Acts of Resistance by Detained People Seeking Asylum, and in the Performance Art of Mike Parr

Wounded bodies as sites of dissensus: Acts of resistance by detained people seeking asylum, and in the performance art of Mike Parr

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Elizabeth Gay BA (Hons) Performance Studies, Victoria University

School of Media and Communication College of Design and Social Context RMIT University

December 2019

Declaration

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. I acknowledge the support I have received for my research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Elizabeth Gay 10 December 2019

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which this thesis was written, the sacred and sovereign lands of the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations. I acknowledge that the sovereignty of these lands has never been ceded and I respectfully acknowledge their Elders past, present and emerging. I acknowledge the disrespect and brutality with which my ancestors illegally occupied these lands and that I benefit from this as an occupier. I acknowledge and apologise for the continuing acts of colonial power, racism and violence which disregard the transgenerational trauma and pain of dispossession for Aboriginal people. I also acknowledge the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of all the lands and waters across Australia which I travel.

I would like to express my deep appreciation to my supervisors, Dr Rebecca Hill and Associate Professor Adrian Danks. I am grateful for the academic support and ongoing encouragement provided by my supervisory team. In particular, Rebecca’s close readings of my writing, her generous feedback and general belief in this work throughout my candidature have been greatly valued.

Thank you to my children, Loxy and Pax, for their patience, support and inspiration. Their love, humour and perfectly timed eye rolling have allowed me to dedicate the time and energy necessary to complete this research. I also extend my gratitude to my dearest friends for their encouragement and genuine friendship.

Thank you to Mary-Jo O’Rourke AE for professional copyediting and proofreading services, according to the university-endorsed national ‘Guidelines for editing research theses’.

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Table of Contents

Declaration.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ii Acknowledgements...………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii List of Figures.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………vi Abstract .………..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………01

Chapter One Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………….…03 1.1 Background of Study………………………………………………………………………….08 1.2 Chapter Outline………………………………………………………………………………….14 1.3 Rationale……………………………………………………………………………………………21 1.4 Methodology.…………………………………………………………………….………………22 1.5 Research Contribution……………………………………………………….………………24

Chapter Two Art and Politics: Comparative Sites of Disruption……………………………………26 2.1 Rancière, the Political and Dissensus………………………………………………….26 2.2 Rancière’s Regimes of Art…………………………………………………………………..29 2.3 Art and Politics, Politics and Art………………………………………………………….34

Chapter Three Performance Art and Mike Parr………………..…………………………………………….42 3.1 Performance Art………………………..………………..…………………………………….43 3.2 Mike Parr and Australian Performance Art…………………………………………62

Chapter Four Biopolitics, Bare Life, Grievability and Dissensus…………………………………..82 4.1 The Governing of Life…………………………………………………………………………84 4.2 Butler and Grievable Life……………………………………………………………………89 4.3 Agamben: Inclusive Exclusion, State of Exception and Bare Life…………97 4.4 Politics, Contestation and Bare Life………………………………………………….104 4.5 Framing and Deeming………………………………………………………………………109

Chapter Five Nationalism, Censorship and Exclusion……….………………………………………..113 5.1 Imagining the Australian Nation……………………………………………………….114 5.2 Mike Parr and Representations of Everyday Nationalism…………………121

5.3 People Seeking Asylum in Australia………………………………………………….123

Chapter Six Not the Hilton: Administrative Exclusion and Bare Life……..…………………135 6.1 Not the Hilton………………………………………………………………………………….136 6.2 Power, Biopolitics and Bare Life………………………………………………………143

Chapter Seven Activism and ‘the Camp’: Lip-sewing as Dissensus…….….……………………..156 7.1 Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre.……………….156 7.2 Refusal of Surplus Subjectivity.………………………………………………………..166

Chapter Eight Close the Concentration Camps: Art as Dissensus….…….………………..……..180 8.1 Politics and Parr’s Performance Art…….……………….…………………………..180 8.2 Nationalism, Geopolitics and Disruption….……….……………………………..184 8.3 Persistent Disturbance………………….……………….………………………………..190

Thesis Conclusion Solidarity and Complicity are Not Mutually Exclusive…..….…………..…205

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………….…….……………………...210

List of Figures

Fig. 1. Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls fight back (1985), poster, Tate Modern.

Fig. 2 Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0 (1974), screenshot from video, Vimeo.

Fig. 3 Günter Brus, Endurance test (1970), photograph of live performance, Tate Modern.

Fig 4. Valie Export, Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and touch cinema) (1960), photograph of live performance, Museum of Modern Art.

Fig. 5 Yoko Ono, Cut piece (1965), photograph of live performance, Museum of Modern Art.

Fig. 6 Mike Parr, Cathartic action: social gestus no. 5 (the ‘armchop’) (1977), photograph of live performance, Art Gallery NSW.

Fig. 7 Mike Parr, Language and chaos I (1989–1990), drypoint print, National Gallery of Victoria.

Fig. 8 Mike Parr, Blood box (1998), photograph of live performance, Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Fig. 9 Mike Parr, Water from mouth (2001), photograph of live performance, Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Fig. 10 Russell Storer, Bleed, bled, said (2003), photograph of back cover of book (Storer 2003).

Fig. 11 Mike Parr, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) (2003), photograph of live performance, Art Gallery of NSW.

Fig. 12 Mike Parr, slides from Close the concentration camp (2000), text excerpts from Not the Hilton used in installation.

Fig. 13 ‘Detainees’ breakout bid’ (2002), photograph by Peter Mathews, The Age newspaper (Banham, Nicholson & Teutsch 2002).

Fig. 14 ‘Ringleader may be forced to disarm: protest death fear’, photograph by Campbell Brodie, Herald-Sun newspaper (Mark 2002).

Fig. 15 Abas Amini, Abas Amini (2003), photograph from BBC News.

Fig. 16 Mike Parr, Close the concentration camps (2002), photograph of live performance image (Pitt & Butler 2016).

Fig. 17 Mike Parr, Close the concentration camps (2002), photograph of live performance image (Genzmer & Marsh 2012).

Fig. 18 Mike Parr, Close the concentration camps (2002), photograph of live performance image (Marsh 2011).

Fig. 19 Mike Parr, Close the concentration camps (2002), photograph of live performance image (Parr 2008).

Fig. 20 Australian Style (2002), photograph from magazine (Australian Style 2002).

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Abstract

People seeking asylum in Australia are allotted little or no space in which to speak and to be heard within the polis. A limit point of this position is asylum seekers who have sought to arrive in Australia by boat and have been subject to policies of mandatory detention in Immigration Detention Centres since 1992. In recent history a number of artists who are not people seeking asylum within Australia have produced work in an effort to show support for asylum seekers and refugees held in mandatory detention.

Many people seeking asylum have protested against their detention and one form of protest has been self-harm. This thesis reads these acts as an expression of agency which locates the body as a site of resistance. These acts of self-harm were (and are) carried out in Immigration Detention Centres, where the access of asylum seekers and refugees to the public sphere was (and is) tightly constrained by their incarceration, by government censorship and by the subsequent rendering of them as invisible within the Australian national imagination. Thus, their acts of resistance have consistently been shut down, framed as manipulative or labelled ‘criminal’ by government officials and the mainstream media.

This thesis analyses a selection of actions of self-harm by asylum seekers and refugees in Australian immigration detention over 2001–2003 and locates them as acts of politics and agency. My thesis also reads several works made during this period by Australian performance artist Mike Parr which he has framed as acts of solidarity with people in immigration detention. Parr’s performance artwork Close the concentration camps (2002) is the focus of a close analysis.

The critical framework of the thesis is interdisciplinary. I take up Jacques Rancière’s conceptualisation of dissensus as a rupture of the consensus in order to think the political. The status of the political or dissensus is deployed to conceptualise the actions of asylum seekers in detention, and of performance artists working with the body as a site of expression within and beyond the space of the gallery. I understand performance art

historically and distinctly as a political art practice that disrupts the consensus, thus enacting dissensus. This argument is elaborated through a selective reading of key works and scholarship in performance art. Parr’s work is situated in this context. In order to consider the specific situation of people incarcerated in Australian Immigration Detention Centres, the thesis draws on Michel Foucault’s, Giorgio Agamben’s and Judith Butler’s respective framings of biopolitics, bare life and ungrievable life. I theorise Australian nationalism and whiteness with reference to Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Ghassan Hage and Suvendrini Perera.

In theorising dissensus, Rancière (2010) claims that the essential part of any political dispute involves the very ‘politicity’ of the dispute itself. On this premise, my thesis argues that contestation over the space to speak precedes all other political concerns and becomes a central point of politics. I locate this precise point at the heart of the protests by asylum seekers and in the performance art of Parr. This thesis contends that art can enact politics when it adds to the voices seeking to create a space for the politically silenced to speak and to be heard. However, this capacity of art is contingent on the direct political actions of those who are fighting for political recognition within the polis.

Chapter One: Introduction

Resistance for me is not only enduring the system to see if it breaks you or not; resistance is equal to fighting. In this prison resistance and fighting through my writing are my most important tools (Boochani 2019).

I came to this thesis as an artist and an activist with a desire to research the incarceration of people seeking asylum in Australia.1 The debate within public discourse surrounding people seeking asylum in Australia is something I have both witnessed and felt imbricated in over the last twenty years. I noted that when people seeking asylum2 were and are held in mandatory detention, they are relegated to living a life devoid of the rights and freedoms awarded to a citizen of Australia such as myself. I observed that the position of my own ‘citizen privilege’ was in clear contrast to the deprivation of rights being forced upon people seeking asylum.3

Mandatory detention in Australia was introduced in 1992 as a policy to incarcerate people arriving by boat in order to seek asylum. Whilst the federal policy was initially brought in by the then Labor Government led by Paul Keating, it has historically received bipartisan support from both Labor and Liberal political parties. In order to detain those asylum

1 As an activist I first engaged with asylum seekers’ rights through my association with what became known as the Woomera Breakout, a protest over the Easter period in 2002 which resulted in a number of detainees escaping. The film Through the wire (2003) provides an audiovisual account of this event.

2 The phrase ‘people seeking asylum’ is the term considered appropriate by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC). ‘Asylum seekers’ is perhaps the more usual terminology used within public discourse and indeed part of the ASRC’s title. I will use both terms interchangeably in relation to the meaning I am trying to convey. Including the word ‘people’ ensures a sense of the asylum seeker as ‘person’. However, at times within this thesis it is the very biopolitical nature of government rhetoric that I am trying to critically convey. As such, at times I use the word ‘detainee’ in reference to those asylum seekers held in detention.

3 When I consider my own citizen privilege, I am referring to such things as: a right to legal representation, access to health and social services, freedom of movement and the basic understanding that I do not fear deportation from Australia. I note, however, that the idea of citizen privilege is not homogenous as the phrase may suggest. It is distributed through the inequality inherent in the power structures of Western neoliberal democracies and thus rights are not awarded ‘equally’ to all identities at all times. I discuss the hierarchical distribution of equality within democratic neoliberal capitalist states in Chapter Two.

seekers arriving by boat, Immigration Detention Centres4 were set up in remote locations. They were designed as prisons, were managed by private security companies and were constructed in spaces such as the harsh Australian desert. Whilst I discuss the conditions of incarceration throughout this thesis, it is important to note here that the policies of mandatory detention of successive Australian governments have ensured people seeking asylum are locked away in remote or heavily secured facilities, with their access to the social, political and public sphere of Australia largely denied.

The conditions of Immigration Detention Centres and the policy of mandatory detention of people seeking asylum have caused detainees extreme distress. As such, there have been numerous reports of detainees self-harming their bodies as a form of embodied protest during the early part of this century. I use the phrase ‘self-harm’ throughout my thesis to describe acts of harm or injury enacted upon one’s own body. This phrase has been utilised by the Australian media and government documentation when reporting acts of harm or injury against the self by detainees in Immigration Detention Centres. My focus in this thesis is on self-harm within the immigration detention environment and within the context of performance art. I acknowledge the complex conceptual terrain of self-harm in a political context. Acts ranging from cutting, self-immolation, drinking of toxic fluids to burning and hunger striking move between being modes of embodied protest, expressions of agency and desperate acts to reclaim the self and the body from a life made impossible to live. My intention within this thesis is not to provide an analysis of self-harm in and of itself.

