Nicole Wermers: Marathon Dance Relief

Even on a late spring day in Lismore, the former church St Carthage Hall holds a certain dampness – a climate typical of large Victorian buildings and, if one needed it, an atmospheric reminder of the United Kingdom’s colonial history in Ireland. Beyond such associations, however, it is the locally scaled functionality of this building that complements the sculptural installation Marathon Dance Relief FIG.1 by Nicole Wermers (b.1971): a barrier or, as the artist describes it, a ‘chorus line’ of mass-produced café furniture, with their tabletops upended. Adorning this shield-like row FIG.2 is a frieze of air-dried clay reliefs, which features hand-sculptured figures. Traditionally, the frieze belongs to the architectural orders that celebrated the city-state, its collective actions and its remembrance. Here, instead, it holds dancing couples supporting one another in states of disarray, collapse and fatigue FIG.3.

Depression-era dance marathons in the United States are still largely remembered through Horace McCoy’s novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) and its 1969 film adaptation, which was nominated for nine academy awards. A type of endurance entertainment, dance marathons saw participants dance for days, sometimes even for weeks. The spectacle mirrored the punishing structure and rigidity of factory worker shifts: every few hours, a klaxon would sound, granting couples a fifteen-minute break, sometimes in beds set up on the dancefloor. Those who failed to wake up were revived with smelling salts or dosed with cold water.¹ Many participants were lured by the prospect of having access to regular meals – often consumed while ‘dancing’ – and the brutalising hope of a cash prize at the end of it. In McCoy’s novel, Gloria, a disillusioned and unemployed young woman, and her partner, Robert, enter a dance marathon, hoping to secure the $1,000 winnings. As they suffer the torment of the competition, Gloria’s mental and physical state deteriorates, ultimately leading Robert to fulfil her disturbing wish to end it all and die, murdering her after the contest is shut down. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it has been described as ‘the first existentialist novel to have appeared in America’, a characterisation often attributed to Simone de Beauvoir.

Marathon dancing gained popularity during the heyday of mass-produced cameras. As such, Wermers layers her sculptural processes with the mediation of the lens or screen, referencing numerous archival photographs while updating the violence of marathon imagery with the inclusion of same sex couples. As the artist has noted, many of the surviving images depict women supporting the bodies of exhausted, ailing men.² Curiously, women constituted the majority of the audience of these spectacles. The forms of Wermers’s reliefs seem to be drawn from an array of modernist sculptural references – the sequential abstractions of Henri Matisse’s Back Series reliefs (1909–30) come to mind, for example. They are lumpen, inexact, proletarian: ciphers for unindexable bodies falling over one another FIG.4. Pinches of clay render tufts of hair, the loose definition of a face or legs buckling from fatigue. The installation title invokes the double meaning of relief: the sculptural technique of projecting figures from a background and the fleeting respite granted to these dancers. The diminutive scale of the work expresses the minor and the forlorn; positioned at eye level, it invites closer examination of the muted figures.  

Dance marathons were largely a working-class phenomenon – spectacles in which the misery of people’s lives became objects of sadistic public consumption, laying the groundwork for now familiar forms of entertainment. Wermers is interested in the way that even fleeting reprieves from such hardships are governed by structural inequality; she is not politely squeamish about the realities of these adversities, nor do her sculpted gestures overtly read as pantomimic or lightly felt. If, in contemporary culture, it can be said that our empathies have been long-hollowed out by defensive cynicisms and resentments, then Wermers’s sharply assembled materials offer some tighter diagnoses as to how we might have arrived here. The fragile, air-dried clay that tentatively rests on the brushed-metal tabletops recalls the wipe-down glass of smartphones, a privatised space in which images briefly appear before being idly scrolled past, dispatched out of memory. In translating photographic images into fragile, physical reliefs, Wermers literalises the precariousness of contemporary subjectivities shaped by digital circulation. Her figures lose their photogenic smoothness, instead becoming rough, compostable. She sharpens our awareness of the otherwise artificially constructed haptic charges that determine our relationship to the digital world.

The tables that Wermers incorporates are the kind found in cafés, airports and public squares – ambiguous spaces of contemporary life where presence is typically anonymous, and encounters transactional. The hard-wearing, dull mirrored surfaces of the tables similarly evoke the temporary and contingent way in which images arrive and leave, carried by others and tidied away. Moreover, the provisional sociality that a table offers, and the way in which it produces a civic space of engagement, is, to quote Hannah Arendt from The Human Condition (1958), one that ‘relates and separates men at the same time’.³ It is a site on which commonalities and perspectives are shared or understood, and, as Margaret Canovan observes in her introduction, ‘without it, we are driven back on our own subjective experience, in which only our feelings, wants and desires have reality’.⁴ By offering a final sculptural flourish – the upright angle of the table FIG.5, a sign that business is finished or not yet begun – Wermers signals that she is less than hopeful about the current capacity to reach a state of communal, shared dialogue that Arendt idealistically positions. While there is a seemingly shared view of communality as a possibility yet to appear, Wermers fixes us in our present moment, assessing how our relations to one another run along privatised and exclusionary limits, where the smooth running of the ‘public realm’ is dependent on our capacity to absorb the shocks of labour upon our bodies without ever seeming to tire.  

In Wermers’s installation, dancing is not aligned with a feeling of being alive – or, as Adam Philips describes, a sense of ‘aliveness’ about one’s life.⁵ Instead, it is brought into a register of despair – one that feels arguably closer to the dance plague in sixteenth-century Strasbourg, where people inexplicably danced for days before exhausting themselves to death, their symptoms attributed to overheated blood in the brain. Yet despite references to such painful, physically exhausting scenarios, ultimately Wermers seems drawn to the question of communal solace in our era of political burnout. By articulating the erosion of human durability under conditions that demand continuous, visible endurance without purpose or end, she considers how such labour might be further obscured by spectacle itself – the collapse of action into mere activity and the transformation of human suffering into an image stripped of meaning.