This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A video-film artist, Eve Sussman creates 'slow-motion tableus', some which reference Old Master paintings and then embellish the narrative with visual insertions that bring the theme into modern context. It is the shaking up "of a canonical work by transposing it to an evocative modern context." (Vetrocq)
One of these works is 89 Seconds at Alcazar, a "meditative recreation and dismemberment of the Velazquez group portrait of himself, the royal family, and their retainers", which is in the Prado Museum in Madrid. (haberarts)
Sussman's piece is a twelve-minute film that is in the video gallery of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She did the initial images at the Prado Museum and then incorporated that image with a re-staging from a set built in a garage near her studio in Brooklyn, using her own posed figures, including herself, as members of the court.
Sussman's figures create a subplot that is much more demanding to the viewer than the easily understood image of the royal family in the Velazquez painting. With Sussman, viewers are challenged by a subplot of human activity directed to what went on before the figures posed. The effect is psychological jiggling of the posed figures in the original Velazquez painting by the shifting of priorities away from what initially seems important, the formal gathering of the subjects, to the reality behind the scene. As a result, the viewer is involved in much more than just an easy to read formal portrait. An example of an undercutting subplot is the threat to the future of the 'ideal' family because two of Sussman's figures are having an illicit and furtive rendezvous, and yet, one of them, a nun, is supposed to be overseeing the morals of the royal children.
A huge project for Sussman, following 89 Seconds at Alcazar, and one featured on the cover of the April 2007 issue of Art in America, plays off of painting in the Louvre, Intervention of the Sabine Women, by Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) and also references a painting with the same subject by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). The combined originals show great turmoil, the rape, followed by the women negotiating a peaceful resolution between their attackers and the rescuers defending their honor of not having their women marry outside the tribe.
In the Sussman film, The Rape of the Sabine Women, done with the Rufus Corporation, her creative company, and lasting 80 minutes, she "updates Roman myth and its Neo-Classical representations with references that range from David Hockney to Jacquest Tati" (Vetrocq). Through the use of sequential scenes in film, it becomes a sustained commentary on modern day realations between men and women. It is also a marked defiance of the 17th and 18th century technique, prescribed by the academics, of trying to convey an 'easy to understand' historical narrative on a single canvas---usually a large one that allows a lot of action to unfold. To interrupt any orderly sense of unfolding time and uncomplicated story, Sussman uses devices such as the insertion of still photographs, alternation between black and white and color, and sustained lingering over certain images. The footage was done in Greece and Germany beginning 2004, and jettisons period costumes for 1960s Greek working girls caught in the turmoil of rival factions of abductors "reconceived as G Men or men in black---with skinny suits, narrow ties and cigarettes at the ready
. . . .women are likened to meat and caged birds. They are presented as insubstantial reflections in subway and villa windows, as victims, property and obliging pleasure toys." (Vetrocq)
Sources include:
Marcia E. Vetrocq, "Sussman's Sabines", Art in America, April 2007, pp.112-116
John Haber, New York City, http://www.haberarts.com/sussman.htm
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