4 I use the phrase ‘Immigration Detention Centres’ throughout this thesis with reference to detention centres specifically designed to house and process ‘suspected unauthorised arrivals’. People seeking asylum can be held within these centres regardless of mode of arrival, along with other non-citizens who have overstayed visas etc. Various terms have been used such as Immigration Reception and Processing Centre or Regional Processing Centre; however, I use Immigration Detention Centre as it is common, current and generally understood as the state-managed institutions which detain and process people seeking asylum. Further, I capitalise the words to show my understanding of this as a concept that is more than just a series of locations where asylum seekers are detained. Within the Australian context it has become synonymous with the consistent acts of governments that seek to exclude people seeking asylum from the polis. Within this thesis, Immigration Detention Centres represent a space where government policies of exclusion are conceptual, ideological and material.

My understanding of the meaning of this phrase is located within the context of embodied protest, as well as psychiatric discourse.5 The research contexts of self-harm as embodied protest, self-harm as an act of desperation and distress, and self-harm within performance art each contain specificities. These contextual separations in no way exclude the possibility of them crossing over both conceptually and literally, and discussion of these nuances takes place throughout this thesis.

Protests involving self-harm such as the sewing of lips and hunger striking were taking place in multiple Immigration Detention Centres including the Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre (Woomera IRPC) between 2001 and 2003.6 The potential power of the protests by asylum seekers was, however, routinely censored and shut down by government policies of censorship and restricted access to Immigration Detention Centres. The Australian government has heavily restricted and censored media access to asylum seekers in detention (Australian Human Rights Commission 2001; Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008). News reports pertaining to conditions in the detention centres come primarily through official government channels. Journalists have to rely on the government agency responsible for detaining and managing the bodies and lives of asylum seekers for a version of events in order to report on disturbances occurring inside detention centres (Leach 2003; Manne & Corlett 2004; Mares 2002; Marr & Wilkinson 2003). I discuss the details of this censorship in Chapter Five; however, it is important to note here that activists both within and outside Australian Immigration Detention Centres have consistently challenged this censorship by leaking information where, when and through any available means possible.7

5 There is significant psychiatric discourse surrounding self-harm which explores such actions as a mode of embodied communication, a coping strategy for feelings of distress, an expression of feelings from a space of the unspeakable and a correlation between trauma and self-harm (Adshead 1997, 2010; Kruger 2003; Motz 2010). This understanding informs my use of the phrase without discounting the political context of self-harm as protest which is a central tenet of my thesis.

6 Whilst self-harm within this context has existed outside of this period and this specific Immigration Detention Centre, 2001 to 2003 is the chosen study period as discussed in the Methodology section of this chapter.

7 Abdul Aziz is a contemporary example of a detainee held on Manus Island who has leaked information through mobile phones smuggled into the compounds. Using WhatsApp, Aziz communicated with Australian-based journalist Michael Green (2017) discussing life inside the prison, making up the podcast The messenger. Such resistance has been consistent from within the walls of Immigration Detention Centres.

The ‘ungrievable’ life is a concept developed by Judith Butler that resonates with my understanding of what I consider to be the punitive policies which manage the lives of people seeking asylum in Australia. When writing with regards to the framing of lives, Butler has developed and theorised the concept of ‘grievability’ to denote the level of recognition that is awarded to one’s life within the polis. She outlines that ‘grievability is a presupposition for a life that matters’ (Butler 2009, pp. 14–15), reserving the condition of being ‘ungrievable’ for lives that are seen as being unable to flourish within the political sphere. My deep concern for the plight of people seeking asylum aligns with her theoretical perspective in Frames of war: when is life grievable? I wondered how one can respond from the complex space of being an Australian citizen to the horror of the Australian immigration detention system, a system of political cruelty which one feels bound to and complicit in. Butler’s concept of grievability, which speaks in relation to visibility within the polis, became a point to begin thinking through the social and political space which ‘shuts down’ and ‘hides’ detained asylum seekers in Australia. The policies of mandatory detention, when considered as a mechanism of rendering asylum seekers invisible, stood out in relation to the concept of ‘citizen privilege’ which is operative as a social discourse, creating an ‘us and them’ dynamic. Whilst as a discourse it seeks to remain uncontested or unquestioned by those who benefit from it, I have been driven to question and contest such a position through my research.

My own art practice sits within the genre of performance art and through my work I seek to explore a personal politics of my body and trauma.8 This has informed my interest in self- harm as a focal point of this thesis. I consider performance art as a practice where the complexity of the personal and political space of the self can be interrogated, on, through and with the body. As an extension of this, I am drawn to other artists’ who work with their own bodies to explore trauma and moments of suffering, specifically, artists who try to expose suffering experienced by other people, such as those rendered invisible, voiceless or indeed ungrievable by the state. It is the distinctive space of performance art as a vehicle to explore the politics of another’s suffering that my thesis seeks to consider in depth. This concern is critically animated by consideration of how those who are positioned as citizens

8 Examples of my own artistic practice can be found at www.lizzilgay.com.

address the politics of the suffering of others who are excluded from this space. Thus, questioning the ethics of representation by artists becomes central, given that the suffering they seek to represent is not their ‘own’. This is especially salient when critiqued within discursive spaces which focus on and celebrate the work of the artist without necessarily foregrounding the politics behind the art.

My thesis explores the strategies of mandatory detention employed by the Australian government, which I consider attempts to render people seeking asylum invisible within the polis.9 This analysis occurs alongside my critique of the aesthetics of self-harm by a performance artist who is not an asylum seeker, yet felt compelled to speak out at the injustice affecting others. It is from this starting point that I explicate and evaluate the concept of the political in a series of works artist Mike Parr created between 2001 and 2003. His works were made in response to protests by asylum seekers incarcerated in Australian Immigration Detention Centres during this time. Parr claimed these works were made in solidarity with people seeking asylum in Australia with a view to increasing the visibility of their suffering within public discourse (Parr 2008). My reading of his works addresses issues of invisibility and considers how he questions his own position of privilege in relation to this. I critically locate the political implications of his works beyond the confines of art discourse and argue that the selected works call into question issues of complicity in relation to the citizen. I consider how the works grapple with ideas of Australian national identity and its reliance on the exclusion of a racialised other. The intersection where the politics of art and activism can be interrogated is the space my thesis seeks to explore.

The political status of performance art as a ‘form’ within the artworld and its capacity to engage in an intersubjectivity which disrupts normative specatatorial practices have had significant focus from within academia.10 My research looks to go further by investigating

9 It is important to acknowledge that whilst I work with the premise that there is an overarching social dynamic of asylum seekers as having no space to speak and to be heard, asylum seekers have, through acts of resistance, created exceptions to this. The works of Behrouz Boochani, Abdul Aziz Muhamat and Eaten Fish are examples of detainees who have smuggled stories and images out of detention and into the public sphere. Activist and writer Janet Galbraith is an example of an non–asylum seeker who has worked in partnership with detainees in the project Writing through fences which publishes detainees’ writing and art.

10 See Jones 1997, 1998, 2009, 2010; Jones & Heathfield 2012; Marsh 2014; Selz & Stiles 2012; Vergine 2000.

the particular dynamic of self-harm in performance art and its specificity as an aesthetic action made as a political statement in relation to the suffering of another person. Within my research, the possibility of performance art being political is contingent on its relation to the political ‘issues’ it makes reference to. There is always a possibility when positioning an artist or their work within discursive formations, such as curatorial spaces or academia, that the specificity of the political element of the work becomes subsumed by the discourse surrounding the artist and their oeuvre. My research seeks to subvert this possibility. It focuses on the political interrelation between the artwork of Parr and the politics it pertains to, whilst ensuring my analysis of his work remains grounded and considered in relation to the protests by people seeking asylum from inside Immigration Detention Centres.

I discuss at length the body and the politics of performance art as a form in Chapter Three. I note that Parr’s work is encompassed (although not exhaustively) by already existing theoretical discourses of the body in performance art. My contribution is to go beyond this discourse in order to consider how his aesthetic practice of self-harm is positioned in relation to the embodied protests of asylum seekers. This focus on the politics of self-harm is an important contribution to the field of performance studies, as it speaks to the body as a site of resistance both from a performance art perspective but also from the space of non- art-based activism. I consider the actions of self-harm by asylum seekers to be a direct call for recognition and the political subjectivity they have been denied. Parr’s self-harm as performance art conversely has acted as a symbol of support for the embodied protests by asylum seekers. Whilst my focus is specifically on Parr and people seeking asylum in Australia, there are implications within the research for thinking about political art and the aesthetic use of self-harm more broadly.

1.1 Background of Study As a method of evaluating and contextualising my research, where the body becomes a site of political contestation in both protest and performance art, I consider how the value assigned to one’s life within the polis is differentially applied. The value of life awarded to the citizen in comparison to that of a person seeking asylum is a key site of critical investigation within my research. I have constructed my analysis through investigation of three potential sites where political contestation takes place on and through the body: the

asylum seeker in detention; the performance artist with citizen privilege; and the asylum seeker or refugee living in the community. Each space of politics intersects with the others, bringing specific questions of agency to consideration of how certain bodies are located within the polis with regards to their social value or function. By focusing on the relationship between art and politics, my thesis considers how these three forms of practice intersect, to expand the conversation regarding the role of art and activism in contemporary political debates.

People seeking asylum in Australia The construction of asylum seekers as a ‘threat’ to Australian security has been set in a haze of racist nationalist rhetoric and used by successive governments as part of the articulation of an Australian national identity.11 The policies created to manage the lives of people seeking asylum have resulted in their exclusion from the Australian polis by indefinite detention. Asylum seekers have been subject to harsh living conditions since the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992 with bipartisan support then and now. This has consistently raised concern from the international community, which questions whether the Australian government is violating international human rights protocols through its policies (Leach 2003; Manne & Corlett 2004; Mares 2002; Marr & Wilkinson 2003).

My study focuses on people who were detained in Immigration Detention Centres between 2001 and 2003, with specific attention to those detained at the Woomera IRPC in the remote South Australian desert. As I discuss within the thesis, Woomera IRPC was a site of significant and ongoing protests, and in ways it became symbolic of the fight against mandatory detention. My research focuses on those people who seek asylum in Australia by boat and face mandatory detention. Whilst there are other modes of arrival such as by plane, Australian politicians and the media have given significant attention to people

11 Whilst other discourses also surround the status of asylum seekers in Australia, this form of rhetoric is imbricated in various government policies, government documents and news media discourses. I discuss this in Chapter Five with reference to specific key authors including: Burnside 2008; Hage 2000; Leach 2003; Madigan 2002; Manne & Corlett 2004; Mares 2002; Marr & Wilkinson 2003; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Perera 2002 & 2007; and Stratton 2003.

seeking asylum who attempt to arrive by boat.12 During the study period of 2001 to 2003 there were numerous onshore Immigration Detention Centres including Baxter in South Australia, Curtin and Port Hedland in Western Australia, Villawood in New South Wales, Maribyrnong in Victoria and others. Nauru (a Micronesian island nation), Manus Island (part of Papua New Guinea) and Christmas Island (an Australian territory) also had operating Immigration Detention Centres during this time, although the one on Christmas Island has since been closed down. Whilst there was significant unrest in onshore Immigration Detention Centres during the study period, this has indeed changed, with offshore Immigration Detention Centres in Manus and Nauru becoming the focal point of contemporary political debates about the detention and treatment of asylum seekers. Thus, whilst this thesis addresses government policies from the first decade of the twenty-first century, I note that conditions for asylum seekers have not improved, as government policies have become even more punitive.

It has been through ongoing policy shifts by successive governments that people seeking asylum are now removed from Australian territory and held in offshore detention. Centres mentioned above such as Nauru or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea incarcerate detainees in tents with little access to basic services such as adequate medical support. Housing detainees offshore was introduced as policy with bipartisan support in 2001 and was initially named the ‘Pacific Solution’ (Phillips 2012). There has since been extreme unrest within the offshore detention centres, with numerous reports of violence within the centres including incidents such as the death of inmate Reza Berati on Manus Island on 17 February 2014.13 The political landscape of offshore detention has been both complex and

12 Under section 189 of the Migration Act 1958 any person in Australia without a valid visa must be detained and placed in immigration detention. This in enacted in various ways through policies which are considered within this thesis. Asylum seekers attempting to arrive by boat are subject to mandatory indefinite detention. Arrival by plane, where asylum is sought at border control, or where a visa is considered invalid also results in mandatory indefinite detention. When asylum is sought whilst in Australia on a valid visa, then most likely a bridging visa is issued until the claim is processed (bridging visas generally reflect the conditions of the original visa in terms of work rights, access to health care etc). However, no form of claim precludes the option of detention pending variables in each case (ASIO intel etc) (Asylum Seeker Resource Centre 2019; Australian Human Rights Commission 2016).

