Mike Parr Blind Self Portraits

ARNDT BERLIN POTSDAMER STRASSE 96 10785 BERLIN GERMANY PHONE +49 30 206 138 70 [email protected] WWW.ARNDTBERLIN.COM MIKE PARR BLIND SELF PORTRAITS 21 SEPTEMBER – 02 NOVEMBER 2013 FOREWORD I knew of Mike Parr’s performance work long before I was aware it was the work of an Australian artist. When I moved to Australia with my family two years ago, my goal was to focus on bringing major international and Asian art to Australia and the best work from Southeast Asia to Europe. I decided to leave Australian art to the experts, who could serve the work far better. On a number of occasions over the past twenty-five years of my career, reality has shown that exceptions need to be made, and this was now the case with Australian art. For whenever and wherever I went in Australia – museums, foundations and private collections – I saw the most stunning, breathtaking works by Mike Parr. For the past twenty years my mission in Berlin has been to bring major artists and their work to audiences who would otherwise not encounter these radical positions, and this mission continues for the Asia-Pacific art landscapes. When Mike Parr and I finally met about his work, we discovered our missions and visions overlapped. I felt strongly that his work needed to be seen and engaged within a European context. Meanwhile, he was prepared to dedicate two years of creation towards an exhibition of new work in Berlin. The result: Berlin and Western audiences connect immediately and instinctively with Mike Parr’s work, without questioning whether they are viewing the work of an Australian artist. The issues and topics addressed in Parr’s amazingly complex print works – as well as the new “Blind Self Portraits”, his first paintings on canvas in fifteen years – are read by audiences as “European”, as part of the fabric of international contemporary art. By its texture and through its subject matter, Parr’s paintings and at times unbearably strong endurance performances are in line with both Viennese Actionism and the history of international performance art, from Chris Burden and Stelarc, via Bruce Nauman and Marina Abramovi, right up to Rebecca Horn. I am happy and proud to host this first commercial exhibition of Mike Parr’s work in Europe, and to join the chorus of voices who wish such a high calibre show of Australia’s most significant living artist would have already happened in Berlin long ago. I am convinced Parr’s work will challenge and enchant audiences in Berlin, Germany and across Europe in the same way it has for the past thirty five years in Australia and the Pacific Region. Matthias Arndt 5 MIKE PARR: BLIND SELF PORTRAITS “The multimedia-based working artist Mike Parr from Australia is one of the most radical Self-portraiture has been a consistent element in his practice. He has produced thousands representatives of the Body Art with extremely auto-aggressive performances, but never- of drawings and prints over the last three decades. “It’s a sort of start-again situation, an theless he remained relatively unknown in Europe.”¹ In Australia well established, Parr (born attempt to know the unknowable,” he says. Ever since the early 1980s, he has begun his 1945 in Sydney) has only recently been honoured with his first retrospective in Europe selfportraits in a conventional manner, looking at himself in a mirror and trying to capture a titled “Edelweiss” at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria. likeness. As the drawing progresses it triggers a memory of a time, a place or an idea, and Parr lets his pencil or etching tool run free in an attempt to record a concept related to the ARNDT is proud to present Parr’s first exhibition in Berlin during Berlin Art Week with a work. “The self-portraits show this crucial problem. I labor away intensively with the premiere of his most recent video work “Fresh Skin like a Baby”, which he was working on interesting possibility of a portrait emerging and then I start to remember something and it for the past three years, and a selection of seven impressive large-scale works executed in will come to me in the entanglement of line.” For Parr, the process of perception is print, drawing, etching and painting. indistinguishable from that of remembering, and the struggle is in how to reconcile the workings of memory, sight and thought. Testing the limits of his physical and mental endurance, Mike Parr has cut, branded, stitched, burned and nailed his body in the pursuit of his art.