Virtuosic Distortion: Nelson Sullivan's Queer Hand
Ricardo Montez
ASAP/Journal, Volume 2, Number 2, May 2017, pp. 395-421 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/665994
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Ricardo Montez
VIRTUOSIC
DISTORTION:
NELSON SULLIVAN’S QUEER HAND
“H
i, I’m
Nelson,
and
this is my new cable
show,” begins a videotaped
monologue by 1980s video
artist NELSON SULLIVAN,
the sound of his footsteps
hitting the pavement
of the Meat Packing
District where he lived.1
Figure 1.
Sullivan’s face, large and Nelson Sullivan in Front of Florent, July 1989. Image from a video by Nelson
Sullivan. Nelson Sullivan Collection, Fales Library, New York University.
slightly distorted, inhabits Reprinted with permission of Dick Richards.
the center of a circular
frame as the industrial buildings of the neighborhood curve around the edges and
move into an extended rear view, trailing of into the distance with each step
Sullivan takes. The streets of New York unfold around and behind Sullivan.
With its ish-eye efect, the wideRICARDO MONTEZ is an assistant professor of Performance
angle lens produces a slightly tubular
Studies at the New School for Public Engagement. He is
view, creating a visual wormhole
currently completing a monograph on the artist Keith Haring
titled Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of
and enhancing a sense of time travel
Desire.
ASAP/Journal, Vol. 2.2 (2017): 395-421
© 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press.
with Sullivan at the helm. “And look, here we are at Florent and Lambert and
the waitresses at Florent are here waving hello to us. Oh, Lambert it’s so good
to see you today. Anyway, we’ll go on. Bye.” Keeping himself in the frame,
Sullivan shits the camera slightly to show his viewers the window of Florent,
the famous twenty-four-hour diner where notable igures from the downtown
art and performance scene continued the party long ater last call had been
announced at the club (ig. 1). The two people he has introduced wave from
the other side of the window before Sullivan shits focus again, maneuvering
himself around a dumpster as the restaurant falls away from view. “My dog and
I are out for a walk,” he explains, angling the camera down to show his dog,
Blackout, turning a corner. At the end of an expandable leash held by Sullivan,
Blackout’s form appears small and narrow, evoking an exaggerated sense of
distance from the camera and highlighting the spatially distorting efects of the
wide-angle lens. Viewers are invited to come along with Nelson as he makes a
scene of this seemingly routine morning dog walk. In his framing of Florent—an
eclectic Meatpacking hotspot long before Sex In the City seduced its suburban
audiences to the neighborhood—Sullivan remarks upon the restaurant and its
employees in a way that suggests its cultural capital before quickly moving on.
The ephemerality of the moment evokes, for the present-day viewer aware of
Florent’s eventual closing, a scene of queer sociality lost to gentriication.
In the video, shot two days before his death on July 4, 1989, Sullivan is rehearsing and recording an introduction for the irst episode of his public access show.
This was a broadcast opportunity for Sullivan to share selections from nearly
1,200 hours of his documentary video footage, in which he narrates details of
his downtown life and describes his physical surroundings, announcing cues for
the insertion of materials from his archive. The walking monologue described
here is a record of great physical skill in which Sullivan, holding an 8mm VHS
camera at arm’s length, steadily navigates an urban terrain and safely guides his
dog on leash through the city streets. As a docent to the downtown streets,
Sullivan anticipates and reacts to what comes into view, exerting himself to
manufacture a surprisingly luid and immersive experience of the city. Sullivan’s
ASAP/Journal 396 /
manipulation of the camera and the distorting efects of the wide-angle lens
produce a mobile experience of inhabitation where the labor of his lexible body
encodes the video tape with a formal structure for his public access project.
Sullivan’s spoken commentary is central to this gesture-driven mediation of his
environment. He presents his viewers with a programming guide while also
indicating an overall afective tone for the television show. “I don’t always know
what I think of my life, but at times I know it’s interesting and exciting, and I
want to share it all with you,” he says before announcing the date: July 2, 1989.
Originally from Kershaw, South Carolina, Nelson Sullivan moved to New
York in the fall of 1970. Between 1982 and 1989, he built an impressive archive
of video footage, taking his camera with him into legendary queer New York
spaces like the Pyramid Club and the Chelsea
Hotel. Sullivan’s documentary practice was
tied to a larger trend in which downtown New
York igures took advantage of new developments in video and broadcasting. As video
equipment became increasingly accessible to
those working outside of network television,
and as the introduction of cable television in
the early 1970s introduced new public access
“
[Nelson Sullivan’s] collection
of videos is a dense and overwhelming archive of the fabulous.
”
channels, a generation of activists, artists, and performers produced programming that captured the ethos of downtown New York City. Shows such as
Willoughby Sharp’s Downtown New York and Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party allowed
viewers access to the club scene and its denizens.2 These shows, coupled with
Michael Musto’s popularity as a chronicler of underground nightlife in publications such as the Village Voice and Details, provide a historical context for
thinking about Sullivan’s adoption of video as a means to document the ephemeral life of downtown and his drive to produce his own public access program.
If Musto, a friend who appears in many of Sullivan’s videos, could ind success and minor celebrity in writing about the very scenes Sullivan taped, why
wouldn’t audiences be drawn to the kinetic, immersive audiovisual records
Sullivan himself produced? His collection of videos is a dense and overwhelming archive of the fabulous. Embedded in Sullivan’s tapes are many scenes of
performance—both on- and ofstage—that are made visible through Sullivan’s
own irst-person performance of apprehension. He enacts a handheld choreography of spectatorship and intimacy, performing himself within these worlds
Montez 397 /
“
[…] the footage he let behind formally enacts a philosophically
compelling mode of documentation that Sullivan describes as
‘active-passive’ observation, a way of utilizing handheld video
technology to perform and inscribe his bodily presence on tape.
”
that are themselves productions of self-fashioning. Queer heroes such as Ethyl
Eichelberger, Jayne County, Vaginal Davis, and RuPaul can be seen socializing
in the dressing room at the Pyramid Club—this anticipatory space of performance pulsing with as much intoxicating energy as the stage acts themselves.
Sullivan’s footage extends beyond the club as well, including a look at the intimate and everyday lives of his extraordinary friends.
While he died before he could launch the public access show, the footage he
let behind formally enacts a philosophically compelling mode of documentation that Sullivan describes as “active-passive” observation, a way of utilizing
handheld video technology to perform and inscribe his bodily presence on tape.
