Title:
Drunken Mind, Heavy Heart
Author:
Olivia Bennett
Date:
22.06.23

Contact High was an exhibitionist AA meeting. There was karaoke, dancing and a macabre piñata. A packed crowd, drinking lowballed liquor and huffing clouds of HQD, spectated three lost souls as they waded, wrangled and wracked through the fellowships’ twelve tenets.1 This edition of Performance Review’s partnership with Gertrude took its theme of ‘transference’ spiritually. It was an inclination swayed from the figurehead of God, untoward a re-formation, or recovery of, the original shape of man. Together, Kenneth Suico, Sophie Gargan and Diego Ramírez proved the repetition of steps as a saving grace.

Mouth caressing mic, Sucio sings softly between vape hits. Backlit by a sunset scene at sea, he lazes awkwardly on a stage mounted blow-up lounge. His eyes fixated on a rolling translation of Song to the Siren, Tim Buckley’s Odysseusian ballad,2 later covered by the Shakespearean foundlings of This Mortal Coil.3 In his mother tongue of Cebuano, Suico’s karaoke performance processes Balikbayan, the Filipino practice of visiting or returning to the Philippines after living in another country. Drunk with longing, he mutters through his lines on repeat, as two standing mics and an English-translated screen, stare blankly at the audience.

Kenneth Suico, Nostos, Sing It To Me (Balikbayan), performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.

Kenneth Suico, Nostos, Sing It To Me (Balikbayan), performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.

Ari Tampubolon was the first to pipe up. The pop-cultural performance artist and Contact High alum supported Suico’s stylings in English. As the track looped, a chorus raptured, two-stepping the artist’s admission with an essence of hope. A fourth wall tore as Tampubolon joined Suico on stage, the artist’s pained presence breaking a smile as another Contact High alum, Kori Miles, offered his co-star a matching vape. Through a ritualised emotional purging, faith returned en masse to carry Suico toward his title of Nostos, even as the artist’s Cebuano-translated screen was turned away from him.4

If Suico wadded toward salvation, Gargan wrangled the walls of a cavernous ruin. Pouring oil into the stones that marked her boundary, she stared naively at a screened shoreline, whispering a purgatorial tale. Dressed in white cotton, she crawled through her confines in awe, wrapping limbs around a projection of faith. Growing out of her clothes, Gargan tested the limits of her surroundings, balancing several acts between brow and brawn. Stepping away from her narrative convention, she replaces this story with revelatory resistance. Running against the walls imprisoning her, the artist’s repetition breaks through, gaining insight and ownership of a new spiritual path.

Sophie Gargan, when did you stop laughing, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.

Sophie Gargan, when did you stop laughing, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.

In her artist statement, Gargan references James W. Fowler’s six Stages of Faith, a psychological investigation of faiths’ developmental process.5 Its relationship to the original six steps of AA is undeniable, specifically the “no hard or fast rules” for timely completion. The progression of Gargan’s movement revealed this teleological battlefield and rebelliously toed the sequence of its chapters. By bearing witness, growth revealed itself as a blessing often disguised by rigid material and bodily boundaries. The artists’ purgatorial dance was an attempt at immortalisation. In relinquishing her selfhood to a higher power, Gargan welcomed the universalising laughter of the absurd.

Diego Ramírez, I am a ‘diaspora’ Latinx. Hola. It means everyone back home thinks I am basic, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.

Diego Ramírez, I am a ‘diaspora’ Latinx. Hola. It means everyone back home thinks I am basic, 2023, performance documentation, Contact High 2023, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne). Photo: Machiko Abe. Documentation facilitated by Open Practice Studio. Courtesy of Gertrude and Performance Review.