13 It was alleged that he fell off some stairs and was beaten by guards until he died. Whilst certain individuals were charged with murder, issues of systemic violence within detention centres and the state-sanctioned violence encouraged by current policies of offshore detention should not, in my view, be negated (Blackwell 2014; Tlozek 2016). I include Berati here to name and acknowledge the suffering of people seeking asylum and

unstable as Australia asserts its presence in the Pacific through the outsourcing of immigration detention. This has been of significant concern internationally from rights- based organisations.

There are detainees on Nauru and Manus in particular who have recently reacted by consistently protesting against their conditions. Whilst not all detainees are involved, some have actively been creating a space where they seek to speak and be heard within the Australian polis. Behrouz Boochani has worked to give a voice to his own experiences, and those of other detainees, from within Manus prison. Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer and activist who was detained on Manus from 2013 to 2019 for seeking asylum in Australia. He smuggled out articles outlining the harsh nature of inmates’ treatment.14 He is an example of the enactment of agency by stateless people who are indefinitely detained in Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Similarly, Abdul Aziz has been able to have his voice heard outside the Manus prison where he was detained. Aziz, a refugee from Darfur, was able to communicate with Australian journalist Michael Green via WhatsApp and their discussion became part of a podcast series, The messenger (2017). Another asylum seeker imprisoned on Manus named Ali Dorani has become known as ‘Eaten Fish’. As Eaten Fish he has created cartoons about his life in detention between 2013 and 2017. His cartoons were published in publications such as the Washington Post until 2016, when he was released to gain asylum in a Nordic country (Cavna 2016). These three asylum seekers portray the potential for activism within and the refusal to accept being made invisible by the immigration detention system. Whilst my research focus here is on the events in Woomera IRPC in the early part of this century, the continuing resistance from within Immigration

the state’s removal of their political subjectivity. Berati’s was not the only death. According to the Australian border deaths database managed by Monash University, between the years 2000 and 2019 there have been approximately 57 recorded deaths in Immigration Detention Centres both on and offshore. This number does not include the other 1967 deaths recorded by the Australian Border force which include: drownings during interdiction at sea, deaths of asylum seekers in the Australian community and deaths whilst in other forms of custody such as prison (Border Crossing Observatory 2019).

14 Boochani with Omid Tofighian as his translator published a book of his experience on Manus titled No Friend but the mountains: writing from Manus Prison (Boochani & Tofighian 2018). Boochani has consistently worked to give a voice to those asylum seekers detained in offshore Immigration Detention Centres and has been published in The Guardian newspaper. Boochani is currently in New Zealand, where he remains stateless.

Detention Centres by asylum seekers is crucial to the discussion of enacting politics from within a space excluded from the polis.

Mike Parr My thesis is focused on a selection of Parr’s works to allow for a close reading of the works and their relation to asylum seeker activism and the Australian polis. I critically locate the political implications of his works beyond the confines of art discourse and argue that the selected works call into question issues of complicity in relation to the citizen. I analyse how the works grapple with ideas of Australian national identity and its reliance on the exclusion of a racialised other. These works by Parr provide an intersection where the politics of art and activism can be interrogated, and it is this space my thesis explores.

Parr’s performance art works which I address within this thesis, were made over ten years prior to the death of Berati and the publications of Boochani, Aziz and Eaten Fish. Between 2001 and 2003 protests were occurring in the Woomera IRPC, with documented incidents of self-harm including lip-sewing and hunger strikes. It was these events which Parr’s selected works were a response to. Parr used his own body to speak to the political situation of people seeking asylum in detention who were self-harming as an act of protest and desperation. Parr considered the Australian response as a host nation to people seeking asylum as cruel and, in his own words, he intended ‘to use the language of my “body art” to make the strongest possible statement in support of the detainees’ (Parr 2008). Whilst relevant at the time he produced them, they continue to hold significance in a contemporary setting.

Parr’s body of work spans from 1971 to today and throughout this time he has consistently placed the body of the artist as a central subject and medium in his work, whilst engaging in self-harm as part of his aesthetic practice. His performance art was part of the 1970s emergence of body art, which as a form saw the body of the artist become the site of the art. Whilst Parr is an interdisciplinary artist utilising print, video and other mediums to create works for exhibition, he is renowned for his performance art, which forms a key element of his oeuvre. During the study period, other artists were making artworks in relation to Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum, notably Deborah Kelly, who

projected images as protests onto public buildings and boats in Sydney and Canberra (Dean 2002). Also, Mickie Quick populated Perth streets with Refugee Island signs, creating public works as protest (Dean 2002). Neither of these artists specifically works with their own bodies as the site of their art. Jill Orr, however, a renowned Australian performance artist, produced two works during the period which held reference to asylum seekers. Ash (2004) and From the sea (2003) were performative meditations on place and belonging, with subtle references to war and the dispossession of Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers who were arriving by boat (Orr 2019).

Parr, however, is a key focus within my research due to the following factors: firstly, he is an Australian artist who engages his body in extreme actions of self-harm and self-deprivation as a mode of artistic practice. Secondly, he carefully documents and re-exhibits this documentation as new work and, thirdly, he has publicly articulated the political intention behind his works in relation to people seeking asylum. Whilst his desire to speak to the plight of people seeking asylum is not exceptional in and of itself, I look to his work due to his own acts of self-harm, which were made as a symbolic gesture towards detainees’ acts of self-harm. As a concept self-harm speaks deeply to the body as a site of agency and resistance, it is the body that I see as being what one has left when all else has been taken away. Thus, I consider it becomes a crucial site of political contestation.

I have selected three specific performance art installations created and executed by Parr to analyse: Water from the mouth (2001), Close the concentration camps (2002) and Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) (2003). These works were made between 2001 and 2003 in alignment with the study period of detainee protests within Woomera IRPC. Whilst Parr was involved in other activities during this time such as visual art exhibitions, I have chosen these artworks as each one specifically addresses the politics of the indefinite detention of asylum seekers in Australia. Importantly, they are also artworks where Parr engages in self-harm and deprivation of his body.

1.2 Chapter Outline My research takes an interdisciplinary approach and draws on the fields of philosophy, art history and performance studies. I utilise the concepts of biopolitics and governmentality to frame my understanding of Australian immigration policy. I further consider how acts of resistance within Australian Immigration Detention Centres can be read as acts of dissensus which disrupt social and political norms. The interdisciplinary framing of my thesis is valuable for elaborating on a complex account of the dynamics at work in the relationship between politics and performance art.

This research presented a challenge given its dual focus on the politics of asylum seekers in detention and the performance art of Parr. Structuring the thesis to reflect a sense of equality between the research subjects has been important to me. Thus, I begin with Rancière to ensure the ‘political’, as per his understanding, is omnipresent within my discussion. I have structured my early chapters to construct a critical framework which contextualises and foregrounds the political in relation to the activism of asylum seekers and the performance art of Parr. I also spend significant time in the body of the thesis discussing nationalism within an Australian context, as this is central to my critique of the Australian immigration detention system and also Parr’s works. It is in the final chapters that I engage in a close reading of both asylum seekers’ protests and Parr’s work through the lens of the critical framework developed earlier. Whilst the thesis addresses the history of performance art and Parr’s location within this framework, my focus has been to ensure that the artist as a concept has not been given authority over the politics they engage with. My thesis resists the dynamic of glorifying the artist by maintaining a strong focus on the politics and personhood of people seeking asylum whilst addressing Parr’s work.

Chapter Two: Art and Politics: Comparative Sites of Disruption In Chapter Two I discuss and elaborate on Jacques Rancière’s notions of consensus and dissensus. His articulation of ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ as moments of disruption within the social sphere is central to my use of these terms throughout this thesis. Rancière provides a crucial framework through which I locate the acts of self-harm by detained asylum seekers as acts of both agency and politics. I similarly utilise this understanding when discussing the political within performance art and the selected works of Parr.

I engage with Rancière’s concept of ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ not as pertaining to the functioning of the state, but as moments or events which work to reconfigure the social space through acts that create a dispute within the consensus. This chapter foregrounds this understanding of politics to imbue its meaning within the thesis as a whole. On this premise, Rancière informs my claims that protesting asylum seekers in detention are enacting dissensus as they create their own bodies as sites of contestation and disruption. Their protests challenge the rendering of their lives as invisible and question the refusal by government policy to allow an interlocutory situation between themselves and the Australian public.

Parr claims his performance artworks are political (2008). As such I ask: how do they ‘do politics’ and how are they political in terms of their relation to the polis and the distribution of the sensible? Whilst Rancière does not explicitly discuss performance art, I will depart from this limitation to argue that Parr’s work can be read in relation to the concept of ‘dissensus’. His work held the potential to disrupt the distribution of the sensible and indeed reveals the problematic relation between art and direct political action. For Rancière, an account of the relationship between art and politics must always examine how art as a form is both separated from or joined to the larger distribution of the sensible (2010, p. 140).

Chapter Three: Performance Art and Mike Parr Chapter Three provides a contextualision of performance art as a form and a genre. I locate the work of Parr within the history of performance art whilst speaking to the political and historical significance of the form. I do this primarily through the lens of performance studies. As a discipline, performance studies draws on and integrates approaches from diverse areas of scholarship including: art history, performing arts, social sciences, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, semiotics, area studies, media, popular culture theory and cultural studies (Schechner 2013, p. 3).

The body of the artist is historically central to performance art and specifically intended to challenge and disrupt art as an institution.15 I draw on the work of Amelia Jones, Anne Marsh and Christine Stiles to contextualise this field. International artists engaging in experimental works of the 1970s including Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, George Brecht, Gina Pane, Günter Brus, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, Valie Export and Vito Acconci, to name just a few, actively challenged the formalist model of analysis within arts discourse. I consider how performance studies resists formalist modes of reading artworks. As a field, it allows the specificity of performance art to occupy a contested space within arts discourse and this is central to my discussion. I further address the issue of ‘liveness’ within performance art research, exploring the role of documentation and the implications that knowledge of ‘the live’ may have on future iterations and readings of the work.

Parr’s role as a documented Australian performance artist is also considered in this chapter. Importantly to my thesis, he has made many public statements about his artistic intentions, engaged in interviews about his work and life as an artist, and self-published a monograph.16 Parr has been documented at a local level (although not exhaustively) by art scholars whose focus is on Australian performance artists. To some extent, however, I have found literature pertaining to the history and politics of performance art in Australia to be somewhat limited. Key theorists such as David Bromfield, Edward Scheer and Russell Storer do offer valuable insights into the performance art of Parr17 but, while they do not ignore his political impulse or intentions, I find their analysis to be primarily focused on ideas such as

15 At times within this thesis I use phrases such as ‘art as an institution’, ‘the institution of art’ and ‘the art world’. These I use to convey the position of art within the social order or indeed art as a partition within the consensus. The use of these phrases pertains to the sense within public discourse that art is a hegemonic concept. Whilst I speak to this at points within the thesis, I note now that when I use such phrases, I am articulating the space of ‘art’ as being a combination of history, criticism, academia, commercial viability, gallery and curatorial concerns. Thus, art as a ‘world’ or ‘institution’ is in a continual, and at times self-referential, cycle to define, validate, maintain and reproduce itself as a cultural category. The artists I engage with within this thesis are those who work at times within this space, but also are antagonistic towards this space as it may be static or confining with regards to their practice.

16 My bibliography highlights many of these articles and interviews, but of specific assistance in the documentation of his work area are his self-published monograph (Parr 2008, Performances 1971–2008 / Mike Parr) and the National Gallery of Australia publication (Pitt & Butler 2016) Mike Parr: language and chaos. Both provide significant outlines of Parr’s key works and overviews of his creative life through these works.

17 Bromfield 1991; Scheer 2008, 2009, 2014; Storer 2003.

the history and subjectivity of the artist, the role of the body in space and time, and the art world’s reception of his work. My thesis looks at a specific political discourse playing out in recent history and how Parr’s performance art can be read in relation to this explicitly.