Considering Sullivan’s documentary practice—his carefully choreographed
manner of walking through New York City with a handheld camera—this
essay examines Sullivan’s handwork as an enactment of queer form. I describe
Sullivan’s video work, paying particular attention to his technological and social
skills in order to think more broadly about the queer hand in the production of
a queer history. Sullivan’s archive—with its particularly afecting documentary
practice—renders a method of social interaction in which Sullivan’s choreographed presence as coded onto the obsolescent material of VHS tapes draws its
viewers into an emergent world conditioned by this very presence. The videos
illuminate a queer mode of apprehension: a way of seeing and being that manufactures a historical narrative of downtown New York. It imparts a sensual
relationship to its subject matter that challenges any attempt to codify the material within neat, linear truths.
As an entry into Sullivan’s practice, I examine footage where he explicitly articulates a philosophy for his video work. Within this footage, Sullivan
praises the potential of the wide-angle lens’s distorting capacity and charts
ASAP/Journal 398 /
the development of a bodily choreography speciic to video self-portraiture.
Whereas the wide-angle lens introduces an explicit process of distortion in
Sullivan’s late work, the kind of intervention it produces in the visual ield—its
ability to make salient a technologized
performance of reality—illuminates a
constitutive quality that exists throughout his videographic archive. As a
pedestrian, Sullivan announces and creates the streets he inhabits, constructing
a queer New York through a walking
articulation of history. His active-passive
technique involves turning the camera
on himself. Although much of his work
prior to acquiring a wide-angle lens does
“
As a pedestrian, Sullivan announces
and creates the streets he inhabits,
constructing a queer New York through
a walking articulation of history.
”
not adhere to this format, earlier footage still testiies to a technology of manufactured eventhood.3 Sullivan’s virtuosic manipulation of the camera is a sensual
methodology enacted bodily, a gestural practice that both records and follows
unfolding events that are themselves in part provoked by his camera’s presence.
Whether traveling between a friend’s apartment and the Pyramid Club, taking
a subway to Coney Island, or awaiting the start of a performance, Sullivan situates himself in liminal scenes, utilizing his body and the camera to capture the
emergent nature of queer sociality. For as much as Sullivan is on the scene and
witness to storied moments in the history of queer New York, he oten takes
pleasure in delaying his arrival and resists marking a clear beginning and end to
an evening’s festivities. His video practice captures a technologized, embodied
commitment to the ephemerality of events and recognizes that the experience
of the present will be codiied in indeterminate ways. Sullivan’s performance
for the camera, in which he celebrates both exceptional and banal experiences
with equal enthusiasm, ampliies the distortion of reality that is happening technologically. Sullivan marks every experience on tape as an event in process and
performatively extends a gestural line into the present, allowing viewers to take
up his work in an ongoing process of queer distortion and illumination.
THE PRACTICE OF ACTIVE-PASSIVE DOCUMENTATION
While Sullivan had been documenting the downtown art and performance
scene throughout the 1980s, ater a hernia operation in the latter part of the
Montez 399 /
decade he acquired a lighter 8mm video camera, and this transformed his practice. This new equipment, coupled with a wide-angle lens, encouraged Sullivan
to develop a new style and philosophy around his video art. Sullivan took advantage of an increased mobility both in the way he could physically move with the
lighter equipment and in the way he could more easily utilize the smaller camera
in crowded spaces. This new mobility allowed him to think diferently about
the process of documentation: rather than simply using the camera as a tool to
record the downtown demimonde he inhabited, Sullivan reimagined himself
as the primary character and tour guide. No longer an of-camera observer of
queer life, Sullivan fashioned a new, visible persona whose physical presence
became inextricably bound to the technology in his hand.
Footage from February 1989 shows Sullivan traveling from New York City to
Atlanta, Georgia.4 We follow Sullivan as he traverses La Guardia Airport, moving
from taxi to check-in desk and all the way on to the airplane. Once seated, Sullivan
hears an announcement by the captain informing him of a two-and-a-half-hour
delay. He then de-boards the aircrat and wanders the airport looking for something to occupy his time and attention. It is late, the airport is relatively empty,
and every business seems closed. “I hate Delta,” Sullivan states in a light Southern
tone of annoyance (ig. 2).
Walking downstairs, riding up an escalator, taking
several spins in a revolving
door, and reading advertisements while keeping
his camera trained on
himself, Sullivan produces
an intense situational
document of this empty
time, during which his
running monologue registers a compulsive need
to ill the space of boredom with some kind of
Figure 2.
Sullivan at LaGuardia Airport, February 1989. Image from a video by Nelson Sullivan.
Nelson Sullivan Collection, Fales Library, New York University. Reprinted with permission
of Dick Richards.
externalized narrative. He
does not film his entire
delay at the airport, but
ASAP/Journal 400 /
his in-camera edits generate a luidity that suggests the camera is never
turned of. A shot of a man walking
ahead of the camera, for example,
cuts to a close-up shot of Sullivan’s
face as he likewise walks through
the airport, giving the impression
that Sullivan is following him down
the terminal hall. These live edits
move us seamlessly across areas of
the airport while the shits in loca-
“
Learning how to move with the camera,
Sullivan is simultaneously developing
a performance of self, creating an oncamera persona who can respond to and
manipulate other people’s reactions to him.
”
tion and perspective enhance a feeling of pure duration. Thirty minutes of footage
give the sense of an interminable delay.
At one point, Sullivan walks into the airport men’s room, commenting on its
large size and the vast number of stalls. For a moment, Sullivan’s image is captured in the mirror, allowing viewers of the video to see the camera. Instantly
realizing this, Sullivan adjusts the camera so that it disappears from view. There
is a sense throughout this trip from New York to the South that Sullivan is
experimenting with his new camera and learning diferent ways to frame the
world through its wide-angle lens. He repeatedly refers to the way people are
looking at him and discusses how those around him cannot make sense of what
he is doing—a self-consciousness about being seen with the camera that is less
acute in later footage. “The opportunity to produce art presents itself almost
everywhere you go,” says Sullivan as he circles the terminal. His tone suggests
both irony and enthusiasm—the former feeling more appropriate given the
environment and circumstance. Sullivan is in fact taking this opportunity to
hone his crat. Learning how to move with the camera, Sullivan is simultaneously developing a performance of self, creating an on-camera persona who can
respond to and manipulate other people’s reactions to him. His description of the
confused onlookers signals his awareness that the camera is creating the environment through which he walks. As his technique improves, his improvisational
responses to those around him will become much more natural to his narration
of place, absorbing the unexpected into his performed vision of the world.
Once in Atlanta, Sullivan connects with his close friend Dick Richards, who
drives him to his hometown of Kershaw, South Carolina. During this trip,
Montez 401 /
Sullivan discusses his idea for a cable access show and contemplates the creative
possibilities of the wide-angle lens. “I think this is the year that everybody is gonna
turn the camera around,” he predicts. “Oh, I just love my wide-angle lens….
