- Title:
- Georgia Banks in conversation
- Author:
- Ari Tampubolon
- Date:
- 22.06.23
Georgia Banks, DataBaes, 2022-23, installation view, Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 March – 20 August 2023. Photo by Peter Bennetts. Courtesy of the NGV.
It was a picture-perfect summer’s day in December, when Georgia and I met up to eat some salad.
AT: I love a good salad, my body feels so great after. I could eat them every day.
GB: I did for a performance once. Well, not every day, I dieted very intensely for a pageant performance.
AT: I forget you had a pageant era. How did that feel?
GB: I anticipated a lot of calorie-counting but I didn’t anticipate how much changing my body and habits would change my life and the way that I was treated in the world. I was going through these hefty physical transformations and I started behaving differently and then the world around me started responding to me differently too. The pageant performance went on for a year and my body went through so much, physically, that every time I stepped out of the house I was performing, mentally. Even when I was by myself, I was performing. I was never not thinking about pageantry and performing.
AT: Have you had any other long-term effects from that?
GB: Yeah, I still have a toenail that falls off sometimes.
AT: Sometimes?
Georgia Banks, DataBaes, 2022-23, video still, Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 March – 20 August 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
GB: Once every few months it pulls off because I got a bad pedicure during the pageant performance and I’d never gotten a pedicure before that and every once in a while that toenail just falls off. I also didn’t eat bread for a year and a half post that performance because my body just couldn't handle it after the extreme dieting.
AT: That’s something I don’t think about often, as a performer: health. It’s kind of scary to me how health is becoming this intensely gamified thing.
GB: Very much so, which is what my next project is about. I’m interested in exploring our increasing reliance on gamification and how that’s impacting our ability to complete daily maintenance tasks, how it’s impacting dating, how it’s influencing more complex forms of human behaviour and how gamification is being incorporated into the future of palliative care.
AT: I’m acquainted with the dating side of things especially in relation to you, after I saw your show at Gertrude Glasshouse, Remains to be Seen. I’ll be honest, when I went to see that show I had no idea what to expect.
GB: I guess we had just met too.
AT: I knew you made work about reality TV, but I still had no idea what to expect from your work, so when I saw the row of petals welcoming me to the early 2010’s mac, with the registration form to win your remains the immediate thought that I had was “...This feels like a very hetero Bondi Beach date”.
Georgia Banks, DataBaes, 2022-23, video still, Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 March – 20 August 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
GB: I’m actually going to be doing a residency at Bondi Beach! When I told my friends they were like, “Imagine how many ex-Bachelor contestants you’re gonna meet!”
AT: Too many. Have you ever met any?
GB: Abbie Chatfield. I painted her portrait for the Archibald Prize.
AT: Oh my god! What was that like?
GB: It was interesting… She hadn’t come out as bisexual at the time, but we talked about queerness a lot and shortly after our conversation she came out as bisexual. I feel like I played a hand in that… I wish I played a literal hand in that.
AT: A whole hand, a finger or two, even. Did she sign up to Remains to be Seen?
GB: No! Ugh! We didn’t interact much, I went to her mum’s house to photograph her and after a few formalities and paperwork, I left. We messaged a few times after I sent her a picture of the painting, but you know, she’s talking to so many people all the time she’s probably never even heard of Remains to be Seen.
Georgia Banks, Remains to be Seen, installation view, Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm (Melbourne), 23 April - 22 May 2021. Photo: Christian Capurro. Courtesy of Gertrude.
AT: What a life she must live. Do you see yourself ever existing in that world exclusively for a time period?
GB: I tried to! I went through the whole audition process and that went on for ages. I spent about nine months of my life auditioning for this reality TV show.
AT: Nine months?! Why did it take so long?
GB: Because I was nearly cast! The audition process was so long. There was the application itself and then more questionnaires as the second step. Then there was a police check and a psych interview and then a face-to-face interview before some personality tests, more psych clearances, a full medical and STI evaluation, everything! A mountain of paperwork. Then they did a final psych clearance and interview, all to end up not getting on.
AT: That’s such a meta process of self-awareness for such an intense period of time.
