- Title:
- Body Loss, Angela Goh
- Author:
- Erin Brannigan and Zoe Theodore
- Date:
- 23.04.21
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Video still: Hospital Hill. Courtesy of the artist.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2017-2020
Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Archie Plus, 21.02.2021
By Erin Brannigan
Angela Goh begins kneeling on the floor of the Grand Courts of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) wearing lipstick, a hot pink camisole, tracksuit pants and runners. With her is a microphone, a cord and a speaker.
the floor, the horizontal plane, Leo Steinberg’s flatbed canvas, but this was never a canvas, this parquetry floor was never a canvas tilted 90 degrees to hold more life
the floor holding the feet of the visitors, whose gaze is stacked level with the frames
She sings single notes clear and fine into a microphone with her mouth wide open and overlays and loops the sounds on her machine.
producing her own score, the autonomous art object-subject, priceless yet paid
amongst occularcentricity, quiet spaces to focus the gaze, fanciful visions drawing us deep into the wall, strangers wandering into foreign space-time
The sound persists behind a lip-synched scream, mouth frozen open, as she crawls slowly across the floor, carefully rock-climbing the architraves and ledges as she mounts the wall.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Photo: Erin Brannigan.
screaming to be silenced, dancing body on the wall, slowly becoming image, a work that ended in 2020
body-object barely differentiated from everything else in the room, the paintings, the furniture, the columns, the architraves, the speaker
She hangs from her fingertips, arching her back and legs off the wall, mouth wide-open, a deathbed her backdrop.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Photo: Erin Brannigan.
visions of Australian bushland, pioneers in their outdoor lives, fine, fine fabrics in folds, biblical trauma frozen in fear, a deathbed by a window, floral still lives in muted tones
to hang, to be hung, to press off the wall like Rauschenberg’s eagle, screaming with life
a different kind of fantastic, a marvel of virtuosic strength and persistence, testing the limits of a materiality
She unwittingly duets with a small boy with a large camera, a curious security guard. She looks back at the spectators, everyone now inhabiting her space-time vision. Then she leaves us. We cluster and disperse.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Photo: Erin Brannigan.
she leaves the frame, our gaze can’t hold her still, she takes the context with her, we talk to the people she brought together
Dr. Erin Brannigan is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of New South Wales. Her academic publications include 'Moving Across Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century' (Sydney: Currency House, 2010), 'Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and 'Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers', co-edited with Virginia Baxter (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2014). She has published various chapters and articles in film, performance and dance journals and anthologies. Her current project is 'The Persistence of Dance: Choreography, Art and Experimental Composition' which provides the historical and theoretical background for a current ARC Linkage project she leads, 'Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum'.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Video still: Hospital Hill. Courtesy of the artist.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2017-2021
Auto Italia, Nature of the Hunt, 11.08.2017
Cement Fondu, Warm Bodies, 06.10.2018
Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Archie Plus, 21.02.2021
By Zoe Theodore
Body Loss is a dance of grief-stricken composure and weightless attention. A fluid container of ideas, the work has moved through four cities over five years, shifting both figuratively and physically as it occupies new contexts. A dance for visual art spaces, the work is performed within an exhibition format, ingesting the gallery architecture into itself with a focused intention and agency.
Body Loss continues Goh's ongoing enquiry into the siren: a mythical creature who lures sailors to death by shipwreck, lulling them to sleep with song. Beginning with her voice, Goh delicately emits a single note into a microphone, recording it through a mixer and then overlaying it with another note to create a harrowing melody. As the soundtrack ominously continues, Goh raises her head and places the microphone down to reveal her gaping mouth; a symbolically charged reference to the undead and a device frequently employed in the contemporary horror genre.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Video still: Hospital Hill. Courtesy of the artist.
Along with the sound score and visage of contained intensity, Goh’s movements echo the atmosphere of speculative fiction. The dancing emerges as an embodiment of uncanniness, her pace and attention reminiscent of a possessed creature, like the deconstructed female bodies found in body horror films like Alien (1979) or The Exorcist (1973). Goh demonstrates her strength as she crawls backwards across the gallery floor, in a non-human manner. She remains close to the ground, her mouth frozen open, as her song continues to haunt and reverberate throughout the space. She stands, turning her attention elsewhere, as if spotting new prey, leading the audience from the floor to the wall. Suddenly her stage is vertical; an act that situates the work within the same context as the other artworks in the gallery.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Video still: Hospital Hill. Courtesy of the artist.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Video still: Hospital Hill. Courtesy of the artist.
The mutability of Body Loss enables the performance to shift around its core tenets each time it enters a new environment. It maintains the same atmosphere but picks up or forgets certain phrases depending on the context, space and distance from both audience and other artworks. In each setting Goh takes on the surrounding gallery infrastructure, testing the limits of her own strength as she climbs architraves, hangs from constructed walls or mounts plinths. She draws an analogy between her sensationalised body and the other works in the room, highlighting their mutual status as materials of exchange in a supply and demand economy.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2021, performance documentation, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney. Video still: Hospital Hill. Courtesy of the artist.
At the first performance of Body Loss at Auto Italia, London in 2017, the audience was packed into a small gallery as Goh performed, perched on a tall, narrow plinth. This iteration also included a scene of Goh stuffing her hand into a cylindrical container of black paint, creating a trail of fingerprints as she scaled the walls, and ended with her stuffing blackberries into her open mouth and then closing it to cause a blood-like trickle down her chin and neck. Conversely, when Body Loss was included in the exhibition Warm Bodies at Cement Fondu, Sydney in 2018, it was performed as a duet with Goh’s frequent collaborator Eugene Choi and featured a sequence of the pair ritualistically applying lipstick to each other.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2017, performance documentation, Auto Italia, London. Photo: Katarzyna Perlak. Courtesy of the artist.
Angela Goh, Body Loss, 2017, performance documentation, Auto Italia, London. Photo: Katarzyna Perlak. Courtesy of the artist.
Body Loss appears to be an assemblage of phrases that can be adapted depending on and determined by, the shifting context. Interestingly, the most recent performance of Body Loss in the Grand Courts of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) was noticeably absent of the more abject gestures adopted in past iterations. The omission of these earlier gestures creates questions around what dictated these decisions. The challenge with a work that can be overlaid into any context is that it must adapt to how it is read in relation to other works within the gallery space. While the image of an objectified female body eating fruit could draw a compelling comparison to the portraits in the Grand Courts, the colonial context and the other artworks included in Archie Plus may have created a different reading. The omission of these phrases also creates uncertainty around who holds the memory of a performance work’s history and what the relevance of that history is when it is held by so few. Unlike painting, where a previous sketch can be drawn over, nothing can be deleted from performance history. Rather, what is omitted has always existed.
Zoe Theodore is an independent curator, producer and writer based in Sydney, Australia. She has worked with artists Shelley Lasica, Amrita Hepi and Evelyn Ida Morris, producing work at various institutions across Australia including the Artspace, Sydney; the Immigration Museum, Melbourne and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne. She was the Co-Editor of 'Dissect Journal'’s third issue and has held professional roles at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; and MoMA PS1, New York. She is a current PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, researching the relationship between performance, choreography and the museum.