Chapter Four: Biopolitics, Bare Life, Grievability and Dissensus Key to the line of argument through my thesis is the understanding that public perception of the value of the life awarded to people seeking asylum is influenced by the government’s management of their bodies. These bodies hold lives which the Australian government detains, monitors, isolates and excludes from the polis and everyday citizen life. Such treatment enacts the denial of elements of social and political life that Australian citizens ‘expect’ to enjoy.18 In order to contextualise Australia as a host nation for people seeking asylum, I approach my analysis through a lens of biopolitics drawing on the work of Michel Foucault. Chapter Four of my thesis draws further on Butler and Giorgio Agamben to critically consider the manner in which the Australian government frames and functions the administration of the lives of asylum seekers as biopolitical. My reading of their works considers the concepts of the ‘ungrievable’ body and of ‘bare life’ as underpinning punitive government policies which perform the exclusion of stateless people from the social order.

Rancière, Butler, Agamben and Foucault provide the theoretical framework of my analysis of both the asylum seeker protests and Parr’s performance art. Whilst I acknowledge these four theorists have theoretical differences, my research finds intersections where their ideas can co-exist in order to develop a strong interdisciplinary framework. I speak with regards to their differing theoretical positions throughout the thesis to illuminate the intersections and diversions in thought, and to uncover the theoretical limitations of ‘bare life’ when considering political agency.

Chapter Five: Nationalism, Censorship and Exclusion People seeking asylum in Australia serve a political function both historically and in a contemporary setting. Australia’s immigration policies position asylum seekers as outside of

18 I use the term ‘expect’ here as I acknowledge that rights are not awarded equally to all groups of people at all times. I discuss the hierarchical distribution of equality in democratic neoliberal capitalist states in Chapter Two.

the nation and those who arrive by boat are portrayed as a specific threat to national security. Since Federation in 1901, the Australian coastline has been part of the national narrative, with ‘illegal’ immigrants who cross this line representing a disruption to cultural and national identity.19 They are portrayed as a ‘threat’ to the ‘Australian’ way of life and thus I consider the way in which the Australian national identity is reliant on the exclusion of people seeking asylum, especially those who arrive by boat.

In Chapter Five, I interrogate the element of race, which I assert cannot be ignored within the context of Australian nation-building. Drawing on Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Suvendrini Perera and Ghassan Hage, I discuss the national understanding that people seeking asylum are a security threat. This perception is rooted in systemic racism and a deep-seated anxiety toward the racialised other which is operative within the population’s multicultural makeup. Australia’s history is a white colonial history grounded in the brutal dispossession of Indigenous Australians.20 On this premise, I discuss the construction of people seeking asylum as a racialised security threat and their subsequent exclusion from the polis as central to the state-led task of nation-building. I look to issues of censorship surrounding access to Immigration Detention Centres and the news media’s portrayal of asylum seekers to consider how they are located within the bricolage of the Australian national narrative.

Chapter Six: Not the Hilton: Administrative Exclusion and Bare Life In his work Close the concentration camps (2002), Parr made the choice to include excerpts from a government report titled Not the Hilton: Immigration Detention Centres inspection report (2000). He claims he wanted to expose what he considered the bland, administrative and bureaucratic language used to describe the conditions of people living in immigration detention (2008). The report focuses on a selection of Australian Immigration Detention

19 My thesis considers asylum seekers are framed as a threat to the Australian national identity based on a range of factors. Whilst not a focus here, I do not discount nation-building strategies which have included migration and the promotion of multiculturalism as part of Australia’s history. Perhaps the discerning factor between the two is the allocation of legitimacy to each mode of arrival. The element of assimilation is similarly key to the Australian framing of a ‘positive’ experience of immigration.

20 I use the phrase ‘Indigenous Australians’ to be inclusive of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Whilst I note that Australia’s First Nations Peoples is also a relevant term in this context, I turn to Moreton-Robinson’s use of the term ‘Indigenous’ in her text The white possessive: property power and Indigenous sovereignty to guide my use. (Moreton-Robinson 2015).

Centres operating at the time, specifically their infrastructure and management. What I have found to be most interesting within the report is the deliberate omission of the voices, bodies and lives of asylum seekers incarcerated inside these prisons.

Chapter Six is thus dedicated to a critical analysis of the report and its intentional exclusion of detainees. I apply the lens of biopolitics to my analysis of the report’s intentions, language and recommended outcomes. My discussion in this chapter utilises Agamben’s concept of the state of exception to explicate how Australian Immigration Detention Centres are designed to push asylum seekers towards ‘bare life’ (although I later argue this push is not always successful). I argue that the Not the Hilton report reveals how the lives of detained asylum seekers are rendered invisible through a web of administrative, bureaucratic and government-based systems of management.

Chapter Seven: Activism and ‘the Camp’: Lip-sewing as Dissensus My thesis draws on Rancière to articulate and position ‘the political’ through his concept of dissensus. For Rancière, an essential part of any political dispute involves the very ‘politicity’ of the dispute itself (2010, p. 35). Thus, contesting of the space in relation to who can speak and be heard within the consensus is a critical precursor to the struggle for political recognition. Chapter Seven is the first of the two final analysis chapters which locate dissensus in different spaces: immigration detention and performance art. I engage with Rancière’s underlying premise that the contesting of space to speak within the polis precedes all other political concerns and becomes the central point of politics. It is this precise concern which I consider to be at the heart of the protests referred to earlier, where asylum seekers sewed their lips together and went on hunger strikes.

Chapter Seven is a close reading of the protests at Woomera IRPC over 2001–2003 where I consider the act of sewing the lips as foreclosing the possibility of speech. This symbolic act of resistance I argue is an act of agency, politics and dissensus. I speak to the notion of ‘the camp’, which Agamben has proclaimed to be the limit point of the state of exception where bare life exists. For Agamben, the camp is a space where political subjectivity is erased by the biopolitical administration of one’s life. Contra Agamben, I argue that Australian Immigration Detention Centres are an example of the camp yet also places where political

contestation is acted out. This occurs through symbolic protest by detainees such as hunger strikes and the sewing of lips, and speaks to their fight against bare life. My analysis in this chapter compounds my earlier contention that whilst Agamben’s theory of bare life is useful in understanding the politico-legal positioning of asylum seekers within a state of exception, it is Rancière who brings the possibility of political agency to the discussion.

Chapter Eight: Close the Concentration Camps: Art as Dissensus A central tenet of this thesis is to critically locate Parr as an artist who uses his body to speak in relation to those whom the government attempts to render invisible and voiceless within the polis. In Chapter Eight, I analyse the performance art of Parr, specifically Close the concentration camps (2002), through a Rancièrian framework. I analyse his work to evaluate and locate the political within it and its capacity to enact dissensus. I further interrogate the complexity of Parr as an artist who is at once privileged and protected within the art world yet chooses this very arena to speak out about injustices occurring to others.

My reading of Parr’s work explores the complexity of ‘looking’ he creates for his spectators who view his injured and bleeding body. I argue in detail that his artistic tactics locate the spectator in a space of complicity in relation to his body and by extension in relation to the asylum seekers whom his work was made in solidarity with. Expanding on my earlier discussions of nationalism, I argue that Parr uses his position as a citizen to question the Australian national narrative. My reading of his work acknowledges the limiting dynamic of his position within the gallery and the art world, whilst looking to how this specific location functions within public discourse. I consider various elements of his performance art as being a geopolitical reference point towards detainees who were hidden from the public sphere.

Chapter Eight locates both Parr and detained asylum seekers as enacting dissensus and thus politics. Whilst the spaces occupied are not the same, they are part of a broader schema and contribute to public discourse. With consideration of Rancière, I argue that it is the consistent and persistent disturbances from a multiplicity of spaces and discourses within the social sphere that challenge the perceptions ‘allowed’ within the consensus.

1.3 Rationale This research has evolved from my observation that there was a space within the field of performance studies to perform a rigorous analysis of the political position of the performance artist as potential activist within the polis. I felt a sense of urgency to research the ongoing and unrelenting policies of cruelty that successive Australian governments were enacting on people seeking asylum. Australian artists were choosing to make work pertaining to these policies and I considered it crucial to conduct an analysis of the politics behind such works, ensuring the focus was on the political as well as the artist. I felt that too often the artist was celebrated whilst the politics behind the work faded into the background. Within this research, my primary drive is to position performance art beyond the discourse of art and explore its location within contemporary political debates and the polis. Parr and his performance art on the mandatory detention of asylum seekers stand out as pertinent examples of art which speaks to the desperation created by the punitive policies of mandatory detention.

In the process of writing this thesis, I became compelled to call into question the issue of citizenship and privilege, especially when I seek to speak in relation to those who do not share certain privileges that I have. Thus, the issue of complicity in the suffering of others has become an important element which I tackle throughout this thesis. I consider how often we fail to call out our own privilege or to position ourselves clearly in relation to those we aim to support through our research and art. The process of writing words that seek to explore suffering, resistance, agency and complicity has brought into relief the complexity of my own capacity to ethically speak about others. Performance studies as an interdisciplinary discourse perhaps allows this self-interrogation within one’s own work. I engage with performance studies as a discipline as it is the most appropriate discourse for discussing performance art. However, whilst my research here is not practice-based, I consider performance studies nonetheless calls for a creative and embodied approach when thinking through and seeking to contextualise the artwork one chooses to evaluate. It asks the questions of who am ‘I’ as the researcher and writer in relation to an artwork; who is the artist; and how are they and their work situated in relation to the world around them?

As I wrote this thesis, my own complicity as a citizen of a country which enacts torture on people seeking asylum sat uncomfortably within me, especially given that I write from within academia, a space physically far away from Australia’s Immigration Detention Centres. However, I felt that to do nothing is a passive acceptance of this complicity. My position is one of an educated white woman and I am located within the consensus within this frame. I live on the unceded sovereign lands of Indigenous Australians and perhaps ‘knowing’ and stating who I am means something. The feeling of complicity is so deeply embedded in my sense of self that I am reminded of performance art as a space where complex elements can be interrogated, on, through and with the body.

My rationale to write was in order to contribute to the conceptual understanding of the artist’s capacity to speak politically within public discourse. As an activist with past involvement in the lives of some people who sought asylum in Australia, I have looked to uncover the politics being created by the protests of the people who ‘inspired’ Parr’s performance art which this thesis analyses.

1.4 Methodology When I first embarked on my research, I intended to do a news media analysis to uncover what I perceived as a lack of images representing asylum seekers in detention during the 2001–2003 study period. My intention was to analyse this in relation to the performance art of Parr and his capacity to create a visual metaphor of the lip-sewing occurring in Immigration Detention Centres. As discussed, this period was a time of major unrest in the detention centres, where many incidents of self-harm were occurring (Australian Human Rights Commission 2001; Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008; Mares 2002). As I began a review of pertinent literature and an initial scan of archived news images of asylum seekers, I found that creating a data set of media was not necessary for the purpose of this thesis. Firstly, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) documentation clearly outlined the conditions under which journalists could enter detention centres and this demonstrated the inability of the media to access asylum seekers held in detention for their

stories or images.21 Secondly, as evidenced in Chapter Five of my thesis, there is sufficient scholarship outlining the restrictions placed on media access to asylum seekers in detention during the study period.22 Finally, as my own initial survey of news media revealed, I was essentially looking for something that wasn’t there: images of asylum seekers who had self- harmed as protest whilst in detention. I was searching for something that was known and referred to as being absent or marginal from public records. This exclusion proved important and as such my method of analysis needed to shift.

In light of this, I refocused my research to create a critical framework to consider three forms or sites of potential activism: the asylum seeker in detention; the asylum seeker/refugee living in the community; and the performance artist. Thus, my research has drawn on the work of Rancière, Foucault, Butler and Agamben to create a framework through which to locate the political in the protests of asylum seekers and its relation to the performance art of Parr. I have sought to analyse asylum seekers’ position within the polis through documents available in the public domain. The availability of documents in the public domain is central to this research given its focus on censorship, public discourse and the Australian polis.

Central to my research are the protests by asylum seekers in Woomera IRPC over 2001– 2003 and the performance art Parr created during this period. My study is located within multiple fields or discourses in order to allow for a complex reading of the political within the three spaces of activism mentioned above.