They really are the best for being out on the street or in the subways or whatever
because even though everything is distorted, everyone knows how to read the
information they’re looking at.” As in the airport footage, Sullivan maintains his
continuous commentary as he plays with diferent shots, framing images in the
car’s side mirrors and moving the camera’s focus between Richards and himself.
In this ilmed conversation—one heavily weighted toward Sullivan’s observations—Sullivan articulates a new direction for his work. Pragmatically thinking
through a potential structure for his public access show, Sullivan also begins to
see potential appeal in everyday environments outside of nightlife venues:
I’m going to start going out in the daytime instead of at night. I mean
I’ve done the nightclubs. I love them, but there’s so much more going
on in the day. I’d rather go for walks with people like Michael or Albert
or Christina, or Lahoma or anybody. Just walking around New York
would be pretty damn fascinating don’t you think? With the wide-angle
lens? Put segments on the show, and put talk shows and music videos,
and interviews with performers and parts of their acts, and lashbacks,
and panel discussions, and on-the-scene-with-Nelsons. If I can’t ill up
thirty minutes a week, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, right? I
may even have to quit my job to do it.5
The liminal space of LaGuardia Airport and environments in the South provide distance from the downtown New York scene, becoming sites for Sullivan
to begin practicing a diferently embodied form of artistry. With the increased
ability to be both the cameraman and the primary character, Sullivan becomes
invested in generating a more expansive vision of his life downtown. The production he describes to Richards brings club personalities into the light of day
while also transforming the everyday act of walking into a performance that
animates his nightlife archive. Inspired by the wide-angle lens’s apparent distortion of the world, Sullivan in turn seeks to distort his daytime environment,
handling the camera and performing himself in such a way that highlights the
processes by which he and his friends transform the mundane landscapes of
New York City into the queer, exceptional worlds they inhabit.
Echoing philosophical questions about the relationship between the ilmmaker
and the camera that emerged throughout the twentieth century, Sullivan’s ideas
ASAP/Journal 402 /
about the wide-angle lens resonate with ethnographic documentary practices
that sought to relect the authorial presence of the documentarian through different technological advances. The increased portability of professional motion
picture cameras, represented by the introduction of the 16mm Arrilex in the
1950s, created new opportunities for a more immersive and directly engaged
documentary that formally indexed the ilmmaker’s role and sparked new
philosophies and directions in ilmmaking such as cinéma-vérité and cinema-direct. Cecilia Sayad, in Performing Authorship, examines the history of authorial
inscription within documentary cinema, calling particular attention to the ilms
and philosophy of Jean Rouch. Sayad’s analysis applies not only to “the negotiation between the directors’ subjectivity and the supposedly objective world they
depict,” but also to “the author’s role as a catalyst triggering events and reactions
on the ilmed individuals.”6 This ilmic performance of authorship is germane
to Sullivan’s work, in which the emergent technology captures immersive
scenes of social engagement that are themselves emergent worlds of subjectivity. Rouch’s documentary practice stressed a necessary connection between the
technologies used to see the other and the physical body of the ethnographer.
The camera equipment for Rouch becomes a direct extension of the body, and
his ilming self both provokes and is absorbed into the scene of encounter. “[A]
‘transformation’ . . . takes place,” writes Sayad, “when the director and his camera are in close proximity to the ilmed subjects, with the ilmmaker acting as
both ‘gymnast’ and as a ‘bullighter in front of the bull.’”7 Rouch labeled this
choreographic process of ilming and becoming “cine-trance.”
Like Rouch, Sullivan begins to formulate a philosophically engaged visual
practice of documentary authorship fueled by the acquisition of new portable
technologies (e.g., the wide-angle eye lens and an 8mm video camera) and starts
highlighting his bodily presence on video as indistinct from them. In April of
1989, shortly ater his return from the South, Nelson documents a long day
into evening as he travels from the Meatpacking District to the East Village
and back west. The footage ends at Christina’s apartment in the Chelsea Hotel.
Christina (who would later be played by Marilyn Manson in the sensational
2003 true crime thriller Party Monster) introduces Sullivan to a woman named
Lynn. Curious about Sullivan’s work, and his camera, Lynn takes his equipment
and begins interviewing him. This is one of the few times we see Sullivan give up
control of the camera. In response to a question about the work he has done, he
explains, “I’ve done so much work that I’ve forgotten it, and then when I see it,
Montez 403 /
it reminds me of all that I have forgotten. And I realize how much more we forget
than remember.” He then discusses the warping produced by the wide-angle
lens (here referred to as a ish-eye lens). “It’s so distorted,” he argues, “that it’s
obviously not reality, but it’s something from which you can construct reality.
So you realize you’re looking at pure information and not the real thing. . . .
[Y]ou reconstruct your own idea of what that reality was.”8 Recalling that
Sullivan’s walking-tour footage was designed to make narrative connections
between diferent moments from his archive, one can see how the wide-angle
lens’s capacity to animate the viewer aligns itself with Sullivan’s manipulation of
time and space. He performs a way to look back and construct the past while the
distortion invites viewers to engage in their own process of recovery.
In his walking tour, Sullivan formally executes the very nature of his archive,
wherein videotapes never present a direct experience of reality but instead always
require that a viewer reconstruct some idea of what may have been experienced
in the moment of video capture. Referring to himself as an “active-passive”
observer who is “striving to bend reality, to afect things even as they happen
to [him] and record them,” Sullivan describes an improvisational responsiveness
to his recorded environments. “A ilm crew can’t do what I do, they’re not
lexible enough,” he argues, justifying his active-passive method. This quality of
documentary evidence, as Rouch and others have demonstrated, is not unique
to Sullivan’s work. The history of performing authorship in documentary ilm
illustrates a legacy of production in which the moment caught on ilm is always
incomplete in regard to a forecasted viewer. Calling attention to authorship in
terms similar to Sayad’s discussion of Rouch, for example, Sullivan’s comment
sutures technology to the lexibility of his physical body; his bending of reality
indexes both the circular distortion of the wide-angle lens and the capacity of
his body to move with the camera. Sullivan produces an emergent experience
“
To see Sullivan in action, holding a
video camera that by today’s standards
would be considered unbearably heavy,
is to witness a virtuosic performance.
”
of New York in the 1980s, dramatizing
the exceptional and the everyday and
allowing viewers to see queer history in
process.
