Non-fungible movements: ‘Contact High’ at Gertrude Contemporary
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We’re told to shuffle backwards to allow more space for the performance. We hardly fit. Bunched up, curving along the back wall of the gallery, this is different from what usually occurs here; it matters more acutely when and where we are in the room.
Piloted in 2022 by Performance Review and Gertrude Contemporary, Dance, dance is the final iteration of ‘Contact High’, a performance series that places the body transparently at the centre of practice. Of course, this always is the case in life and art, but other artforms such as object-based practice, film and writing can often obscure this fact by positioning the live body in the past. There is something brave about performance in the way it is created anew each time, making the possibility of failure feel raw. We’re quiet and we watch closely.
We’re also more implicated in the process, attested to by the anticipatory flutter in many stomachs during Cold Tooth (2024) as Harrison Ritchie-Jones plucks an audience member from the crowd, who he continues to intimately roll on top of, cradle like a baby and whack against the wall. As Ritchie-Jones drags dirt around the space, spits wine dramatically against the wall and smears it with fake blood, I wonder whether I can start to eat the burrito hidden in my bag now the gallery decorum has been upended.
In Mara Galagher’s piece with Andrea Illés and Nelly Clifton, titled unnamed work (2024), we are witness to bodies resting beneath an engine-ready van; a dangerous act heightened as cars move right next to the performers. A flock of birds fly behind Illés’s shoulder as she perches unflinchingly on top of the van looking down High Street, and I’m more aware than before of Gertrude Contemporary’s location and surroundings. Moving and moving outside opens the space of relation, extending audiences and negating the supposed neutrality of our art spaces. The context of the neighbourhood pours in and the smell of cooking lamb wafts out.
The night ends with Sarah Aiken’s Body Corp (iteration no.4) (2024), continuing her exploration of the fractured, incomplete selves we project through our screens. Objects are hidden, revealed, and mismatched as Sarah’s live body momentarily synchronises again and again with her body on the screen. What you see coming into alignment is dependent on your spatial relationship to the performance; a reminder of the multiple truths alongside the absolute; a complicated paradox often obscured in the era of self-branding, reshares and infographics on platforms owned and governed by increasingly wealthy billionaires.
Rather than relegating it to the sadly denigrated-in-the-eyes-of-the-institution public program, ‘Contact High’ progressively positions dance and performance as the main event. Walsh’s curatorial approach provides a deeper contrast to the traditional activities of the gallery and allows for a questioning of what usually occurs here. Dance and performance make the presumed mechanics of the gallery clearer and provide different, compelling, mirror neuron activating options. Instead of facing out to the walls, our bodies look at their bodies and there is something refreshing in the directness. It makes you think, could we have more of these cultural conversations without the collectable objects?
Dance and performance have a harder time being purchased as an investment (or for lowering taxes) and are inherently more difficult to possess as production cannot be easily divorced from its maker. It is limited by the body which complicates unbounded trade and growth. This particularity of the form challenges pervading economic structures which repeatedly fail to recognise limits of people and ecosystems. The reflection of organic reality feels important as more of life becomes alienated, transactional, and objectified for the ungrounded notion of profit and status. It’s hard to put dance on a wall and it doesn’t easily match the curtains.
Despite a lack of support for dance and performance art, ‘Contact High’ sits as a testament to its popularity and critical function, and grounds the necessity for institutions to provide it with increased support. As we pay more, work more, and see each other less, live art and the gathering it precipitates feels potent. Changing, breathing bodies in the process of entrainment, possible only together and not to be owned or reproduced ad infinitum.
Lana Nguyen, Naarm/Melbourne
Piloted in 2022, ‘Contact High’ is a three-year partnership between Gertrude Contemporary and Performance Review that interrogates the transference that occurs between performers and audiences, primarily within the gallery space. ‘Contact High’ is curated by Anador Walsh, Director of Performance Review.