21 The Australian Immigration Department was known as the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) from 1996 until November 2001, when the name was changed to the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA). I use the acronyms according to the period they apply or when speaking generally use Australian Immigration Department (Mares 2002, p. xv). It was changed again in 2007 to the Department of Immigration and Border Control, and then again to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, which I read as a discursive shift.

22 Key texts used to develop my understanding of the censorship surrounding Immigration Detention Centres are: Hudson 2002; Lusher & Haslam 2007; Manne & Corrlett 2004; Mares 2002; and Marr & Wilkinson 2003.

Key qualitative methodologies central to my research are: i. The intersecting use of the philosophical concepts of biopolitics, governmentality and dissensus as a discursive space from which to interrogate and contextualise the political position of people seeking asylum in Australia and their protest actions in relation to the polis ii. The intersecting use of the academic discourses of performance studies, art theory and philosophy as a discursive space from which to understand Parr’s oeuvre and his performance art created in response to asylum seekers’ protests iii. Collation, analysis and critical contextualisation of archived and existing documents pertaining to Woomera IRPC incidents iv. Collation, close textual reading and critical contextualisation of archived images, artefacts, interviews, published texts and reviews of Parr’s work.

Because of the centrality of aesthetics in relation to art and protest actions performed on the body, textual analysis is the central methodological approach utilised in this thesis.

1.5 Research Contribution This thesis contributes to the fields of performance studies and the theoretical humanities by contending that art as politics can add to the voices seeking to create a space for the politically silenced to speak and to be heard. However, this capacity of art is contingent on the direct political actions of those who are fighting for political recognition within the polis.

Unique to this research is my reading of Parr’s performance art made in direct relation to the actions of people seeking asylum whom he claims ‘solidarity’ with. Developing a critical framework drawn from Butler, Agamben and Rancière locates this thesis in a space which diverges from the normative methods of analysing performance art. Much of the current theorising of performance art focuses on the artist, their body as subject within the work, the importance of place and temporality, their oeuvre and how they are located within the art world. When I began my research, I perceived a pattern in performance studies of positioning the artist and their work as central within discursive formations such as curatorial spaces or academia. I noted that this resulted in the politics the artwork was addressing becoming subsumed by the discourse of art which foregrounded the artist.

This research resists extolling the work of the artist in order to consider how Parr’s aesthetic practice of self-harm is positioned specifically in relation to the embodied protests of asylum seekers. My research seeks to maintain the integrity of the political interrelation between the work and the politics it pertains to by allowing the specific politics of direct action rendered invisible within the consensus to come to the fore. This approach is distinctive, as it departs from normative analytical practices and the labelling of artworks as political without rigorous consideration of the political the art makes claims on. Thus, this thesis challenges such practices by foregrounding the direct political action of asylum seekers and articulating in a meaningful way, that Parr’s performance art in this instance is only political due to the ongoing activism and work of people seeking asylum. His performance art is contingent on the protests of asylum seekers.

Whilst my focus is specifically on Parr and on people seeking asylum in Australia, there is space within this research for thinking about political art and the aesthetic use of self-harm more broadly. Art as political is an idea that circulates within art circles and through public discourse. Yet the political as a concept is not necessarily clearly defined within these circles. Through locating politics as specific to moments of disruption and dissensus, this thesis argues that the possibility of performance art being political is contingent on its relation to the political actions or political object it pertains to. When this perspective is taken, it becomes questionable to analyse a political artwork without interrogating the collective politics it lays claim to. Thus, my research aims to deepen the discussion of art and politics through a rigorous engagement with the political to stimulate complex understandings of art and its place in the polis.

Chapter Two: Art and Politics: Comparative Sites of Disruption

It begins when they make the invisible visible, and make what was mere noise of suffering bodies heard as a discourse concerning the common of community (Rancière 2010, p. 139).

Introduction This chapter maps out my critical engagement with Rancière’s conceptualisations of ‘politics’, ‘dissensus’, ‘consensus’ and the ‘distribution of the sensible’. These key elements in his work form the theoretical framework which underpins my analysis of the comparative sites of disruption and contestation within art and politics. I further discuss Rancière’s ‘regimes of art’ in order to elucidate my understanding of how his notion of politics can be applied when analysing art that lays claim to the political yet exists within the confines of the art world.

2.1 Rancière, the Political and Dissensus Rancière has extensively theorised the concepts of politics and the political as a disruptive moment in the perception of what is ‘normal’ within the social and cultural sphere. He does not consider politics to be that which is linked directly to the state or to government practices, thus refusing to align the notions of ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ with governmentality, state actions and administrations (Rancière 2010, pp. 34–5). Instead he reserves these concepts for acts of resistance or transgression. He presents ‘the sensible’ and ‘the distribution of the sensible’ as the normative and functioning social order, whilst ‘politics’ is a disruption of ‘the sensible’ and ‘an intervention in the visible and the sayable’ (Rancière 2010, p. 37). He claims that the social order allows for a predominant and established mode of perception of what is normal or acceptable within a human community. Thus, the sensible is norms in everyday thinking and behaviour that belong to the realm of the human senses and perception (Rancière 2010). Such norms I would suggest include the enacting of gender, sexuality, class, racial difference and any mode of being that requires one to ‘fit into’ an assigned role. The distribution of the sensible is thus a general

and implicit array of ideas that define the forms and modes of perception accepted within the social order.

With reference to the distribution of the sensible, Rancière articulates the concept of the consensus as reliant on the idea of ‘real partners’ (2010, p. 71). The consensus consists of members who are speaking subjects acting in the places and spaces designated as ‘proper’ by cultural norms. As speaking subjects, real partners maintain their position within the distribution of the sensible by speaking and acting from within the accepted partition in which they are located. Those who do not act from within their accepted position are considered ‘surplus’ subjects and the consensus seeks to expel such subjects from itself, replacing them with real partners. For Rancière, the political subject is in fact a surplus subject. He locates the political within dissent, unlike Agamben, who locates the political within the subjectivity of the qualified citizen, as I discuss in Chapter Four. Thus, the surplus which Rancière speaks to, whilst theoretically outside of the consensus, is considered political subject when politics is attributed to the moment when those who have no part attempt to carve out a space in which to speak and be heard. ‘Political subjects are surplus subjects that inscribe the count of the uncounted as a supplement’ (Rancière 2010, p. 70).

Let me give an example to explicate Rancière’s framework. A real partner can be an individual and they can also be a social or identity group (Rancière 2010, p. 71). A person experiencing long-term homelessness and living on the streets exists outside an accepted partition within the distribution of the sensible and as such is expelled from the consensus, rendered invisible and not allotted a space to speak and be heard. Thus, in Rancière’s terms I suggest they represent a surplus subject. However, a social service group that seeks to represent this person is a real partner in the consensus as it engages in negotiations utilising accepted ‘learned expertise’ in the interest of the homeless person. Thus, those within the consensus (such as a social service worker) are considered real partners as they have an accepted partition within the consensus where they can speak and be heard. The surplus subject (here the homeless person) they represent is considered voiceless and cannot speak and be heard. They are rendered invisible within the polis.

Within this understanding of real partners, consensus reduces democracy to ‘the way of life or ethos of a society’ (Rancière 2010, p. 72, emphasis in original) and anyone who speaks outside of that ethos is not a real partner. As such, the distribution of the sensible contains both passive and active, overt and implicit, social processes which define whose voices can be heard, what spaces specific voices may occupy, whose voices are surplus and thus not able to be heard, and who has legitimised visibility. People seeking asylum, for example, are designated to occupy this surplus space within the Australian polis and are physically, socially and legally excluded from the distribution of the sensible and thus the consensus via detention. I argue throughout this thesis that people seeking asylum and being held in detention represent a limit point of social, legal and physical isolation from the Australian population. The accepted ethos within Australian society constructs asylum seekers as not real partners and thus not part of the consensus. This ethos effectively renders them invisible, as not having a voice, and thus relegates them to exist in the space of surplus subject.

Rancière’s conceptualisation of politics and the political relies on questioning the notion of equality and democracy. A liberal democracy is considered to be a distributive democracy model and is thus inherently hierarchical (May 2010, p. 4). It is dependent on a distributor (most often the state and its actors) and those who receive the distribution (the people). As Rancière claims, the social order exists ‘because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it’ (1999, p. 16). This model of distribution is contingent on a hierarchical structure. However, designating the distribution of equality to government actors performing administrative tasks disguises the fact that this distribution divides people into those who are active, those who are considered passive and those who are deemed surplus (Rancière 1999, p. 17). Those who are active, such as the administrators of state policy, members of strong corporate interest or lobby groups etc., coerce the will of the consensus to ensure an element of passivity in the majority. Thus, the majority accept their allotted partition within the consensus. By insisting on the legitimacy of place within the distribution of the sensible, the hierarchy of the consensus is maintained. Rancière’s conception of the political is based on the actions of those who disrupt these mechanisms of

power which serve to distribute democracy and equality through the partitioning of the consensus according to unequal power structures. 23

Rancière’s contention that governmentality, state actions and administrations do not occupy the space of politics ensures that politics as a concept is reserved for acts of resistance by those who seek a shift in the structures that maintain and control society. Following Rancière, I suggest that politics, if defined as dissensus and moments of disruption, is part of an ongoing democratic process which ensures rights, or a life striving to be based on real equality and visibility within the consensus. It is the ongoing negotiation of terms under which politics is staged and how subjects are formed or determined within the consensus (Hinderliter et al. 2009, p. 7). This understanding of the staging of politics and dissensus as per Rancière informs my use of phrases such as ‘political action’, ‘political art’ and ‘political activism’ as a challenge to the hierarchal democratic notion of consensus. For use within this thesis, I locate politics within this contested space, where activity that is antagonistic to the understanding of the normative social order occurs.

2.2 Rancière’s Regimes of Art Rancière offers an account of art’s relation to the distribution of the sensible and to the political through his development of three regimes of art. These three regimes do not correspond with strict temporal periods, although they may align with some key historical moments or periods. They are a series of critical points that arrange art and its relation to other practices. The regimes are intended to frame the manner in which art has been located within the ordering of the sensible to consider art’s relation to itself and also to the consensus. Rancière’s articulation of the regimes is wound through his writings on art and politics and at times is somewhat nuanced, as if to allow for shifts in understanding and perception. In this section, I give a basic outline of the three regimes, illuminating my use of

23 I suggest here that within Rancière’s terms, being active, passive and surplus may fluctuate within one person or group. Whilst someone may vote in elections, they may still be generally passive and accepting of location within the distribution of the sensible. Yet if that same person uprises with their fellow domestic workers, for example, to demand better working conditions, then they are attempting to be active within the consensus and effect change. This then leads them towards becoming surplus if the voice they are using is not one that can speak and be heard. The domestic worker’s allocated partition within the distribution of the sensible may be one of passive compliance within the hierarchical social order. Once they speak outside of this partition, they risk becoming surplus and thus from within a Rancièrian framework they are enacting politics and dissensus.

them in this thesis. I look to provide an overview of the regimes to locate the language and context through which Rancière approaches his broader discussion on politics and dissensus and how this may be applied to performance art within my thesis.

The first of the regimes, the ‘ethical regime of images’, is where the practice of art and the resulting artefacts are judged according to their direct moral and political worth. Here Rancière draws on Platonism and argues that images within this regime were considered a distraction from the task of philosophy, which was to discover the ‘eternal truth of Ideas’ (Chanter 2018, p. 85). The subordination of images to the maintenance of the common good, informed by Plato’s Republic, informs the ethical regime (Chanter 2018, p. 108). Thus, the value of art or the image becomes based on its origin, its end purpose and its social function. Given that for Plato images were only of worth when they upheld the order of ‘truth’, the key function of art within the social order was to ‘educate the citizenry in accordance with the distribution of the occupations in the community’ (Rockhill 2006, p. 86). The ethical regime of images then can be described as a regime that erases art unless it serves to maintain social cohesion and ‘the unity of the polity’ (Chanter 2018, p. 108). Thus, maintaining the unity of the polity was achieved through partitioning the social order by allocating specific bodies specific ways of being, seeing and saying within the ethical regime. A person stepping outside of an allocated role problematised the regime, as they were positioning themselves within discourses not intended for them and thus disrupting the distribution of the sensible. The communication of ideas and ‘truth’ was considered the role of philosophers and thus ‘art’ finds no place as an autonomous form.

