Title:
Pattern Recognition, Angela Goh
Author:
Suzanne Claridge
Date:
29.09.23

“There is a poem that takes you everywhere and tells you nothing.”1

Quench the thirst
Breathe in, breathe in
Turning
back and forth
Mouth wide open
Rasping gasps
Clown head carnivalesque
I dare not peer into the abyss
for fear of what creature within
will emerge from the void, reaching
out towards me but
the tongue is tied and the fingers crossed.

Quench the thirst
Take my breath
Crawling
upside down
Mouth wide open
Frail wails
Tongue dance arabesque
I stare into the abyss
A worm-like alien-tongue, searching
with its sponge-like appendage, but
what is found is already lost.

_

Performed in four iterations at Fine Arts Sydney in May 2023, Pattern Recognition explores repetition by drawing upon recurring gestures of the mouth present in Angela Goh’s previous works Desert Body Creep (2016), Body Loss (2017-2023), Uncanny Valley Girl (2018) and Sky Blue Mythic (2021).

Goh describes the mouth as a channel, a cipher through which things appear, disappear and mutate.2 In Pattern Recognition, the mouth is rendered as both material flesh and an expansive void that blurs the otherwise rigid boundaries of linear chronologies and movement, between what enters in and/or what falls out.

Angela Goh, Pattern Recognition, 2023, performance detail, Fine Arts, Sydney, Eora Country. Courtesy of the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney.

Wearing a white t-shirt, black denim pants and sneakers, Goh begins to pace back and forth from the centre of the room to the edges cordoned by the audience. We are seated, crouched and leaning against the walls. A sense of anticipation fills the gallery.

Goh positions herself with hands and knees on the floor. I observe the stillness of her body. Her mouth gapes open, a singular vocal tone, almost a gasp, falls out - or does it fall in?

The mouth is a channel, the throat a grotto, air is ciphered into the abyss. Singular, monotone echoes escape, falling from/through the mouth like desperate whispers. As though a door was hinged slightly open, allowing a draught to slither inside, chills crawling into the halls of the lungs.

Angela Goh, Pattern Recognition, 2023, performance detail, Fine Arts, Sydney, Eora Country. Courtesy of the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney.

Goh rotates her torso towards the ceiling and begins to walk on her hands and feet. Her mouth remains open. I wonder at which point her mouth becomes disembodied and instead transforms and mutates into the mouth.

The body twists, legs slide against the concrete floor and sneakers slice the surface with a swish. Slowly twisting and turning and swishing and slicing. Legs and arms crawl towards me, bringing the mouth closer and closer. Am I looking into the mouth? Or is the mouth looking into me? What was it that Nietzsche said about monsters and the abyss again? When you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back into you.3 Blank eyes stare out into the distance, refusing any connection or transmission of information. The body becomes a flesh vessel, led instead by the eye of the void.

Angela Goh, Pattern Recognition, 2023, performance detail, Fine Arts, Sydney, Eora Country. Courtesy of the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney.

Seated, anchored to the floor with the hip as an axis, the body hinges back and forth. Slowly swinging between facing the wall and facing the audience. The mouth closes, turns away, returns and opens - clown head carnivalesque. The tip of the tongue emerges. Quivering at first, the tongue searches the sides of the mouth - tongue dance arabesque. A glass of water at the back of the room catches its attention, the tongue desperately leads the body to the source – quench the thirst. The tongue recedes into the abyss, the mouth of the cave closes.

_

Goh begins to pace back and forth from the centre of the room to the edges cordoned by the audience. She stands still. A sense of anticipation hangs heavy in the air.

Fingers begin to probe the mouth, threading and pulling something inside-out. Crossed fingers fold outwards and stitch the mouth shut. The thumbs and little fingers extend, morphing themselves into a flayed tongue that is now worn as a mask, a new face. Knees bend outwards as the body lowers. An elbow leans towards the floor, the fingers untie themselves and a hand wipes the mouth clean. Upside-down, back-to-front. Goh resumes her position with hands and knees on the floor.

Angela Goh, Pattern Recognition, 2023, performance detail, Fine Arts, Sydney, Eora Country. Courtesy of the artist and Fine Arts, Sydney.

_

I attended Goh’s performance Pattern Recognition twice. A month passed between my viewing of the performances and writing this piece. Overwhelmed by plot-holes in my personal life that were opening up, I momentarily escaped to Europe. In the back of my mind, though, flashbacks to Pattern Recognition filtered through with persistence. I held onto its memory, cradling it in the corners of my mind, replaying the fragments and attempting to place them chronologically.

How did the performance begin again? By walking from one corner of the room to the other? On hands and knees? With a sip of water? I’m joining the dots, the loopholes and plot-holes, back-to-front and front-to-back. The origins are non-linear. The portals collapse, rebuild and repeat. The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end.

  1. Angela Goh, Pattern Recognition, Fine Arts, Sydney, artist statement, accessed 30 June 2023.

  2. Angela Goh, Pattern Recognition, Fine Arts, Sydney, artist statement, accessed 30 June 2023.

  3. Full quote: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you”. Fredrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p.102.

Suzanne Claridge is a writer, time-traveller and artist based on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). She is currently a PhD candidate. Her interdisciplinary research broadly explores historical silences, non-linearity and re-imagining the archive. Her writing has also appeared in Cordite Poetry Review and Running Dog.

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.