This performance of mediated history
is facilitated by Sullivan’s agility with
the camera. To see Sullivan in action,
holding a video camera that by today’s
ASAP/Journal 404 /
standards would be considered unbearably heavy, is to witness a virtuosic performance. He detly manages the camera with a steady and responsive hand while
constructing his mediated persona in a responsive relationship to the shiting,
oten chaotic, urban environments he inhabits. Shortly before his death, a BBC
crew came to New York to shoot a documentary about Sullivan and the world
he captured on video. The ilm, World of Wonder, afords a unique perspective on
Sullivan’s practice, given that a ilm crew documented him in action.9 Filmed in
the third person, World of Wonder enables viewers to see the bodily movements
and improvisational gestures through which Sullivan produced his luid documentations of self and queer New York. Viewing his videos, one might never
realize the amount of physical efort and applied technique necessary for him to
produce a sense of seamless entry into the scenes he inhabited. Sullivan’s arm
disappears from the frame, creating an efect like that of today’s selie stick,10 and
stabilizes the camera at an intermediate distance. The lens distortion can at times
produce a funhouse efect whereby even Sullivan’s minor hand movements create
a sweeping, disorienting vision of multitudes from which clownish and ghoulish
faces emerge leetingly to engage the camera. This kind of dizzying view, with its
lashes of glitter, makeup, and club lights, presents an afectingly immersive experience of queer nightlife. Through his choreography of the handheld, in which
the editorial movement of his body is as much part of the distorting efect as the
wide-angle lens, Sullivan pulls his viewers into his kinetic present. Distortion
fuels a participatory potential for the viewer that enhances the immersive experience. Paradoxically, the elements that communicate immediacy and immersion
also illuminate an afecting temporal gap between now and then when one recognizes that so much has been lost. Sullivan’s videos, however, function less
as nostalgic portraits of a queer New York lost to time than they do animating
records of the ephemeral nature of queer life worlds. They in fact conjure, make
present, worlds that are always in the process of disappearing.11
Sullivan’s never-aired public access show imagines a multitemporal movement
through queer life in all its glamour, perversion, and abject intoxication. His
work manifests, that is, a queer temporality where the centrality of his bodily
gestures and vocalized narrative are crucial to an enactment of queer form. In
this he anticipates work by scholars of queer temporality who have considered
the inability of certain subjects to inhabit a fully realized condition of progressive
contemporaneity deined according to tropes of linear advancement. Heather
Love and Elizabeth Freeman, for example, illuminate the ways in which queer
Montez 405 /
pleasure oten arises in connection with conditions that are in excess of, or
out of synch with, the forward movement of modernity. In recognizing the
importance of the perverse, abject, and painful as necessary to queer life and
acknowledging pleasures that resist recuperative narratives of self-actualization, these scholars describe alternative modes of inhabiting time.12 Sullivan’s
embodied practice of the handheld produces a technical record that anticipates
future spectators who are themselves absorbed into an embodied practice of
apprehension; they are spectators in a constant process of recoding and re-orientation to Sullivan’s manufactured experience of the moment.
Much of the scholarship on queer temporality has turned to archival material in
order to demonstrate how records of the past pulse with animating queer potential. Complementary to these conversations around energetic documents and
the residues of queer life, Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on the emergent in aesthetics
provides a useful framework for contemplating Sullivan’s archival inscriptions
and, speciically, his hand. In The Pleasure in Drawing, Nancy considers the
production of aesthetic form, particularly in regard to visual igures, as manifestations of gestural lines. Analyzing the Freudian view of sexuality in which
pleasure arises in stages of perverse excitation prior to a normative reproductive
end, Nancy suggests a relationship between sexual pleasure and aesthetic pleasure. He turns to drawing and the artist’s sketch as a means to elucidate this
connection. For the purposes of this essay, the most interesting aspect of his
argument is the primacy of the gestural line in the production of an aesthetic
pleasure that unfolds from a form’s emergence. The pleasure of the line, according to Nancy, lies in a sensory temporal space of emergence in which the graphic
manifestation of gesture presents a reaching out within itself independent of a
singular narrative that might be imposed upon a work of art to make sense of
it. It is a pleasure in the inconclusive, “in essence the pleasure of beginning, of
an opening, and so the pleasure of a desire that is aimed less toward an object to
“
Not unlike the artist’s line on paper, Sullivan’s life on tape is an
index of bodily gesture, a document of technologized embodiment that
animates viewers in its performative capacities.
”
ASAP/Journal 406 /
be attained than toward this very opening, toward its impulse, towards it own
impossibility.”13 Nancy inds pleasure in the line’s unfolding, impossible nature
but also relatedly in the way this opening signals an animating excessiveness in
the artist’s design—its inherent incompleteness.
This concept of pleasure grounded in gesture resonates deeply with Sullivan’s
approach to video. The artist’s sketch not only illuminates the potential of the
visual form in process, but also indexes the physical body of the artist who leaves
his mark as brush or pencil hits paper. Not unlike the artist’s line on paper,
Sullivan’s life on tape is an index of
bodily gesture, a document of technologized embodiment that animates
viewers in its performative capacities.
Sullivan’s use of a wide-angle lens and
his luid documentary performance
yield a technology of distortion that
captures information in excess of his
visceral experience of the moment.
Putting himself at the center of the
frame, allowing the extended arm to
disappear, and using his relection in
the lens to frame the shots, Sullivan
manufactures a sense of unfolding
eventhood that likewise exceeds its
“
Sullivan’s technologically mediated
walking tours reorient viewers
to geographical landmarks while
demonstrating the ways in which the
productive force of narrative is always
at play in any apprehension of the city.
Walking is a way for Sullivan to make
and perform history.
”
own choreography. This intensely physical mode of recording life in New York
results in an animating archive of video—an archive in which the video artist
has explicitly embedded an opportunity for viewers to reconstruct their own
understanding of what might have really happened in front of his camera.
PEDESTRIAN HISTORIES
The active-passive-participant model of Sullivan’s documentary practice, with
its formal attention to and articulation of the unfolding nature of the social,
engages in a gestural project for futurity, re-historicizing fetishized liberation
landmarks like the Stonewall Inn and the Chelsea Hotel. Sullivan’s technologically mediated walking tours reorient viewers to geographical landmarks while
demonstrating the ways in which the productive force of narrative is always at
Montez 407 /
play in any apprehension of the city. Walking is a way for Sullivan to make and
perform history.
Returning now to that hot July day in 1989, this essay meets up again with
Sullivan in the Meatpacking District as he guides us with a steady hand into the
West Village. Ater leaving Florent, Nelson continues his journey east, speaking
his monologue across several in-camera edits in which the focus moves between
Sullivan, his panting dog, and the unfolding environment of the West Village.