Rancière’s second regime he terms the ‘representative regime of art’. This regime defines what can be the subject of art, what genre it should exist in and how it will be depicted within the sensible. Rancière’s representative regime of art is released from the moral and social parameters of the ethical regime servicing Plato’s good and truth. The representative regime, however, becomes a series of rules, regulations and conventions that mandate what can be represented as art, how it should be represented and who art is for (Chanter 2018, p. 86). Thus, whilst perhaps released from the morality of the ethical regime, a new form of structure develops implicit and explicit mechanisms of governing art in this regime. Rancière describes the representative regime as a ‘regime of visibility regarding the arts’

(2006, p. 22). It is not an artistic process as such, but that which renders ‘the arts’ as autonomous yet simultaneously linked to the general order of occupations and ways of doing and making (Rancière 2006, p. 22). Whilst not a movement in and of itself, this regime formalises art’s visibility and provides it with a place within the distribution of the sensible.

Rancière’s conceptualisation of the representative regime rests on the premise that what counts as appropriate is determined by conventions and rules of art established through forms of power (Chanter 2018, p. 123). Through such power structures, we perceive art as an institution with its own discourse and operating model. This positioning ensures its place as an autonomous institution within the distribution of the sensible and it is contingent on its operative model. The representative regime is where the form and style become important to a work’s capacity to be judged as art. A painting, for example, will be judged on form and labelled with a style based on how it aligns with other works. The gallery then becomes an allotted space within the consensus as part of the mechanisms which define a work as art. The representative regime works to ensure that certain rules and conventions position art and artists within a specific cultural location, which further defines a certain class of people whom art concerns. Thus, within the representative regime, those creative works which do not comply with the understanding of what makes art may be excluded from galleries, collections and museums, on the premise that these are the defined spaces for art to exist within the social order.

Finally, Rancière speaks of the ‘aesthetic regime’ as that which seeks to overturn or contest the rules and regulations defining what is art and how it should exist. The aesthetic regime sees the dissolution of determinate connections between artistic causes, artworks and spectatorial effects (Tanke 2011, p. 66). It allows artists and critics to ‘reinterpret what makes art and what art makes’ and in doing so it questions the representative regime’s definition and containment of art as a form and location (Rancière 2006, p. 25). Art in this regime is thus perceived not as an autonomous institution per se, but as part of the greater social dynamic. Unlike the formalist modes of criticism discussed in Chapter Three, which create clear configurations by separating art from the context from which it comes, art is recognised as a contingent practice within the aesthetic regime. Thus, the aesthetic regime refuses the dislocation of art from other forms or places of collective experience (Rancière

2006, p. 26). This refusal ensures ‘the temporality specific to the aesthetic regime of the arts is a co-presence of heterogeneous temporalities’ (Rancière 2006, p. 26), allowing different perceptions of the sensible to emerge from within art. Thus, the aesthetic regime aims to abolish the hierarchical partitioning of art, including the privileging of certain forms, subjects and genres of art within the distribution of the sensible.

An example of the shifting dynamic inherent to the aesthetic regime is evident in a Guerrilla Girls poster work which directly criticised the exclusion of women artists from mainstream gallery spaces. In 1985 they pasted their first posters in the streets of Soho listing galleries where less than 10% of the artists shown were women (Tate Modern 2019b)24 (Fig. 1). The posters were based on the propaganda style of political protest advertising, which was not traditionally aligned with ‘art’. The Guerrilla Girls developed their feminist critique of the art world’s erasure of women artists through their public postering activities. Eventually they became somewhat encompassed by the art world they critiqued and one can now purchase their designs as posters, coasters, tea-towels and other gallery shop paraphernalia.25 As an example, the Guerrilla Girls serve to reveal that in the aesthetic regime what can be recognised as art is not static.26 It is important to note that whilst the hierarchical structures of galleries exist and perhaps a painting by Monet is a highly prized and valued work, it is the aesthetic regime which best describes the current capacity for art to move across spaces, both in and out of the gallery. Indeed, the tension inherent in the dialogue about what art is, who it is for and how politics functions in art is a central tenet of the aesthetic regime. The critical element of the aesthetic regime is that it allows art to play out the clash of heterogeneous elements of both art and society in order to provoke a break in our perception of the sensible, thus allowing dissensus (Rancière 2009, p. 41). The main focus of political and critical art such as that of the Guerrilla Girls, for example, is perhaps to work to

24 The Tate Gallery exhibits some of the posters created by the Guerrilla Girls. The Tate also sells their posters made into products such as tea-towels in the gallery shop (Tate Modern 2019b).

25 I think here of a quote by Marsh in her book Performance ritual document, ‘capitalism can and does sell anything’ (2014, p. 24). Here she is referring to ideas and gestures, but in the case of the Guerrilla Girls the art world can even sell a critique of itself on a tea-towel.

26 Tina Chanter gives a detailed analysis of the Guerrilla Girls in her book Art, politics and Rancière: Broken Preceptions (2018).

create the possibility of this clash, ensuring that the border between art and politics is one which the artist can cross and question.

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 1 Guerrilla Girls talk back (1985)

With consideration of Rancière’s regimes of art, currently the art world straddles the aesthetic regime on the premise that it still draws on specific qualities of the previous regimes. This highlights why Rancière’s regimes do not specifically pertain to historical periods or art movements. However, within the current setting of art there is a tension between the desired critical clash of the aesthetic regime and the institutionalisation of art which ensures its autonomous partition with the distribution of the sensible. The tension of this clash arises when art that looks to enact dissensus is exhibited in a formal setting. Indeed, such a clash can be considered institutionalised and its criticality risks being negated or dulled by its location in the gallery or museum when it is ‘held up’ as art. The gathering of heterogeneous works and exhibiting of them as ‘lumped together’ create art that is no longer located in a space which encourages the critical clash as it becomes a collection of works (Rancière 2009, p. 46). In this instance, such works become part of the consensus, that is, the configuration of visibility within the gallery or museum which creates its own exclusive discourse in order to be recognised as ‘art’. This collective situation risks objectifying the art in such a way that it no longer lends itself to dispute and thus is non- controversial within this given discourse (Rancière 2009, p. 48). Thus, I suggest at risk within art is the construction of a limiting discourse which, on the one hand, harbours the desire to enact a radicality of practice dissociated from the confines of the representative regime. On the other hand, the discourse of art risks containing the expression of that which may challenge the art world and its capacity to occupy a qualified space within the consensus.

Art which speaks to the political within the art world is contained by its own partitioning as art and contained by the gallery as concept. Thus, I question whether it is political if it cannot disrupt the sensible of both the art world and the world ‘outside’ or ‘life’. Paradoxically then, art as an institution seeks to place itself critically within the aesthetic regime; yet it is still bound by the representative regime, which acts to contain any promise of art impacting on life by the existence of art as an institution. The rules and conventions of the representative regime, however, provide visibility and a space to speak and be heard within the distribution of the sensible, allowing it to be perceived as art. The struggle for art within this central paradox is: that which allows art to exist within the aesthetic regime and thus enact critical interventions on the distribution of the sensible equally restricts this criticality. Here then art, including performance art, in order to be considered art, becomes bound by this constraining limitation on its cultural location within the distribution of the sensible. Thus, its capacity to affect lies in its escape from the art world through its audience, who become like conduits, allowing it to unpredictably enter the distribution of the sensible. Through this escape it may affect new interpretations of seeing and doing, and new promises of what is visible and sayable.

2.3 Art and Politics, Politics and Art Parr focuses on the visibility of people seeking asylum in his works Water from the mouth (2001), Close the concentration camps (2002) and Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) (2003). Whilst Parr’s performance art had a specificity to people seeking asylum in this case, he has consistently worked with issues of nationalism, kinship and ableism, as I discuss in Chapter Three. Within my detailed reading of his work in Chapter Eight, I address the idea of Parr’s performance art attempts to effect sensory perception and disrupt the distribution of the sensible from within the confines of the art world. This location of the art world, which exists as a partition within the broader distribution of the sensible, has its own set of rules and conventions, and Parr’s performance art enacts dissensus with its own specificity.

Central to Rancière’s theorising of art is art’s capacity to speak to the sensory perception of those who engage with it. He claims that within the aesthetic regime nothing is unrepresentable, nor is anything outside of language (Rancière 2007, p. 124). This quality is

a key distinction distinguishing the aesthetic regime from the representative regime. The representative regime focuses on the host of conventions concerning ‘propriety’ and what ‘can and cannot be represented, what is appropriate to represent, and what not, what can be seen and heard, and what cannot, what should be felt and what not’ (Chanter 2018, p. 86). Given Rancière does not address performance art specifically, I extend his thinking on art to consider performance art as a form that seeks to break conventions of what can and cannot be represented as art when considered within its historical context. Through its focus on the body, it further offers to open spaces for sensing and perceiving in ways which do not comply with traditional ways of understanding art or the body. Performance art pushes the boundaries of engagement by focusing on the sensory perception of the participating bodies of both artist and spectator, and by foregrounding the moment over the existence of any ‘object’. I discuss this further in Chapter Three.

Performance art as a form seeks to disrupt the consensus. Whilst it is established as a genre in a contemporary sense, central to performance art historically was the dismantling of the formalist tropes of art criticism. Performance art challenged definitions of ‘good’ art and the assumption of the neutrality of spectatorship by resisting representative constraints and creating art outside defined modes of production and presentation. Performance art was not bound to a gallery or museum (although not excluded from them either), often occurring in public space.27 As a form, performance art was historically free of charge to attend, ephemeral through being ‘live’ (aside of documentation, as I discuss in Chapter Three) and not for sale. When enacted within a gallery space or a museum, performance art may attempt to disrupt the understanding of this space as a place embodying the assumptions of the representative regime. Through working against social norms, performance art has the capacity to challenge the rules and conventions of the art world,

27 Public art such as that which is performed on the ‘street’ engages in this notion of equality to some extent, although such works are not necessarily within the performance art genre. Performance art in the gallery is not free of the confines of the representative regime, as I address in Chapter Three. Similarly, Parr’s work is problematic given its positioning within a gallery or on a university campus. Whilst ‘free of charge’ such spaces are imbricated with rules and conventions of who can and cannot attend, and who ‘feels’ they have the capacity to be present in that defined space.

whilst simultaneously disrupting the distribution of the sensible, through its drive to insert alternate perceptions into the social order.

Primarily performance art that speaks to the political can, and at times does, enact dissensus. Given it has been performed in, on and through many sites, both inside and outside of the gallery space, it is worth considering performance art’s potential reach beyond the discourse of art. Art is an outcome of a complex set of relationships which exist within a discourse perceiving certain objects or creative works as art. When considering the relationship between art and politics, one needs to examine the ways in which art is thought to be separated from, or joined to, the larger distribution of the sensible (Tanke 2011, p. 75). Thus, the work of Parr is recognised as belonging to the cultural institution of art and, as such, takes its proper place within the distribution of the sensible where it is partitioned as art. Whilst art as an institution forms part of the broader structure of, in this case, the Global North,28 to some extent divergent world views within the institution are at risk of being contained within art’s own critical discourse. As such, most activities that are categorised as art I do not consider create dissensus within the boundaries of the art world as they comply with assumed conventions and ways of thinking. It is their seepage from art discourse into public discourse which I consider holds the promise of a reconfiguration of perception. Such seepage has the unpredictable potential to disrupt the distribution of the sensible. Here art can enact politics within public discourse by adding to the plurality of voices that speak to the democratic potential of aesthetics and politics.

Art and activism As I have discussed, art can be seen to contain new propositions of politics and democracy in a Rancièrian sense and effect the sensible in subtle ways. Whilst art may not always have

28 I use the term ‘Global North’ to define a concept, not a place per se. The terms considers those nations (including but not limited to those in North America, Western Europe and ‘developed’ parts of Asia, Australia and New Zealand) which have significant economic and political investment in what can be called the Global South. The Global South is similarly a collective term which conceptually includes continents with large populations such as Africa, Central and Latin America, and most of Asia. Members of the Global South are more likely to have had significant investment from businesses of the Global North providing raw materials, manufactured goods and outsourced business and consumer services from multinational enterprises. There is a dynamic of perceived economic and political power which maintains the Global North as a dominant global force. Gallas, Herr, Hoffer and Scherrer’s (2016) Combating inequality: the Global North and South offers an in- depth account of the complexities of this global power dynamic.

a direct or quantitative effect on government policy, for example, I would not discount its potential to offer interventions into the sensible. For Rancière, art challenges what is sensible, thinkable and possible on the condition that it not surrender its identity as art (2010). He argues that integral to art within the aesthetic regime is its capacity to challenge the sensible whilst maintaining its identity as art (Rancière 2010, p. 137). Thus, for Rancière it is important that art does not occupy the exact space of political activism, as it would then cease to be art as such. I deploy the term political activism here as that which directly disrupts and challenges the hierarchal democratic notion of consensus. Thus, the performance art of Parr is able to engage in public discourse but specifically as art. It is through the status as art that his work is able to affect perceptions within the distribution of the sensible without crossing over to direct political activism. A point of tension I locate here however, and a departure from Rancière, is that whilst art such as Parr’s is not political activism per se, it is a ‘call’ to the political and a call to activism.

