Review: Triptych
Phillip Adams | Temperance Hall, Boon Wurrung Country | 03/2023.
It has recently come to my attention that I am a hater.
A few friends have shared with me that I can be hateful. I am critical, have overly particular (and political) tastes, and am generally pessimistic about the state of performance art. This is not something I’m trying to change about myself, though, and I quite enjoy my apparently hateful outlook.
Negativity, I feel, has a unique utility in our neoliberal, ‘wellness’ obsessed and hyper-positive world. Hope isn’t necessarily a dirty word, that said, but it is attached to a certain futurity that I struggle to condone. Queerness and the future have a strained and strange relationship, after all (1). Maybe I’m a hater because I feel that so much of our future is at stake, then, and relish in the negative because it allows us to be little shits about the present:
Negativity in art attacks the myths of the dominant culture — the pastoral myth, for example, of sexuality as inherently loving and nurturing, of sexuality as continuous with harmonious community. (2)
When I think of other little shits who enjoy the negative — who challenge the ‘pastoral myth’ that preoccupies our Christo-colonial society in so-called Australia — I am drawn to Phillip Adams. Adams has been playing with negativity and queer images of hate-cum-love for some time now, and his latest work, Triptych (2023) is no exception. If anything, it is an exemplar of queer negativity, told through a dance of cinematic persuasions.
Triptych is the champagne-coloured third instalment of Adams’ pseudo-Biblical trilogy, which began with Ever (2017) and Glory (2019). While Ever is a white-picket fence fantasy of repetition, and Glory a mass for pink poodles, Triptych is a much darker entry from Adams.
The work is divided into three acts and draws inspiration from Francis Bacon’s triptychs — particularly his studies of crucifixion — to explore themes of exposure, shame, and obliteration. The vocabulary is ballet-tinted, with subtle waltzes, arabesques and ornate use of the hands and wrists. I am reminded of Joe Goode’s 29 Effeminate Gestures (1987), with lifted pinkie fingers and self-conscious gesticulations. The score, by David Chisholm and Duane Morrison, reminds me of Thom Willems: intense, thrumming and anxious, as if we are listening to a plane land on a glass runway.
The opening and closing sections are danced with flair by the cast. Benjamin Hurley reaches a breath-taking ecstasy, and I can’t recall the last time I saw a dancer achieve such a self-destructive fever. Samuel Harnett-Welk is svelte, mantis-like and shines during an exchange of catty text. Oliver Savariego embodies the devil in the details and provides a stable, earthen corporeality. Harrison Hall, meanwhile, is a zephyr: soft, elven, and clearly invested in the safety of his fellow dancers. In a humorous departure, Alexandra Dobson is wry in her UPS uniform and narrates the third act with cool clarity.
The middle section sees a film projected onto the carpet stage. After the action painters of the mid-20th century, Adams squirts paint from his anus against a sheet. The spurts of paint achieve an elegant arc as James Wright’s videography slows to accommodate their flight. The use of red paint is especially poignant and evokes a vicious haemorrhage — an encroaching mortality.
The cast does well to interpret Adams’ religious vernacular. As the saying goes, we’re never not Catholics, even if we leave the faith — merely bad Catholics. And Adams is a terrible Catholic. The bastardisation of Christian imagery is a mainstay of Adams’ work, and while rituals, rites and self-deifications have been explored before, this work is specifically interested in the public shaming inherent to crucifixion (3). Adams’ political motivation, at first obscured by flamboyant aesthetics, becomes clearer the deeper we settle into the work.
Triptych is a work about the anus and adopts the gravity of death that Leo Bersani once inscribed it with (4).
For Bersani, the rectum represents the negativity that Western society has pinned to homosexuality and queerness writ large (5). At the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, commentators, politicians and the media in the United States homed in on the deaths caused by AIDS — connecting the ‘lifestyle’ of queer people to the lethality of the disease, and in turn binding queerness, symbolically and politically, to death. Focussing on the anus as a corporeal marker and signifier for gay sexual desire (or, at least a placeholder for the many non-reproductive sex acts that queer people of all gender identities might engage in) Bersani contemplated the ways that anal sex evokes destruction; destruction of the self, certain modes of masculinity, and heteronormative politics. Reflecting on the terms of the homophobic majority, Bersani posed a question that has echoed through queer studies: why should we, as queers, seek to belong in a society that hates us?