“Blackout, let’s go down to Sheridan Square and get some cofee,” suggests
Sullivan. “We’ll be there in a minute. Yeah, we’ll go down there and give the
tourists what they pay their money for. New Yorkers have a big responsibility, you know,” he states, in his signature wry tone. Southern gentility mixes
with a blasé Warholian enthusiasm where hints of mocking irony do not necessarily negate a genuine interest in the world.14 “See, here’s where Bleecker
Street starts, and it ends up over there near CBGBs on the east side,” explains
Sullivan when they reach this well-worn path between the East Village and
West Village. Once arriving at Sheridan Square, “one of those places you feel
like you’ve never let every time you get back,” Sullivan decides to forgo the coffee, commenting on the heat of the day, and just hangs out in the park. “Just last
week,” he remarks, “there was a riot here to commemorate Stonewall twenty
years ago.” He focuses the camera on the Stonewall bar sign. “It happened on
the night of Judy Garland’s funeral. Most people don’t make that connection,
and I didn’t myself until this year. The queens were devastated. Angry. Instead
of sympathy, they got violence and abuse from the police. So, last week, this
momentous occasion in all our lives was commemorated by the Radical Faeries
and hundreds of others here in a mock riot—a mock funeral—for Judy Garland.
Twenty years ater the fact.” This monologue provides a setup for his incorporation of footage from the event. During his description of Stonewall and the
commemorative funeral, Sullivan circles Sheridan Square, executing a series of
in-camera edits that produce quick shits in perspective. Surprisingly, the distortion of the ish-eye lens and the jump cuts do not interrupt the luidity of the
overall conversational tone; rather, the viewer becomes a witness to the explicit
manipulation and construction of a historically signiicant place.
While the recorded monologue suggests that edits will be made ater the recording, the in-camera editing discloses this ability to make history in the moment.
Stopping the camera, framing a shot to immediately follow the previous one,
and then starting the camera again, Sullivan sustains the momentum of his
ASAP/Journal 408 /
movement through the city and delivers a captivating immersion in a historical location. Imbued with the history of gay liberation, the streets Sullivan
walks have been codiied by desire and longing long before Sullivan takes this
particular journey. Michel De Certeau’s theorization of space and place provides a particularly compelling framework for making sense of the animating
and constitutive force of Sullivan’s pedestrian acts. In the chapter on “Spatial
Stories” from The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau considers the pedestrian’s
act of walking as a performative enunciation of space. The pedestrian transforms place—something static and ixed—into space, that which “takes into
consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables.”15 Inhabiting
geography through preconceived understandings and articulations of it, the
pedestrian reconstitutes that geography anew with each step she takes. De
Certeau maps out a theory of performativity in which every urban geography
must be understood as that which is variably reconstituted with each enacted
experience of inhabitation, whether it be real or imagined. Interested in the
ways narratives—from fairy tales to the directions given to a tourist—are central
to the construction of space, de Certeau aligns walking and talking as co-constitutive forces. He writes:
[N]arrated adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and driting into the commonplaces of an order, do not merely
constitute a “supplement” to pedestrian enunciations and rhetorics.
They are not satisied with displacing the latter and transposing them
into the ield of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make
the journey before or during the time the feet perform it.16
De Certeau’s theory of the pedestrian as an organizing function of narrative
articulates the ways in which the physical structures of urban design and the
maps we produce to represent them are not inherently stable or objective, but
instead socially and variably produced and experienced. For Sullivan, the narratives that shape such walks are reiterated and recoded in his video performances,
imbricating spoken monologue with local historiography in a manner that renders them mutually charged with sensory intensity.
Indeed, Sullivan’s knowing performance of the pedestrian in the West Village
exempliies de Certeau’s ideas of spatial practice. The sound of footsteps that
opens the walk from the Meat Packing District to Stonewall audibly introduces our guide and welcomes us to his cable show. Sullivan’s walking narrative
imposes itself on a visual unfolding of the city, while the distortion from the
Montez 409 /
ish-eye lens signals his manipulation of the very scenes he documents. While
waiting for traic to pass in order to cross the street, Sullivan moves the camera
from Blackout to a buf, shirtless man in tight shorts on a bike. This ilmic
gesture is a lascivious wink, at once marking the temperature of the hot July
day and evoking the potential for erotic contact. His camera movements as connected to his pedestrian maneuvers make salient the directional processes of
spatial practice. Passing by a restaurant on Bleecker Street, he notes, “There’s no
one at the Cotton Club. They’re all at Fire Island.” As we have seen, Stonewall
may be Sullivan’s intended destination for this journey, but prior to reaching the
great gay liberation landmark, he performs an active construction and reproduction of the gayborhood through his articulated experience of pedestrian travel.
Once at Stonewall, Sullivan rehearses a narrative of the riot as an event sparked
by angry queens who were upset about the death of Judy Garland—a coincidence oten spoken of as a joke. Stonewall in Sullivan’s video is at once a farcical
production of gay history—where its monumentalization violates and eclipses
the heterogeneous desires, histories, and bodies that inform gay liberation—
and a vortex of afects and energies that animate a continued engagement with
structural violence. When he says, “This street was full of faeries. Do you want
to see?” he prepares his viewers for footage of a mock funeral in which Radical
Faeries and other igures from the gay world appear in messy drag and melodramatically perform grief for their lost icon. He imagines day shiting to night,
moving back in time in the same location to be surrounded by drag queens
wailing “Judy!” over and over again. While a document of campy fun, the footage necessarily reverberates with the afective energies of AIDS activism in the
summer of 1989. Over-the-top performances of melancholic grief as recorded
through Sullivan’s distorting technology gesture outwards from the event,
potentially conjuring the grief and rage associated with government neglect and
state-sponsored eradication of queer bodies.
Sullivan’s introduction, with its announcement of the parade, represents what
Jonathan Flatley describes as afective mapping. The recorded footage is a
“mobile machine of self-estrangement” in which Sullivan presents his audience
with a particular afective rendering of the neighborhood and the monument of
gay liberation. The viewer may be drawn into feeling amusement, pleasure, and
the intensities of loss when witnessing the geography of historical violence on
tape, but at the same time, Sullivan is technologically marking the process by
ASAP/Journal 410 /
which he visually and audibly produces the West
Village and Stonewall as geographies of feeling.
For Flatley, the afective map “is a map less in
the sense that it establishes a territory than it
is about providing a feeling of orientation and
facilitating mobility. . . . it is a representation
to oneself of one’s own historically conditioned and changing afective life.”17 Sullivan’s
wide-angle distortion afords viewers an openended opportunity to reconstruct their own
versions of the reality presented. At the same
“
Sullivan immerses his viewers into
a formal ield of individualized
productions of self that gestures
outwards to queer collectivities and
histories.