Art is able to enact politics though its capacity to move or escape the art world as a discourse. As an institution or as an ‘operative model’ art can be considered porous and unable to contain all that it deems art (Chanter 2018, p. 97). That is, as an institution with its own partition within the distribution of the sensible, it risks becoming a self-contained discourse. Through its mode of exclusive operation in galleries and spaces defined as ‘being for art’ it may fail to disrupt the sensible. Perhaps then art’s potential to disrupt the distribution of the sensible is contingent on its boundaries being contested and revealed as porous. This very porousity indeed provides a tension, ensuring the art world remains unstably located within the distribution of the sensible and fails to consistently contain art. Thus, art which has political intentions becomes locked in a paradoxical relation; however, as Rancière claims, the paradoxical relation between art and politics is itself one of dissensus (2010, p. 140). This paradox can be literally played out when artists take to the streets with ‘art-based’ protest.

For Rancière, dissensus exists in two forms which affect the distribution of the sensible: artistic and political. At times it can be difficult to find clarity on how dissensus operates differentially within the spheres of art and politics within Rancière’s discussion. However, the key distinction I identify is that dissensus as politics invents new subjects and political

subjectivity by actively and specifically breaking with the order imposed by the police (Rancière 2010, p. 139).29 The political activists who take to the streets to protest, for example, create dissensus by seeking to give a voice to something which is actively excluded from the consensus. During specific protests, people who have no partition to speak and be heard or visibility within the consensus may demand some form of recognition by disrupting the usual social order; this is dissensus as politics. Dissensus as art on the other hand ‘lies in the practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience’ (Rancière 2010, p. 140). Art in the aesthetic regime enacts dissensus by offering different perceptions and new visibilities within the distribution of the sensible, but not by direct activism specifically. It creates work within the confines of the art world. However, as art seeps through the porous boundaries of its own discourse, it becomes available to affect the perception of the policed divisions of the social order.

I turn now to Pussy Riot, a contemporary Russian feminist, punk group of activist artists to provide a salient example of how contra Rancière, political art can simultaneously be read as political activism. Famously arrested for storming and singing inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in March 2012, Pussy Riot members Mari Alyokhina, Nadya Toloknnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich were charged with ‘disorderly conduct, committed with the purpose of inciting religious hatred by a group of persons in an intentional conspiracy’ (Hewitt 2017). They were prosecuted and imprisoned for their art action. Pussy Riot first and foremost went into the streets to protest against the social order and government actions using art as their primary vehicle. Thus, unlike an artist such as Parr whose work is primarily situated within the gallery or art world, Pussy Riot actively defied the police order by creating their work in public spaces. Their imprisonment for publicly performing political art highlights the paradoxical relation between art and politics. It reveals an underlying tension within Rancière’s concept that art needs to remain

29 Rancière considers the police a force that organises ‘the reality in which bodies are distributed within the community’ (1999, pp. 28–29). Policing functions to ensure the partitioning of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ is configured by properties which are designated as ‘proper’ within the ‘consensus’ (Rancière 1999, p. 29). Policing functions to ensure the configuration and partitioning of social space maintain the aesthetics of the social order. In his text Disagreement: politics and philosophy Rancière (1999) acknowledges Foucault’s book Security, territory, population (1978) in which the police are considered to maintain the state’s visible order. The concept of ‘police’ for Foucault concerns the government’s oversight of the various aspects of a population: health, welfare, birth rates, etc. Rancière, however, focuses on policing in relation to the ‘distribution of the sensible’ as that which maintain the aesthetic order (1999, pp. 28–32).

independent from politics in order to affect the distribution of the sensible. In the case of Pussy Riot, however, it is this collision of art and politics within the consensus that succinctly demonstrates dissensus and the paradoxical relation of art and politics. Indeed, once taken to the streets, their art may struggle to be defined as ‘art’ within art discourse and this departure becomes a point of critical tension and dissensus.

Dissensus as art ‘re-frames the world of common experience’ (Rancière 2010, p. 142) and the effects of this are felt within the distribution of the sensible. Pussy Riot stand as an example that reveals this distinction as paradoxical, although it is a paradox Rancière does not wholly discount. Their actions took what can be considered art with its designated space being the gallery and inserted it into the conservative Orthodox Russian Church. They stormed the church with colourful balaclavas to perform an apparently obscenity-laced song titled ‘Punk Prayer’ which attacked the Orthodox Church’s support of President Vladimir Putin (BBC News 2013). Security descended on them very quickly and to some extent the art element of the protest became subsumed within the activist chaos, given security attempted to remove the women from the church. In terms of art, Pussy Riot were barely able to perform as church security responded quickly. However, in terms of offering a reconfiguration of the sensible, they disrupted the sanctity of the church dressed in their colourful balaclavas and prostrating themselves in the pulpit. The video of the church act is on YouTube, countless articles on the incident and the subsequent legal battles were published, and eventually the women were released from jail due to international pressure, including from Amnesty International (BBC News 2013).

Pussy Riot enacted dissensus as politics and dissensus as art; an analysis which is a challenge to Rancière’s contention that art and politics must not coalesce. (Rancière 2010, p. 140) However, as politics, they made a direct action against the police order and were arrested for that. As art, they disrupted the normative understanding of art’s location, offering a reconfiguration in the distribution of the sensible as to art’s political relation to the polis. Since ‘Punk Prayer’, Pussy Riot’s actions have become enshrined in the art world via their

inclusion in art festivals and documentaries of their work in film festivals.30 Thus, whilst they took their art to the street as a form of activism, they returned to the art wold. This temporal and spatial movement exemplifies and further challenges the central paradox of Rancière’s framework where art and politics cannot fuse. The tension and the limitations which Rancière invokes here reveal a dynamic space for the analysis of artists such as Parr, who make strong claims to the political within their work yet enact their art within the gallery.

Summary ‘The distinction between the “politics of aesthetics” and the “aesthetics of politics” is not a stable one’ (Chanter 2018, p. 118). It is this instability which makes the lip-sewing of protesting asylum seekers and the lip-sewing of the artist Parr a valuable point of comparison within my research. Both lip-sewing actions affect the distribution of the sensible as an act of signification with their similarity of ‘form’. They do so, however, in differing ways: one as political activism and one as political art.

Art does not guarantee political transformation per se within Rancière’s framework; however, art can create dissensus. “If there exists a connection between art and politics, it should be cast in terms of dissensus” (Ranciere 2010, p. 140) A disruption to the perception of that which is ‘sensible’ within the social order can occur via the seepage of ideas through the porous boundaries of the art world. Similarly, whilst the lip-sewing of asylum seekers struggled to become visible as a legitimate act of protest within government-controlled political fields, it managed to seep into the distribution of the sensible, disrupting what could and could not be visible.31 The concept of dissensus and the potential to affect what is visible and who can be heard within the consensus are key to my analysis of Parr’s work and the political actions of people seeking asylum in Australia in the final chapters of this thesis. Whilst I have engaged with Rancière here to consider the political in art and activism, it is

30 As an example, Pussy Riot were part of the Dark Mofo Arts festival in Tasmania, which I attended in 2017. They performed, their documentary was shown, and they spoke in a Q&A session discussing their art and activism (Lehman 2017). 31 It is interesting that Boochani has published articles, a book and a video from inside detention on Manus via WhatsApp. This piece of technology in this instance stands as a literal manifestation of the idea of the seepage and porosity which allows dissensus to occur (Boochani 2018; Boochani & Tofighian 2018).

necessary to locate Parr within art discourse in order to analyse his work. Next, in Chapter Three, I will contextualise performance art historically and specifically discuss Parr’s relation to the development of the genre.

Chapter Three: Performance Art and Mike Parr

When I’m working there is no ‘self’ – it’s not about me – it’s about the materiality, about the body I activate. It’s about being able to merge with the need to question certain image possibilities (Schneemann in Jones & Heathfield 2012, p. 448).

Introduction This chapter discusses performance art as a form and a genre.32 I outline specific historical moments in performance art to contextualise it in relation to artist Mike Parr. Parr was part of the emergence of the performance art genre within Australia during the 1970s and also internationally. This chapter is not intended to provide an exhaustive account of performance art but considers specific moments from the late 1950s onwards. It encompasses movements and markers within art history which I consider influential and relevant to Parr’s work as an Australian performance artist.

This chapter is divided into two sections. Section 3.1 looks at the development of performance art as a form and as a genre internationally. I discuss the intersubjective potential of the performance artist and their spectator in relation to the location of the body as the site of the artwork. In order to contextualise Parr’s work, I consider its relation to three key moments and movements in the performance art genre: Happenings, the Viennese Actionists and the Fluxus movement. These three movements within the performance art genre influenced Parr’s early performance art. Further, I explicate my understanding of the role of documentation and ‘liveness’ within the field of performance art research. As we are limited by the inability to always be ‘present’ at a live performance work, I consider how knowledge of the ‘live’ affects the perception and engagement with documentation that remains.

32 I use the terms ‘form’ and ‘genre’ in relation to performance art within this thesis to provide the following distinction. Through form, I am referring to the elements of performance art practice and how it is embodied and enacted by the artist/s. By genre, I am referring to the practice of performance art as it has become contextualised and located within art discourse and performance studies.

Section 3.2 provides an outline of themes and moments from Parr’s artistic life. I look to contextualise his history as an artist in order to ground my analysis of his more recent works made in relation to asylum seekers in detention. I outline a selection of elements and influences which I consider are important to Parr’s artistic output including: his early works; the influence of the European performance art scene on his own artistic development; his consistent questioning of the role of the spectator in relation to the artist; the inherent physicality in both his performance and non-performance works; his use of self-harm as an aesthetic value; and his works in relation to contemporary political debates. Through focusing on specific elements of the history of performance art, this chapter locates Parr as a part of the emergence of the genre both internationally and in Australia.

3.1 Performance Art Performance art has developed as a genre encompassing a specific discourse of body art which focuses on the artist’s subjectivity and social or political positioning. As a form it places the artist’s body as central to the work. The artist becomes both subject and object of the work, skewing the normative spectatorial dynamics within art. With regards to the normative roles of the spectator, I refer to the conventions of the spectator in a gallery as being conceptually removed from the work, as being able to quietly contemplate the work such as a painting or sculpture and as having the capacity to have a critical distance. Similarly, in theatre the audience will often sit away from the performance and watch from the safety of the auditorium. Performance art acts as a site of disruption towards these conventions of looking and also of the critical discourse that surrounds art.

Performance art as a form Specific to the history of performance art as a genre are both the diversity of performative actions and the intention of the artist to challenge art as an institution. Art historian RoseLee Goldberg (2011, p. 9) claims that ‘performance defies precise or easy definition beyond the simple declaration that it is live art by artists’. This quality of being difficult to define is inherent to performance art as a form, given its reliance on multiple disciplines and media for material (Goldberg 2011, p. 9). The body of the artist is the locus of the work and, as such, performance art reveals an ephemeral element of ‘liveness’ inherent in the form. Such liveness speaks to the challenges of easily defining performance art, as per Goldberg

(2011), as it embodies a fluidity distinct to the form unlike object-based art, for example. Performance art carries an unpredictability as a form and as such is contingent on its capacity to resist simplistic definition as it encourages multifarious readings.

