Art, Interrupted (AI)
Art Institute of Chicago, March 2020
When I spoke to Devon Sullivan, earlier this week (April 6th 2020), he was in bed. He’d been spending a lot of time there – not because he was ill, thank goodness, but because it was just about the only place to be during a period of self-imposed quarantine. It’s a testament to the power of his imagination that, as with every other encounter I had with him, he seemed to be traversing a vast creative landscape.
Sullivan transitioned into art from an unusual background, that of a financial trader, with a particular interest in blockchain technologies. This experience, and his natural turn of mind, prompt him to see patterns and networks where others would just see… life. His prolific and multivalent work offers an experience by equal turns unnerving and exhilarating: it’s as if he has cracked the code of society itself, and is giving you just a few of his findings.
The pandemic came along at a particularly weird time for Sullivan. He was in the midst of completing an intense and provocative investigation of the School of the Art Institute itself: its recruitment patterns, the unstated (yet measurable) “values” it places on its own students through such mechanisms as financial aid, as well as other, less sensitive topics like previous MFA shows and their configurations. Salient data points are set alongside mere coincidences in an elaborate invented system. (For example the MFA show was meant to take place in the Sullivan Center, named for its architect, the great Louis Sullivan - no relation, but Devon likes to think of his famous namesake “as a conceptual patron to future generations”). The project is akin to the workings of an artificial intelligence, which pays no mind to the niceties of etiquette, instead following its own relentless logic, arriving at its own kind of truth.
Abruptly de-institutionalized, locked out of the place he’d been trying to map, Sullivan has had to set this research aside. But he’s kept working, kept thinking. What could he do in bed? Plenty. Among other things, he had constructed a little box-shaped frame and was making complex, overlapping vector drawings with embroidery thread. Each of these “bed objects,” as he calls them, is a microcosm made with his own hands. A way to continue. One of infinite portals to the new.
