[4] Lynn Sullivan, Zoom conversation with author, September 3, 2025.

[5] Donald Davidson, “The Third Man,” Critical inquiry 19, no. 4 (Sumer 1993): 610, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343898.

[6] Lynn Sullivan, Zoom conversation with author, September 3, 2025.

[7] Robert Morris, “Writing with Davidson,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (Sumer 1993): 624, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343899.

[8] Lynn Sullivan, personal correspondence with author, September 24, 2025.

[9] Lynn Sullivan, personal correspondence with author, September 24, 2025.

[10] Lynn Sullivan, Zoom conversation with author, September 3, 2025.

[11] Kenneth Surin, “Getting the Picture: Donald Davidson on Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings IV (Drawing with Davidson),” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 152, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30750. 

[12] Davidson, “The Third Man,” 607.

[13] Ibid., 610

[14] Plato’s Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth, quoted in Davidson, ibid., 610.