”
time, the narrative performance of walking furthers a critical project where viewers are provoked to sensually experience New York City, feel it with Sullivan,
and learn—through his technique—about how the experience is a product of
social and historical forces. Sullivan trains us to think about structures of feeling
in relation to a variably reconstituted geography and invites us to feel a connection to the past from our contemporary moment. While this description of
training might suggest that there are cognitive dividends to Sullivan’s method,
the immersive nature of his videos—with all their afective capacities—technologizes a performative inability to know history in any complete way. As Sullivan
acknowledges, the video archive oten illuminates what he himself has forgotten.
He too becomes the viewer who must reconstitute the reality on tape according
to how he understands his own documentary practice. His corporeal presence,
as a mobile extension of the camera, exists only as a gestural experience of time.
Sullivan executes an emergent, embodied performance of the city that casts the
Stonewall Inn as an inherently unstable, continually reanimated landmark whose
historical meanings and animating potential can never be known fully. Sullivan
immerses his viewers into a formal ield of individualized productions of self that
gestures outwards to queer collectivities and histories. In his mediatized performance, he both manufactures the limits of experiential knowledge and creates an
absorbing opportunity for viewers to feel and reconstruct the past according to
their own simultaneously limited and expansively gestural experiences.
ARE WE THERE YET?
One can access hours of mundane observational footage on a YouTube channel devoted to Sullivan’s archive. The 5 Ninth Avenue Project, a labor of love
Montez 411 /
maintained by Dick Richards, is a vibrant public repository for the work of the
“godfather of vlogging.”18 Here, one can view an array of documentary techniques Sullivan employed over the course of a decade. The archive as a whole
is binge-worthy, taking hold of the viewer because of its relentless attention to
the temporal intensities of urban queer life. As a collection of videos that moves
beyond the club—onto the streets and into the domestic environments of queer
worldmaking—Sullivan’s archive produces its portrait of queer life through an
extended elaboration of diference within the quotidian. Sullivan manufactures
the constructed, contingent, and leeting nature of queerness in his steady durational focus on life in process.
One of the primary ways he accomplishes this is through the space of travel.
The video mentioned above—where the cofee supposedly motivating the
walk never materializes—is but one example of Sullivan’s play with the liminal
experience whose end is always being postponed and redeined. His practice
literalizes José Esteban Muñoz’s articulation of queerness as a utopian formation, fabricating a “desire [that] is always directed at the thing that is not yet
here, objects and moments that burn with anticipation and promise.”19 As a
documentarian, he is obsessed with getting to a place even as he constantly
resists arrival. He makes a scene of the transitional spaces around and between
events, explicitly imparting an eventhood to what might be thought of as nonevents. His attentiveness to preparing for, traveling to, and awaiting the start of
an event produces a compelling, oten exhausting, register of anticipation in the
social worlds he inhabits. Sullivan’s technique of exaggerated postponement—a
performance of manufactured delay in the arrival to an event—produces an
orientation to queer eventhood that is necessarily fragmentary and incomplete.
Through the documentation and sculpting of the liminal, his hand draws viewers into an imminent ield of queer worldmaking.
A number of the videos included in the 5 Ninth Avenue Project show Sullivan’s
friends in transit on the subway. These journeys in and beyond Manhattan are
remarkable in their evocation of time and their ability to convey the rhythms
of travel. In one of these clips, the photographer Liz Lizard joins Sullivan and
the downtown gossip columnist Michael Musto on a trip from Union Square
to Coney Island.20 Lizard has her children in tow, one of them a shirtless blond
teenage boy in lip-lops who descends, beach-ready, into the subway with
his sister. Once on the uncrowded train, the two lay themselves across open
benches for a nap. Liz Lizard, sitting across from her son, also dozes of as the
ASAP/Journal 412 /
train shuttles toward Brooklyn. While Sullivan’s camera takes in the entirety of
the grimy, graiti covered subway car—for many a romantic emblem of old,
hard New York City—its focus keeps returning to the blond, bare-chested
boy. Against the backdrop of urban grit, the video captures a scene of sleepy,
distracted travel through the lens of erotic attention toward the white, masculine youth. At one point, Albert Crudo—the noted performer and fashion
designer—boards and successfully meets his friends in the irst car as planned.
He sits next to Musto and discusses the “rude” girls who were on the platform behind him. According to Crudo, they kept saying, “It’s a guy!”—their
sensibilities around gender apparently challenged by Crudo’s long hair. As the
friends travel together, dressed in styles notably distinct from the other subway riders, Sullivan captures their togetherness—a mobile, shared sociality that
is sharply felt when Crudo boards the train and discusses the phobic harassment he experienced on the platform. Over the course of the ride, as their
bodies shit positions, Sullivan retrains his focus on the various activities of his
Figure 3.
Subway Ride to Coney Island with Liz Lizard, Michael Musto, and Albert Crudo, June 1987. Image from a video by Nelson
Sullivan. Nelson Sullivan Collection, Fales Library, New York University. Reprinted with permission of Dick Richards.
Montez 413 /
friends—staring out the window, putting on makeup, doodling, swinging from
the hanging straps (ig. 3). Seven minutes of footage produce the sense of an
interminable journey. “Ugh! That train,” Lizard groans when they inally reach
the Stillwell Avenue stop in Coney Island. Sullivan evinces a skillful mobility
in this footage through an editorial lexibility, following the movement of his
friends and the movements of things with an eye for detail and a sense of timing
such that a viewer might share Lizard’s sentiment.
A sense of the speciicity of Sullivan’s project here emerges through a comparison with one of the landmark documents of 1970s experimental ilm: Chantal
Akerman’s News From Home (1977), which similarly includes a long subway
segment. Consisting of durational shots of New York City, the ilm’s voiceover soundtrack is that of Akerman reading letters from her mother. While also
inscribing an authorial presence within the cinematic frame, Akerman utilizes
a far less kinetic observational style than does Sullivan, framing the subway
train from a static viewpoint, with the camera positioned at the center of one
end of the car. The shot creates a symmetrical plane of observation, an aesthetically detached rendering of train space. By contrast, Sullivan’s videotaped
ride to Coney Island renders the social through explicit exchanges between the
camera operator and his subjects. Sullivan does not, in this case, maintain a
running commentary throughout the ilming, but the handheld camera movements and his minimal conversation with friends index his continual presence
in the scene. Subway time—where minutes can feel like hours, particularly to
those who are not conditioned to commuting life—pulses forth from Sullivan’s
video. The video does not communicate New York City rush hour time but the
less productive, oten sleepy and lazy, leisure time of a hot, urban summer. He
captures a fullness to the experience of travel, but it is one conditioned by his
technological intervention. Whereas Akerman’s static long shot suggests a less
invasive documentation, Sullivan’s gestural shooting style performs an active
social immersion in the vernacular and, in doing so, manufactures the subway
scene as a rhythmic constitution of queer social space.