² In his oeuvre his visceral performances are being accompanied by sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography and video, through all of which he examines his identity and major political and cultural conventions of the 20th century, ranging from his disability to Marxism, from the refugee crises to the structure of language. “I grew up in the backblocks. In the fringe zone beyond the reach of the big cities these are peculiarly ambiguous areas with a high proportion of misfits, religious fanatics and down at heel no-hopers. A lot of the disturbance in my work, its expressionistic irony and its solipsism, dates back to my experience of the backblocks in the late 1940’s, 50’s & 60’s when our family moved from one rundown farm to the next.” By 1966 he started as an artist in Sydney – strongly objecting to the war in Vietnam, he refused to register for the draft. The climate of anti-war protest instilled Parr with a sense of being an outsider challenging authority. During the late 1960’s and throughout the 1970’s he voraciously read the work of 20th-century intellectuals such as German philoso- pher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse and Austrian-American psychiatrist and psycho- analyst Wilhelm Reich, absorbing their accounts of authoritarianism, exploitative behavior and the restricted nature of liberty in Western societies. The performances he staged at this time were unique and groundbreaking refutations of the status quo of the Australian visual arts scene. He fused his fascination for the structure of language with his performance work. “I wanted to turn words into things,” he says. “I actually think my first performances were some sort of bizarre attack on language.” However, the attacks on language soon gave way to shocking performance pieces that made his body and the limits to which he could push it the focus of attention. 1 Matthias Reichelt, KUNSTFORUM International, Bd. 220, März – April 2013 2 Michael Young, Art Asia Pacific, 2009 6 7 “Backblocks’ is a pun. The desolate towns and small settlements dotted through the country areas and the outback of Australia are referred to in the argot as the “backblocks”. I grew up in the backblocks. In the fringe zone beyond the reach of the big cities these are peculiarly ambiguous areas with a high proportion of misfits, religious fanatics and down at heel nohopers. A lot of the disturbance in my work, its Expressionistic irony and its solipsism, dates back to my experience of the backblocks in the late 1940’s, 50’s & sixties when our family moved from one rundown farm to the next. A lot of the memories are hilarious, bizarre. Me riding a heifer along the dirt track to Nerang in the 1950’s or the raging cyclone in 1956 that blew all our chooks and their galvanized iron sheds into the air. Backblocks are also printing blocks. Specifically the 110 x 80 cm copper blocks of the 8–9 sets of 12 Untitled Self Portraits. Works that aggregate the Self Portrait as a series and which as a series nags at the idea of the Self Portrait as likeness, because the Self Portrait in these works often collapses into strident acting-out. So the ‘back catalogue’ as the irony of the Self Portrait Project… its amnesia. Backblocks (Body without Organs) utilizes one of these suites of 12 S.P. plates as a ground. The set is repeated twice in random order to fill the enormous expanse of the final work and many of the dry points have been printed with swathes of turpentine washed into the rice paper, so parts of the drawing run, sag… Over this miasma John and I have printed one of my large labyrinth heads in a bulging, anamorphic perspective, so that the frozen, authoritarian Behemoth leers at the viewer. Beneath its crushing weight (literal, because the woodblocks were subjected to the weight of the ‘Peugeot Press’) the Self Portraits leak and flow like the organs of a body.” Mike Parr, 2013 BACkbloCks (BodY witHOUT ORGans), 2013 ETCHING, CARBORUNDUM, STENCIL, SHELLAC ONTO RICE PAPER BONDED TO RAG PAPER 330 X 400 cm | 129.92 X 157.48 in This work is uniQue. printed with John Loane at Viridian Press, Canberra. 8 9 “Blind Obedience (dead), is a large text based printwork. The final form of a Conceptual work of mine from the late 90’s early 2000. The Conceptual work is called Blind Obedience/Silent Majority, 1998–2005. It installs as 2.42 inch plasma screens on the wall. The two screens abut. Screen 1 plays a flow of words. The 80 words of Blind Obedience were generated by simply looking up a synonym for the word “synonymous” and continuing with the process of looking up the synonym for each subsequent synonym for 80 moves to produce a blind semiotic drift. By extraordinary chance the final word turned out to be “dead”. Screen 2 is a flow of numbers. Silent Majority simply rewrites all 80 words in Blind Obedience as numbers, by substituting 1–26 numbers for the letters of the alphabet.” Mike Parr, 2013 BLIND OBEDIENCE (DEAD), 2013 ETCHING, CARBORUNDUM, STENCIL, SHELLAC ONTO RICE PAPER BONDED TO RAG PAPER 320 X 420 CM | 125.98 X 165.35 IN This work is uniQue.

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