Diego Ramírez is no stranger to the vaudevillian nature of the self. Running his devil-may-care attitude onto a make-shift stage, the artist taunts his audience. Donning a DIY devil costume and flaming socks, he steals a beer from an audience member and gesturally thrusts hook, line and sinker into the crowd. His hype reel, though short, vibrated a malicious tone around a blackened, tentacle-clad urn that hung heavy from the gallery's ceiling. The shape-shifted piñata grunted morosely upon the calculation of Ramírez’s repeated thwacks. Leaching from the artist his leftover humanity, the object’s fatal blow spat a confetti history of Gertrude’s art spaces.6

Playing in pantomime the lighter shades of human monsterology, Ramírez’s diasporic identity becomes a devilish celebrity blown into the shape of a final resting place. Channelling the cocaine-fuelled performances of two Mexican TV personalities separated by murderous corruption,7 Ramírez transfers this fallen story arc literally. Like Gargan, the piñata’s perpetual rise and fall universalises a wracked being, a staging of acts that agonise upon restoring a lost self. By evoking childhood memory and grounding it in his sadistic scene, Ramírez’s titled belief that “everyone back home thinks I’m basic” becomes a sobering reminder of humour’s sinister underbelly and the tenuous duality of man.

Leaning on popular mythology and culturally specific rituals, Contact High’s curation splinters selfhood into a triad of spiritual negotiations. For Suico, recovering an identity cast at sea requires a lure of lyricism. His siren song pieced together stark realities, by sculpting faith through the repetition of lines and the temporality of fleeting communities. Gargan reached her agreement through isolation, scouring for lightness in the struggle of her stride. The body became a site where maladaptive thinking is ripped and repaired by the balancing of a heavy heart. Reconciliation, for Ramírez, is a play on the performance of alternative selves. Faith in God and its redemption of man demand that darkness is recast in the light of conflicting truths.

Despite its declaration, Contact High’s spiritualised demonstration of transference moves beyond the parasocial calculations of a solitary performer. In psychology, transference is met with countertransference, a power dynamic that can destroy the therapeutic process or provide a pathway to healing. Through their performances, Suico, Gargan and Ramírez set against their steps a world staged by backward perceptions and downtrodden dissent. Transference becomes more than just the repetition of a self-perception to unassuming others. Instead, it is the constant practise of swerving into the light of a forked trajectory.

Together these artists mark multiple pathways toward this one unifying destination, relinquishing the bondage of identity by setting aside everything known for anything practised. In the famous words attributed to French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau, “a drunk mind speaks a sober heart”. With this sense, testimony undulates between contexts. By swaying to the beat of its hum, Contact High spotlights salvation in the steps we take to better understand our partnership with an illusory universe.

  1. Bill W., Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (United States: Alcoholics Anonymous World Service Inc, 1952).

  2. Tim Buckley, “Song to the Siren”, Starsailor, Straight, 1970.

  3. This Mortal Coil, “Song to a Siren”, It’ll End in Tears, written and composed by Tim Buckley, Blackwing Studios, 1984.

  4. A theme used in Ancient Greek literature, which involves an epic hero returning home by sea.

  5. James W. Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (United States: Harper Collins Religious, 1981).

  6. With support from staff, Ramírez shredded copies of A Short Ride in a Fast Machine: Gertrude Contemporary 1985–2005 (2005). This book, edited by Charlotte Day, documented an exhibition of the same name that surveyed the gallery's 20-year history.

  7. Paco Stanley and Mario Bezare were major personalities on Mexican TV during the nineties. Francisco Jorge Stanley Albaitero, known by his stage name Paco Stanley, was murdered on 7 June 1999 in a circumstance connected to the cartel.

Piloted in 2022, Contact High is a three-year partnership between Gertrude and Performance Review exploring the transference that occurs between performers and audiences in the gallery.

Each year during the month of January, a group of Naarm-based artists are given full access to Gertrude Glasshouse as a space in which to develop, rehearse and workshop new or existing performance works, before showing them to the public.

In January 2023, Contact High’s participating artists were Sophie Gargan, Gabriella Imrichova, Diego Ramírez and Kenneth Suico. These artists presented work on 18, 24 and 25 January.

Olivia Bennett writes in response to Sophie Gargan, Diego Ramírez and Kenneth Suico’s 18 January performances as part of Gertrude x Performance Review, Performance Review’s critical response to the performance elements of Gertrude’s artistic program.

Olivia Bennett is a Melbourne-based writer with by-lines in Artlink, Running Dog and more: www.oliviabennett.info

Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.