This hate was not unfamiliar to so-called Australians at the time, and the infamous ‘Grim Reaper’ HIV awareness campaign of 1987 springs to mind (6). Set in a hellish bowling alley, a rotted reaper — scythe in hand — sends a bowling ball flying at a pin-set of men, women and children. The bodies fall, and lie in a pool of smoke, with skin greyed and eyes blank. “At first,” we are told, “only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS.” Though the narrator later explains that more Australians are now at risk — a baby flies through the air, punctuating the threat to innocence at hand — the underlying message is clear. Before, it was ‘only’ the gays and drug users — those expendable types at the periphery of polite society — who were dying. It is implied that these populations ‘invited’ death, and that it is understandable that these people should become ill and die. After all, those who stroke the bear — who transgress the norm — invite its wrath. The precious children and innocent heterosexual mothers and fathers, by contrast, are sacred and in need of protection (7).
Triptych is a work that counters this argument. It is a work about bottoming and the grave-like onus of queer sexual receptivity. The nuclear family and darling child are cast aside to celebrate and explore the rectum as a site for potential transgression, largely framed here as a slight against a Catholic/straight God.
Through the inflation and deflation of a massive pink ring encircling Paul Yore and Devon Ackerman’s staging, Adams mirrors the orgasmic pulse of the penetrated anus. Toni Maticevski’s slitted pants expose the dancers’ butts with each straddle and twist. Pelvises are tucked under, thighs parted, and rolls onto the back embellished with lifted legs. Embraces are sensual, careful and sensitive, but open to erotic readings. Butt cheeks are massaged with curious attention, and the dancers often move with an ‘internal’ motivation, as if their guts were spasming around an unseen stimulus. Deep in the hollows of their bowels, a hornet stings and screams. The cast struggle, thrash and throw themselves in a desperate plight for form.
Sexuality is not the only signifier of death in Western society, however, and gay shame is a racialised feeling (9). Sometimes in queer performance art, the intersections of race, sexuality, and death are not explicitly explored. Looking to the context of dance and performance in so-called Australia, I feel that continued dialogue and collaboration between projects like Triptych and First Nations artists working with death — Jaye Early, for example — would benefit the field overall. Death is one language of colonialism (9), after all, and queerness demands attention to all exercises in oppression (10).
That said, the negativity that compels Triptych is worthwhile and necessary. The significance of the show closing on the same day that Melbourne hosted a transphobic, Neo-Nazi ‘protest’ against the reality of gender diversity underscores the need for Adams’ provocations. The world, per Bersani’s original treatise, remains hateful and antagonistic towards queerness. Thus, with sharp voices and carpet burnt bodies — red skin dressed in silver and gold — Triptych’s call and gesture against the straight ‘God’ is clear. We may be shamed, and we may indeed die, but these negations are ours to claim. ▮
This review benefitted from discussion with producer Anna McDermott. I would also like to acknowledge my previous engagement with Phillip Adams as a Temperance Hall artist, and further disclose my role as moderator for the Triptych Q&A evening on March 17, 2023.
Notes
(1) James Bliss, “Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 48, no. 1 (March 2015): 83–98, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030736; Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
(2) Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 34.
(3) Adela Yarbro Collins, “From Noble Death to Crucified Messiah,” New Testament Studies 40, no. 4 (October 1994), 481–503, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688500026436
(4) Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?
(5) Ibid.
(6) Christy Newman and Asha Persson, “Fear, Complacency and the Spectacle of Risk: The Making of HIV as a Public Concern in Australia,” Health 13, no. 1 (January 2009): 7–23, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26649852
(7) Edelman, No Future
(8) Morgan Bassichis and Dean Spade, “Queer Politics and Anti-Blackness,” in Queer Necropolitics, eds. Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2014), 191–210; Jack Halberstam [published as Judith Halberstam], “Shame and White Gay Masculinity,” Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 219–233; Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
(9) Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
(10) Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (London: Routledge, 2021).