GB: That’s what the chatbot I’m building for my work in Melbourne Now, DataBaes is all about. I’ve used every question that was asked of me during the audition process for this reality TV show and used it to build the personality of the chatbot.
AT: What does Miss Chatbot look like?
GB: She looks like me! I’m playing her in the video work for Melbourne Now.
AT: So she’s as hot as you.
GB: I’m hotter.
Georgia Banks, DataBaes, 2022-23, installation view, Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 March – 20 August 2023. Photo by Peter Bennetts. Courtesy of the NGV.
AT: Do you see yourself inhabiting this character of Miss Chatbot often?
GB: No, I hate her. Her name is Gee. Don’t tell anyone, because she is me. When you watch DataBaes at Melbourne Now, all of the conversations in that video are actual conversations I had with Gee. We fought a lot and there’s a fight scene in the video work that’s real, derived from when I had a fight with this chatbot version of myself from 2019.
AT: Do you ever see yourself becoming this Gee character at times?
GB: Actually, no. Gee was only ever constructed for the video, so obviously I played her because it’s this imagined reality where TV show contestants are being built using deep fake and AI. But Gee is separate from me, she exists. You’ll be able to talk to her through the chatbot at the NGV. She’s not in me, she has come out of me.
AT: That’s interesting. I've noticed that there’s been this wave of people wanting to detach parts of themself into a persona and that’s sort of what I explore in my work. There’s all these expectations to perform your identity in your work and be vulnerable for the world in your practice and I kind of wanted a body of work that acted as the antithesis of who I am. Hence, that alter ego I performed who fooled everyone into thinking I moved to New York.
GB: I remember that! I’ve never had an alter ego character apart from my work in Miss Young Juicy and Malleable, but when I did the pageant performance and the reality TV show auditioning, people would always ask me what it’s like being this character and I would have to say, “this is me! This is not a character!” Sure, I was throwing myself into a completely foreign situation from what I normally do, but I wasn’t performing, I was totally myself through those entire processes. Even with the Remains to be Seen work, yes I was acting for the video, but it was still real. I was really giving away complete control over the disposal of my body and my funeral. I don’t really see my work as inhabiting an alter ego, it’s just me giving way to two different aspects of myself. Sure, I’m a performer in the way that we are always performing. But I’m still being honest with who I am. I think people think that I have higher levels of irony than I do, which would make me a surprisingly earnest person.
AT: I agree. I think you’re one of the most sincere people I know. Which, to some, might translate as fake.
GB: It’s weird, isn’t it? People who know my work from my really heavy body modification, crucifixion, blood and gore era meet me now and are like, “you are not at all what I expected”! Like they expect me to have stayed spooky, as if my work and personality were static.
AT: People love to see performance as truth or lies when there is so much more to it.
GB: You know what, someone once told me—I don’t know if it’s just a quote or if someone actually told me—that art is telling lies to tell the truth. I think about that all the time.
AT: And that person was Mahatma Gandhi.
GB: That’s right.
Georgia Banks, DataBaes, 2022-23, video still, Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Naarm (Melbourne), 24 March – 20 August 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Ari Tampubolon's interview with Georgia Banks took place late last year and is our fourth and final piece from the 2022 edition of Gertrude x Performance Review, Performance Review’s ongoing critical response to the performance elements of Gertrude’s artistic program.
Banks is a performance artist whose works begin with an invitation and a provocation. She was a Gertrude Studio Artist from 2019 – 2022.
Banks exhibited Remains to be Seen at Gertrude Glasshouse 23 April - 22 May 2021.
DataBaes will is currently showing at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia til 20 August 2023 as part of Melbourne Now.
Ari Tampubolon is a performance artist working across filmmaking, writing, experimental performance and commercial drag forms. Ari has recently shown works with Running Dog, The Substation, Immigration Museum, Gertrude and SEVENTH Gallery, amongst others. In 2021, Ari was awarded the Les Kossatz Memorial Award for her BFA (Hons.) research and consequently was the recipient of the inaugural Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV) Diasporas Commissions. Ari’s screenplay BLEACH, which formed part of her graduating thesis, is currently in pre-production with MAV.