The subway video exempliies Sullivan’s project of queer worldmaking.
Whereas his nightclub footage provides some of the most compelling representation of queer sociality, Sullivan’s studied observation of his friends in
more everyday environments makes evident the improvisational and contingent
nature of queer togetherness. Like the walking tour between his neighborhood
ASAP/Journal 414 /
and Stonewall, the subway footage illuminates a scene of practiced place. Crudo
does not simply escape from the phobic world he confronts while alone on the
platform. Rather, that reality accompanies him onto the scene and creates a narrative framework for understanding the alternative world of sociality the friends
inhabit. The discursive frameworks that deine and make possible a sense of
queer embodiment are fabricated within the historical moment of enunciation
and documentation. Phobic violence is discursively written into the infrastructure of urban travel, no less than the pleasures of erotic and social contact. It
conditions queer possibility.
THE ANIMATION OF LOSS AND GESTURES TOWARD FUTURITY
In its inception and execution, Sullivan’s video practice longs for and anticipates an audience whose engagements with
the material will ind impossible possibilities in
the reconstruction of reality. The queer hand
Sullivan inscribes into his archive is a gestural
trace, an extension of his bodily presence into
an always-emergent future. Imagining a queer
methodology that thinks through the politics of bodily or sensual connection, Juana
María Rodríguez’s work on the queer gesture
describes gesture in such a way: as a necessarily
social means of communication and transmis-
“
The queer hand Sullivan inscribes
into his archive is a gestural trace,
an extension of his bodily presence
into an always-emergent future.
”
sion. Independent of an audience, the bodily gesture is, for Rodríguez, always
encoded in and indexical of the social. She argues, “Even when done in private,
gestures are always relational; they form connections between diferent parts of
our bodies; they cite other gestures; they extend the reach of the self into the
space between us; they bring into being the possibility of a ‘we.’”21 Gestures are
the means by which the physical body reproduces and orients itself to the world.
They represent an embodied practice through which one articulates herself in
relation to other bodies in a constantly unfolding and shiting social sphere.
Rodríguez describes gesture as that which both extends toward future possibility and registers the past insofar as it is conditioned by memory, history, and the
social forces that regulate bodies. In an exchange between Giorgio Agamben
and José Esteban Muñoz, Rodríguez highlights the importance of such futurity
in the formulation of collectivities in revolt against the status quo.22 Departing
Montez 415 /
from the antisocial turn in queer theory, this work insists on the ever-expansive
conditions of a better life, an imagining of the future fueled by an aesthetics that
refuses an end to political transformation and constantly challenges the terms on
which acceptance and assimilation are granted.
Within this gestural framework, where the body communicates a past and signals
a continual process of inspiring connection, Sullivan’s embodied, technological,
and authorial trace can be seen as a formal gesture toward an unendingly variable experience of queer life caught on tape. His choreographic project pulls the
viewer into a distorted view of the past, communicating an emergent quality
to documented events rather than a sense of their completion. As one of these
viewers, I turn to my experience of Sullivan’s archive at the end of this essay,
taking his hand, as it were, in order to illuminate further its afective capacities and to inscribe my own gestural trace in the apprehension of his mediated
world. As an archive that pulls me into the ephemeral life of queer sociality,
the collection of videos engender a space of mourning while also situating me
within an ever expansive mode of queer historical formation.
I initially encountered Sullivan’s work at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a New York
City gallery, in February 2001. A selection of videos played on a continuous loop
in a darkened section of the gallery, and the program varied from day to day.
In the midst of my graduate
research on Keith Haring
and the larger scene of 1980s
downtown New York, I was
thrilled by Sullivan’s footage
and the kind of access to the
past it aforded. I could witness a Keith Haring opening
at Tony Shafrazi, see John
Sex perform live on stage,
and experience a night on
the town with Lahoma Van
Zandt and RuPaul (ig. 4). I
Figure 4.
Lahoma Van Zandt, Sullivan, and RuPaul. Image from a video by Nelson Sullivan.
Nelson Sullivan Collection, Fales Library, New York University. Reprinted with
permission of Dick Richards.
spent hours mesmerized by
Sullivan and absorbed into
lost environments of queer
ASAP/Journal 416 /
potential. Training my gaze on the material with a fetishistic longing for a time
before Rudolph Guiliani’s quality of life campaign “cleaned up” the city’s nightlife and public sex cultures, I found intense pleasure in a melancholic condition,
experiencing what could never be mine and yet felt fundamental to my understanding of self and my larger conception of the world. Years later in the early
summer of 2007, Sullivan made an unexpected appearance when Muñoz and
Nao Bustamante included Nelson and Christina (2006) in their shorts program
for Outfest Los Angeles.
Nelson and Christina, a ilm produced by Robert Coddington and Dick Richards,
presents eighteen minutes of footage from Sullivan’s archive, focusing speciically on a close friend to whom
Nelson dedicates the premier
episode of his unrealized project. The ilm transports us to
the Chelsea Hotel where we see
Nelson’s last meeting with this
tall, blonde drag persona who
speaks in a strange pseudo-German accent (ig. 5). In the
context of the Chelsea, where
she makes a cup of instant cofee
for Nelson, Christina physically
calls to mind Nico in Warhol’s
ilm Chelsea Girls (1966). For the
YouTube channel dedicated to
Sullivan, Richards has produced
a thirty-minute program that
imagines Sullivan’s irst cable
Figure 5.
Sullivan and Christina, June 1989. Image from a video by Nelson Sullivan.
Nelson Sullivan Collection, Fales Library, New York University. Reprinted with
permission of Dick Richards.
show. The following statement, taken from the walking tour discussed earlier,
appears near the end of Sullivan’s monologue and serves as an introduction to
the same material seen on Nelson and Christina:
Due to circumstances beyond my control, Christina is conined to the
archives forever. The last time I saw her was at the Chelsea Hotel. I miss
her terribly now, and I always will. I would like for my irst cable show
to be a memorial to my friend Christina. She was warm, witty, talented
Montez 417 /
and generous. She had exquisite taste, and she was an artist. And all the
extraordinary people who knew her knew that she was extraordinary
herself. I wish I could sit down and have something to eat with Christina right now. But, we’ll go visit her at the Chelsea. You can come along
on my last visit to Christina.23
Richards follows Sullivan’s cue here and inserts the appropriate footage.
What I experience in watching this material is not only a devastating portrait
of absence and a sweet remembrance of friendship on the margins. I also feel
Richards’s own hand taking up Sullivan’s gesture and caring for the archive
of loss. While Sullivan describes Christina’s condition as one of coninement,
the actual work of the video record, with Richards’s care, elicits something
other than coninement. The formal nature of the work performs an opening
into seeing and being with Christina and viscerally communicates the sensual
nature of a late-night start where the conines of the Chelsea will be let for a
night on the town.
