Amuse.co, August 2016
Provocative, visceral and poignant, the work of Australian artist, Mike Parr is the kind that cannot be unseen. The kind that questions the sheer notion of what art is and what it can be. Since the early 1970’s, Parr has been burning, beating, slicing and bleeding against the grain. One of Australia’s most influential artists and the Godfather of chaotic, conceptual art, Parr fearlessly shines a torch on his homeland’s dark past and present social injustices – from asylum seekers to indigenous affairs, identity, memory, psychology and beyond.
Working in performance, printmaking, video and installation, the 71-year-old deals in a currency of shock and awe, testing the limits of both mental and physical endurance. If you’re game, it takes a simple Google image search to see the sheer ferocity of Parr’s practice.
Subjecting himself to various forms of self-mutilation and torture, Parr, in a similar vein to artists like Marina Abramović and Chris Burden, offers his own body up as the canvas, forcing a point of social commentary and confrontation on an audience, who may or may not be ready for what they’re about to see. In a time where art in Australia was safe and conservative, Parr was a bubbling cauldron of provocative energy.
CATHARTIC ACTION: SOCIAL GESTUS NO. 5 (THE “ARMCHOP”)1977 COLOUR PHOTOGRAPH FROM PERFORMANCE SCULPTURE CENTRE, THE ROCKS, SYDNEY PRIVATE COLLECTION PERFORMER: MIKE PARR PHOTOGRAPHER: JOHN DELACOUR
This month, an exhibition of Parr’s vast body of work, spanning the 1970s to now, opens at the National Gallery of Australia. The show is the first to assemble the artist’s output across all media and will showcase his performance and video practices, as well as talks and new work.
Here’s everything you need to know about Australia’s seminal provocateur.
Rural beginnings
Born in Sydney in 1945, Parr grew up on a small, decrepit farm in Queensland. His family, who had moved with romantic ideas of rural life, struggled to survive and fit in. It was here where feelings of displacement were first felt. A deformed left arm meant Parr was often singled out by the other children, resulting in desperate feelings of isolation and loneliness, sentiments that would, in-turn, influence his artistic practice to-come.
THE EMETICS (PRIMARY VOMIT): I AM SICK OF ART (RED, YELLOW AND BLUE): BLUE 1977 COLOUR PHOTOGRAPH FROM PERFORMANCE WATTERS GALLERY, DARLINGHURST, SYDNEY PRIVATE COLLECTION PERFORMER: MIKE PARR PHOTOGRAPHERS: JOHN DELACOUR, FELIZITAS STEFANITSCH
Pushing against the establishment
In 1970, after dropping out of a law degree and the National Art School in Sydney, Parr, along with fellow provocateurs Peter Kennedy and Tim Johnson, established Inhibodress Artist Collective, an avant-garde, artist-run space that promoted conceptual, performance, installation and experimental work – unheard of at the time in Australia.
Inhibodress produced many of the country’s first installation-led works. This included Parr’s Word Situation’s II, 1971, a precursor to his future use of endurance and commands. Each word in the dictionary meaning of “wall” was defined and typed on sheets of A4 paper, then each of those words were defined and typed-up, and so on, for over 250 pages. The artist-run space set the tone for conceptual art in Australia, upset the establishments and ruffled critical feathers.
Shock value
Aiming to disorient and create discomfort in his audience, Parr’s abrasive, if not, self-indulgent, work has seen him cut, stitch, pierce, mutilate and burn his body.
Most famously, in 1977, Parr forced spectators to watch in knee-jerking horror as he hacked off his bloody arm with a meat cleaver – unbeknownst to them, it was a prosthetic limb filled with meat and fake blood.
26 years later, Parr nailed his other arm (the real one) to a gallery wall for 30 hours, as a protest against mandatory detention of asylum seekers. The piece, Malevich (A Political Arm), was broadcast via a live webcam. He has also stitched his face up in response to the same issue, created an installation featuring buckets of his urine (that festered over time), beheaded roosters, isolated himself without food for 10 days (also broadcast over the internet) and locked himself inside a historically disturbing ex-mental asylum with no respite, for 72 hours. One can assume that if a Mike Parr performance is about to take place, emergency services have already been notified.
HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE LIGHT A CANDLE. HOLD YOUR FINGER IN THE FLAME FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE 1972 BLACK AND WHITE FILM, 3:28 DURATION INHIBODRESS GALLERY, WOOLLOOMOOLOO, SYDNEY
Printwork
After a particularly harrowing performance in Adelaide in 1981, where Parr forced himself to smile for 24 hours, the artist made a serious move into printmaking. “When I flew back on the aeroplane I thought I was still smiling,” he said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. “It was a very alarming problem. I couldn’t do performance after that, I was very demoralised – something had snapped.” From self-portraits to slightly haunting abstract works, the large-scale prints were snapped up by collectors before they hit the gallery. Then, in a classic Parr move, he decided to paint over the works in red (including some that were already sold). Of course, he did return to performance eventually.
MIKE PARR PRIMITIVE GIFTS 11 APRIL 2006 COLOUR PHOTOGRAPH FROM CLOSED PERFORMANCE THE LAB STUDIO, WATERLOO, SYDNEY PRIVATE COLLECTION PERFORMER: MIKE PARR PHOTOGRAPHER: PAUL GREEN PHOTOSHOP: FELICITY JENKINS; MAKE-UP: CHIZUKO SAITO
A fiery protest
If his gallery thought painting over existing work was a brutal move, nothing was to prepare the art world for his performance at this year’s Biennale of Sydney. Burning Down the House was shrouded in secrecy to all. There were confused fire fighters on site, and slightly stressed gallerists as Parr handed out papers with quotes from environmental scientists and climate change campaigners. Then, as the Talking Heads song “Burning Down the House” roared across a Sydney carpark, Parr laid out an estimated half a million pounds’ worth of prints, doused them in petrol and set them ablaze. His reasoning? “I’m not a scientist but elementary mathematics should tell us all that [global warming] is an issue way beyond our control… The scenario is drastic,” he said. “That’s the imperative behind the performance… My view is once you compromise the future, the past becomes unbearable.”
Narcissistic? Perhaps. Extreme? Yes. Perplexing? Definitely. The art may be the actions by a madman, but with Parr, you can at least argue that it’s not without intrigue, depth, narrative and legacy.
Mike Parr, Foreign Looking is on at the National Gallery of Australia until 6 November.
nga.gov.au