- Title:
- Flesh and Diamonds, Lilian Steiner
- Author:
- Angelita Biscotti
- Date:
- 29.09.23
“Since the value of all this beauty and perfection is only determined by its significance for our emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.”1 - Sigmund Freud
Flesh and Diamonds (2023) is choreographer and dance-artist Lilian Steiner’s first foray into object-based gallery art. Live performances within the white cube are not new, but the theorising of what’s possible when the performing arts become gallery artefacts, is in an exciting development.

Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 June - 27 August 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
Stepping into the wide, warehouse-style exhibition space of Gertrude, Preston, the first observable art works are eight larger-than-life wall-sized digital prints on chiffon, suspended on fisher hooks. Depicted on these prints are classically posed, evenly lit nudes of Steiner's regular dance collaborators: Phillip Adams, Alice Dixon, Mara Galagher, Lucy Guerin, Rebecca Jensen, Shelley Lasica, Shian Law and Geoffrey Watson. They stand in an identical contrapposto, more weight on one leg, arms hanging loosely over thighs, their gaze directed serenely off-camera. The prints are hung above eye-level, drawing the viewer’s gaze upward to meet the dancers’ faces. In dance, time is suspended for both dancer and spectator. In these stills, it is the dancers who are suspended, calling attention to the difference between live dance and the dance-object-artefact; a suspension of our idea of what dance is.

Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 June - 27 August 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
At the centre of the space is a table with a draped fabric print of Steiner, posed similarly to her wall-mounted collaborators. Eight pearlescent 3D print-sculptures are placed on top of her. Each dancer was invited to perform a series of improvised movements, which Steiner then repeated while wearing a motion-capture suit. Rendered sections of Steiner’s performance of these improvisations were then 3D-printed by ongoing collaborator Patrick Hamilton into palm-sized, abstract sculptures.2

Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 June - 27 August 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
Steiner’s is a different take on what dance documentation and archiving can be and calls into question whether the default documentation systems of photography and video are effective at preserving a form whose beauty and power lie in its ephemerality. The work interrogates the premise that liveness can be captured, condensed and re-presented in a manner faithful to what was witnessed by those present. A video or photo of a moment in a sea of moments that flow into and from each other, are videos and photos of something that is not quite the thing. According to critic Peggy Phelan, “performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.”3
I find it alienating to watch playback of a recent live performance or browse through documentation photos–even if they are beautiful, even if I do love a good selfie. As a performer, it unsettles me to view flat, two-dimensional representations of the multi-dimensional live energies of being in contact with the score, the temperature in the room, the texture of the light on my skin, my co-performers’ bodies, the floor, the walls and the presence of the audience. It’s a reversal of Lacan’s mirror stage. In the mirror stage, the child, flailing in their unruly body, aims to match up with the whole form they see reflected back by the glass. Yet as I look at images and video recordings of shows I’ve done, I find myself longing instead for the generative unruliness of a moment where I cannot be an audience to my own figure, where I can only know my body through encounters unmitigated by self-consciousness, where my body is more potentiality than a finality fixed into the archive through the authoritative click of the shutter.

Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 June - 27 August 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
Transference is also a foundational idea of psychoanalysis, a discipline (or anti-discipline) that questions the stability of the (psychic) archive and the chaotic (in)fidelities of memory. In the Flesh and Diamonds exhibition text, Steiner also describes the multi-stage making process as a “transference”: “Through this transference, we have together carved out an impression of that particular dance -- a fossil. Each fossil is a portrait which = them + me. Dance is absorbed. Bodies are absorbent.”4 The 3D print-sculptures are abstract crystallisations of Steiner tracing her collaborators’ movements with her own body. Because their bodies, dance lineages and individual personal histories are varied, the repetition of gestures is inexact. Exactitude isn’t the point. The repetition is already an embodied interpretation.

Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 June - 27 August 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
In questioning the contradistinction between the dancer and the dance, or the dance as something that is the dancer’s doing, Philipa Rothfield recalls Nietzsche: “There is no being behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; the ‘doer’ is invented as an afterthought.”5 The work is the unity of Steiner, her collaborators, and motion-capture and 3D printing technology – and their capacity to move and be moved by one another. Transference works like this too. Without taking on and working through, the ever-present risk of being caught in the orbit of the other’s rage, heartbreak, disappointment, loss, love and dreams, psychoanalysis becomes nothing more than a perfunctory clinical gesture, indistinct from hyper-structured self-disclosure rituals demanded in Centrelink applications.
There is something tender about this exhibition. The figures on the walls simultaneously evoke the timelessness of the Old Masters’ paintings and the inevitability of our shared mortality. The composited, subdermal elements of joints and organs on the bodies emphasise the tension between lens-based dance documentation and the way the photographed or filmed subject can repeat but never quite return to the moment the shutter clicked. We may find ourselves watching films and flicking through social media depicting the youth and vitality of actors long deceased. The same may eventually be said of photos and videos of recent dance works. These 3D-printed blobs, reminiscent of Ken Price sculptures, offer alternate insight into how motion might be fixed into time. The copy is never quite the same as the original, although the originals themselves are not all that original. The dancers providing the source-material for Steiner’s movements embody memories from their own artistic histories–and are responsive too, to their shared history as collaborating artists and friends.

Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 June - 27 August 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
What is fidelity anyway? In In Praise of Love, the non-theory-bro’s gateway-drug to Alain Badiou, Badiou writes, “Mallarmé saw a poem as ‘chance defeated word by word’... Fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure.”6 The purpose of the archive is to defeat forgetting. All archival work is an exercise in selective forgetfulness, because not all memories are preserved at equally weighted intensities. This is why archives can never be neutral–and fail to be trustworthy repositories of collective memory. In his poem Touch, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil writes that contrary to the presumed authority of the sense of sight, “The hands, they knew / what faith was– / the held object / holding you.”7 The irreducible moment of the dance that simultaneously binds and exists beyond Steiner, her dancers, machine and object, announces itself through embodied transference in a similar way. There are many ways to be faithful to a primordial spark. Where the lens falls short, the remembering body makes up the difference.

Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, installation view, Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 June - 27 August 2023. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
Sigmund Freud, "On Transience," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV (1914 - 1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957), p.306.
The last time I saw this 3D technology at work was at Science Gallery's Mental, where Dr Kellyann Guerts and Dr Indae Wang had the audience wear headsets that generated printed thoughtforms depicting their brainwaves in action.
⬈Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p.146.
Lilian Steiner, Flesh and Diamonds, Exhibition text, Gertrude Contemporary, accessed 20 August 2023.
⬈Philipa Rothfield, Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny: Philosophy in Motion (New York: Routledge, 2021), p.122.
Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (New York: New Press, 2012), pp.45 - 46.
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, Highest Hiding Place: Poems (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009).
Angelita Biscotti’s review of Lilian Steiner’s Flesh and Diamonds is the fourth and final instalment of the 2023 iteration of Gertrude x Performance Review, our ongoing critical response to the performance in Gertrude's artistic program. Flesh and Diamonds was exhibited at Gertrude, Preston from 24 June - 27 August 2023.
Angelita Biscotti is a critic, poet, performer, composer, astrologer, renter, casual academic, non-binary wife, unwilling trauma-dump-receptable, chaotic introvert, fidgety immigrant, Virgo sun, Aquarius Rising and uninvited guest on unceded Boon Wurrung Country. Their first poetry collection Else But A Madness Most Discreet was published by Vagabond Press in 2018. Their writing has been published by the Sydney Review of Books, Jacobin, Cordite, Liminal, Overland, Australian Poetry Journal, Going Down Swinging and elsewhere. Their recent work explores unconventional intimacies; the unspeakable within sexuality; race and class in erotic intimacy and resonances between the heavenly and earthly spheres. The stardust in them is curious about the stardust in you.
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.