“
Sullivan’s mode of doing history, his way of producing a queer
New York, reanimates dead landmarks. It also reorients me to
a calciied idea of 1980s New York that has been codiied
according to a limited story about the history of AIDS.
”
It is not just Christina’s loss that informs the emotional register of the ilm.
As stated previously, Sullivan himself, the endlessly charming tour guide, died
suddenly of heart failure two days ater ilming the introduction to his cable
show. When talking about Sullivan, I have gotten used to clarifying that his
death was not “AIDS-related” since, given his age and the time period, this
is oten what people presume. But this no longer seems right to me. To say
that Sullivan’s death was not due to HIV infection is not the same as asserting
that his death was unrelated to AIDS. It is everywhere in Sullivan’s archive
even though it is not the central focus of most of his videos. The compulsion
to document queer life in the 1980s relates to losses that precede and extend
beyond HIV.
ASAP/Journal 418 /
In this essay, I have traveled with Sullivan to the Chelsea Hotel and the Stonewall
Inn. These two landmarks are commonly understood as important to queer
history, but the terms on which this importance rests oten go unquestioned.
They become dead markers of a generically told story of gay liberation and queer
artistic exploration. Similarly, 1980s queer documentary video as a genre has
come to signify AIDS in a generic way. This is in part due to the impressive
and seductive history of ACT UP and the centrality of video to AIDS activism.
Sullivan’s mode of doing history, his way of producing a queer New York, reanimates dead landmarks. It also reorients me to a calciied idea of 1980s New York
that has been codiied according to a limited story about the history of AIDS. In
Sullivan’s archive, I ind myself immersed in scenes of queer sociality that are not
solely focused on the trauma of AIDS. As a viewer, however, I read AIDS into
Sullivan’s distortion, and in this process of grasping what is present in its absence,
Sullivan formally trains me to feel what is emergent. The narratives that have
come to frame the loss of a vibrant downtown within the context of AIDS and
gentriication become evident themselves as distorting technologies that must
be continually revised and read beyond. Recording that which unfolds through
manipulation, holding attention on the mundane, and generating a sense of captivation in the prioritization of anticipation over arrival, Sullivan’s queer hand
teaches us how to be in queer history. The formal properties of his archive manage loss, urging us not to codify experience only by what we know happened but
instead guiding us into the pleasures and tensions of queer potential.
Notes
1
Nelson Sullivan, “Monologue in Greenwich Village for First Cable Show,” July
2, 1989, Box 14, Nelson Sullivan Video Collection 1976–1989, The Fales Library and
Special Collections, New York University.
2
See Terese Svoboda, “Cast Iron TV and Friends: Artists’ Public Access in
Manhattan” and Benjamin Olin, “TV Party: A Cocktail Party That Could Also Be a
Political Party,” in Downtown Film & TV Culture 1975–2001, ed. Joan Hawkins (Chicago:
Intellect, 2015), 179–209.
3
The term eventhood here refers to the quality of being an event. Sullivan creates a
sense of an event through his mediated performance as documentarian.
4
Nelson Sullivan, Tape 306, digital transfer from 8mm video onto DVD, from the
personal collection of Dick Richards. For an edited version of this material, see “The
Delta Terminal at LaGuardia Airport in 1989,” Parts 1–3 on the 5 Ninth Avenue Project
YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/5ninthavenueproject.
Montez 419 /
5
Nelson Sullivan, Tape 306, digital transfer from 8mm video onto DVD, from the
personal collection of Dick Richards, 59:51-1:00:40.
6
Cecilia Sayad, Performing Authorship (New York: IB Tauris, 2013), 72.
7
Ibid., 80. The quotes in this passage are those of Sayad, who is citing Jean Rouch,
Ciné-Ehtnography, ed. and trans. Steven Feld (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 39.
8
Nelson Sullivan, “Christina, East Village, Carlos’s Party,” April 14, 1989, Box 10,
Nelson Sullivan Video Collection 1976–1989, The Fales Library and Special Collections,
New York University.
9
Randy Barbuto and Fenton Bailey (also known then as the synth-pop band The
Fabulous Pop Tarts) wrote the original treatment for the ilm. They initially proposed it
to the BBC, but it was ultimately bought by the UK’s Channel 4 who screened it as a
television special. The duo would eventually use the title of the ilm, World of Wonder, to
name their production company, an organization that went from managing their band
to becoming one of the most lucrative media companies in the United States, creating
documentary ilms (Party Monster, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and several successful reality
television shows including RuPaul’s Drag Race.
10
Students in my classes, who came of age in an era of YouTube and cell phone
cameras, oten respond enthusiastically to Sullivan’s videos. Sullivan speaks to their
aesthetic sensibilities and impresses them with his technique. The kinds of framing and
in-camera edits he executes while moving through the city are seen as visually remarkable
by these individuals who constantly self-document and edit their lives for distribution. His
skill is recognizable even by today’s standards where technological advances would seem
to make the work less formally impressive or appear as simply a record of technologically
obsolete documentation.
11
This notion of conjuring takes its cue from Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions
of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), who
described the performative documentary as a “ilm that brings into being as if for the irst
time a world whose appearances and meanings we think we already know” (96).
12
See Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010) and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of
Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
13
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013), 38.
14
Sianne Ngai’s analysis of the term “interesting,” as a pedagogically oriented
aesthetic judgment that forgoes an absolute response to a work in favor of a critical space
of elaboration, has greatly aided my thinking about Sullivan’s videos. His wry afective
performance of attention oten invests people and places with an interest that is driven
by an indeterminable judgment. See Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute,
Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 110–73.
ASAP/Journal 420 /
15
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 117.
16
Ibid., 116.
17
Jonathan Flatley, Afective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 7.
18
This is a descriptor Coddington used during a series of talks and events sponsored
by the Fales Downtown Collection at New York University when they acquired Sullivan’s
archive.
19
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New
York: New York University Press, 2009), 26.
20
5 Ninth Avenue Project, “Train Ride to Coney Island in 1987,” Filmed
June 1987, YouTube video, 07:18, posted July 2012, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=JN4ATDfCYmo&t=361s.
21
Juana María Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
(New York: New York University Press, 2014), 2.
22
Ibid., 5, 11.
23
5 Ninth Avenue Project. “Nelson Sullivan’s Cable TV Show (as imagined from
his videos).” Filmed July 1989. YouTube video, 28:38, posted June2015. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=mPbGEBYEk_Y&t=25s.
Montez 421 /