Within performance art I locate the body as a site of personal and political tension, a site of social and cultural exploration, and ultimately a site of resistance. Similarly, Marsh (2014, p. 14) argues that performance art is fundamentally political and a site of disruption. The body as a site of both contestation and power reveals resistance against cultural or political forces outside of the art world and equally a resistance against the institution of art itself (Jones 2000, p. 22). Historically, performance art has been a site of political critique, a site of social commentary and even a site of culture jamming, as artists look to specifically interrupt normative structures of spectatorship. The focus on disrupting standard conventions of spectatorial interaction, intended to disrupt normative perceptions of social or cultural norms, allows performance art the potential to speak to contemporary politics through the body of the artist.

Jones uses the term ‘body art’ when referring to performance artists from the 1970s and she includes Parr within this schema. For Jones (1988) the emphasis on the term ‘body art’ in her writing is to highlight the implications of the body and its subjectivity as central to the artwork. She speaks of body art as a set of performative practices which, through their potential intersubjective engagement, threaten to destabilise and dislocate a stable sense of self and place, such as that which formalist critics lay claim to (Jones 1998, p. 1). It is this intersubjective possibility and destablisation which speak to my consideration of performance art as political, a site of resistance and as an example of dissensus.

Intersubjectivity Through focusing on the body as art subject and object, and the intersubjective potential of the artist/spectator relation, performance art can disrupt the traditional fields of both spectatorship and formalist art criticism. Whilst in a contemporary setting performance art has developed into a genre with certain traditions, this location of the artist as both subject and object challenges assumed ways of viewing art as a static object which the viewer gives life to. Live works of art have the capacity to create a charged and unpredictable space

between the artist and the viewer, allowing the work to become open to the possibility of an intersubjective experience. The spectator community is placed within a multisensory space and any assumption that one can ‘distantly’ observe an object of art is disrupted by the knowledge of the live.

This notion of intersubjectivity was and continues to be explored in the work of performance artists. Performance art has consistently acted to disrupt what has been established as art within art discourse. Serbian-born artist Marina Abramović says that in performance the idea is to leave behind the idea of the ‘public as voyeurs’; as a form, ‘art has to be interrupted’ (Abramović in Jones & Heathfield 2012, p. 546). Much of Abramović’s own work aims to interrupt the comfort or position of the spectator as voyeur and I consider her work political in this respect. Abramović, who has recently become popularly known as ‘the grandmother of performance art’, created many radical body artworks in Europe and later the United States during the 1970s.33 Often in collaboration with her then partner Ulay, her works focused on the body as both object and subject whilst simultaneously exploring the relation between the audience and the artist. The audience, the liveness and the presence of her body were crucial aspects to her work. In one of her key early works, Rhythm O (1974, Naples), she stood naked in the studio where the work was presented.34 Spectators were invited to select from objects on a table near her and engage directly with her body as they wished. The objects included wine, a rose, a scalpel, a feather, nails, a gun loaded with one bullet and other things. She stood for 6 hours whilst the audience used these objects on her body, at times inflicting harm towards her (Ward 2012, p. 120) (Fig. 2).

33 For example, in The Guardian in 2014 an article by Emma Brockes was published where Abramović is called the grandmother of performance art. This was a common way for the media to speak of her at this time as she came to popular attention through a number of reworkings of performance art pieces from the 1960s and 1970s, and a documentary ‘Marina Abramović: the artist is present’ was produced about her and released in 2012 (Brockes 2014).

34 The work is documented in the Tate’s web archives. Whilst the aforementioned article by Brookes states the work took place in Serbia, it in fact took place in Naples (Tate Modern 2019a).

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Fig. 2 Rhythm O (1974)

In Rhythm O such an invitation to engage with the artist’s body as both object and subject suggests a surrendering of her agency. This call to the spectator allows them to become part of performance action; how they choose to engage with her body becomes central within work. Here Abramović works to break down the notion of the distanced spectator or the objective viewer, and this includes the art critic and the general public alike. The offer is for an intersubjective relation. In a scenario such as this, the spectator who chooses to idly sit by and watch others take action against her body becomes located in a challenging position. As such, I consider the work calls on their moral position with regards to taking action or being complicit via passivity. I will speak further to the differing ways in which Abramović and Parr use intersubjective tension within their work in Chapter Eight.

The concept of playing with the audience’s presence in the performative context extends to other early performance artists, including influential artist Joseph Beuys, who created works as part of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s. His famous work Coyote: I like America and America likes me (1974) exhibited Beuys sharing a room with a wild coyote for seven days in New York. According to Goldberg (2011, p. 151) his ‘daily rituals included a series of interactions with the coyote, introducing it to objects – felt, walking stick, gloves, electric torch, and the Wall Street Journal. Beuys engaged a convention of the fine art tradition where a flimsy barrier in the form of a rope, or in this case a chain, separated him and the coyote from gallery visitors. The boundary of the chain-link fence served to keep the audience out of the action. However, perhaps it also created a tension/anxiety around Beuys’ safety in relation to the coyote. The barrier placed the spectator in a position of having to navigate the terms of their spectatorship in relation to the artist and the coyote, given that the ‘potential’ for physical engagement was available. This potential, however,

was put into question by the barrier and as such an engagement with the artist was possible but contingent on crossing the barrier. This contingency exacerbated the intersubjective nature of the work by creating a tension surrounding engagement. This became a denial of permission for the spectator to act out and as such as a provocation for a sense of complicity within the spectator. In the event of any adverse reaction from the coyote towards Beuys, or vice versa, the creation of the space as a delineated artwork, formalised by the chain-link fence, served to challenge the voyeur role and inspire an active spectator who may question their role in any actions.

Above I have outlined the importance of the artist’s body and intersubjectivity within performance art as a form. Parr’s work engages with these elements, as did various movements which were central to the development of performance art as a genre historically. Parr was part of the developing performance art movement in the 1970s. His work at this time resonated with three key moments and movements of the genre internationally: Happenings, the Viennese Actionists and the Fluxus movement. I turn to these now.

Performance art as a genre Parr’s performance art emerged out of a gradual shift in Western art practice over the twentieth century. As early as 1910, artists associated with avant-garde movements used their bodies in ‘live’ and public performance actions, whilst proclaiming museums and galleries as being ‘dead’ (Jones & Heathfield 2012, p. 19). This trend continued and gained momentum throughout the twentieth century. Stiles (2012, p. 798) writes that artists drew on the performative art practices instigated by earlier avant-garde movements: Futurism, Dada, Surrealism and the various Russian avant-gardes and artists associated with the Bauhaus in Germany. These movements set the foundations for future iterations of body- based art.

Artists from the later part of the twentieth century, with seeds planted by these earlier influences, began exploring the body as a specific form across sites by utilising live performance, new media and installation. Within the context of Western art post-1950, artists such as Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, George Brecht, Gina Pane, Günter Brus,

Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramović, Valie Export, Vito Acconci, Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono furthered what their avant-garde predecessors had begun.35 They are considered to have ‘explosively expanded the parameters of live, body, performance, video and/or installation art to redefine what could be done within the aegis of the aesthetic’ (Jones & Heathfield 2012, p. 21). As such, they are integral to the history and development of performance art as a form and a genre. It was during this second half of the twentieth century that the practice of performance art evolved into an independent medium and genre within visual arts discourse.

Happenings In New York in 1959 the painter Allan Kaprow created his first performance-based work, 18 happenings in 6 parts (1959). The work comprised three rooms of mixed media with live performers engaged in activities such as painting on canvas, playing the violin or reciting fragmented texts. The audience moved from room to room and were engaged with the performance by being part of scripted setups. For example, the audience were given instructions only to applaud after the sixth set of a specific performance sequence (Goldberg 2011, pp. 128–29). After this work and due to Kaprow’s naming of his initial event ‘Happenings’ the term became used wherever the quality of an artwork was activated by the live performance of artists and had the potential for audience interaction, regardless of any artistic affiliation to Kaprow.

Whilst individual Happenings by artists tended to have pre-scripted actions and intentions, there was no strict format to Happenings as a creative form. They were defined by their engagement with the mixing of media, concern for everyday life and the expectation that the audience was not separated from the work (Atkins 2013, p. 141). Similarly, there was no formal group of Happenings artists, no collective, nor a manifesto. It was a term that was used primarily by the press following Kaprow’s 18 happenings in 6 parts (1959) to describe other works made in a similar vein, regardless of whether they were connected by similar sensibilities or structures (Goldberg 2011, p. 132). Kaprow, however, felt by the mid-1960s that any aesthetic aims of Happenings had been appropriated and trivialised by popular

35 This is by no means an exhaustive list of performance artists working at this time.

entertainment. As such he began encouraging artists to disengage from producing marketable art and objects (Stiles 2012, p. 800). Kaprow sought to resist the constraints of works being defined by art discourse and aimed to dislocate art from the gallery.

Viennese Actionists Happenings occurred in the late 1950s. During this period the Viennese Actionists were turning away from Abstract Expressionist painting and moving towards body art actions (Marsh 2014, p. 90). Happenings and the actions of the Viennese Actionists have been read as a reaction against, and possibly an extension of, the action painting of Abstract Expressionists such as Georges Mathieu and Jackson Pollock during the early 1950s. Whilst Abstract Expressionists like Pollock did engage in what were known as action paintings, and this has been theoretically considered at length by many including Kaprow, the acceptance and indeed exulting of Pollock’s paintings by formalist art critics such as Clement Greenberg may have fuelled the politically and socially inclined works of Kaprow and the influential Viennese Actionists.36

The Viennese Actionists are considered to have created the ‘most influential form of body art in the history of performance art’ (Stiles 2012, p. 805). Similarly, Marsh notes that the core artists, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, comprised one of the most radical groups of European performance artists in the 1960s

36 Kaprow, Greenberg, Marsh and Jones are but a few art historians to theorise, albeit from different perspectives, the work of Pollock and his shift from Abstract Expressionism to what Marsh describes as radical body art. It is not the point of this chapter or thesis to go into a detailed analysis of Pollock’s work; however, it needs to be acknowledged that his action paintings are considered by theorists such as Kaprow and Jones to be a precursor to what some describe as the ‘performative turn’ in art history (Marsh 2014, p. 92). Marsh on the other hand finds this interpretation ‘quite radical’ and claims it overlooks Pollock’s own artistic intention of exploring ritual and shamanism in his ‘action paintings’ (a term coined by art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952) (Marsh 2014, p. 89). It also does not fully consider that formalist critics such as Greenberg embraced him as a radical modernist, giving him a solid place in the art world. Marsh sees Pollock as ‘a pawn in the corporate game’ who ‘remains the symbolic hero’ but was an outlaw artist wracked by genius and anxiety and whose life ended prematurely through self-destruction (2014, p. 89). The primary problem for Marsh from the perspective of a history of performance art is that this heroising of Pollock and his undoubtedly famous and radical works threatens to ‘foreclose on the history of performance art that dates back to Dada and arguably the “Duchampian performative” of the early twentieth century’ (2014, p. 89). Whilst I acknowledge the importance of this discussion, for the purpose of this thesis I will leave the Pollockian phenomena and focus on those ‘self- proclaimed’ performative artists such as the Viennese Actionists, Fluxus, those engaging in Happenings and those focusing on social and political performative works.

(2014, p. 93). The actions they engaged in were essentially developed from painting and it is clear from film archives that:

[T]he event of painting was literally transcribed by and on the body using visceral and abject materials which were often extracted from dead animals: organs, blood entrails; the natural and domestic environment: sand, stones, flour, food stuffs: and the human body itself: semen, faeces, urine, saliva (Marsh 2014, p. 93).

Such techniques noted above became the tools of action-based painting and other participatory events. These core artists were performing mainly out of Vienna. They were dedicated to political works and at times were arrested and jailed. Austrian artist Brus, for example, gave up his interest in Abstract Expressionist painting to engage with performative works. In 1968 at the University of Vienna’s ‘Art and revolution’ event, Brus cut his naked body with a razor blade, drank his own urine, publicly defecated and smeared his body with excrement. He then sang the Austrian national anthem whilst masturbating. He was arrested and sentenced to six months’ prison for this action, but fled to Berlin to escape the charges (Weir 2015).37 Actions such as the one by Brus mentioned above saw the Viennese Actionists come to be considered ‘art criminals’ and as a result some had to go into exile (Marsh 2012, p. 93). Brus brings to mind a correlation with the work of Pussy Riot discussed in Chapter Two. These are artists who took their politics to the street using art. Brus pushed the boundaries of the art world, looking for a specific collision of art and politics by performing in public. His work (and that of other performance artists) rejects the rules and conventions of the gallery, and the segregation of art from public space and discourse, and thus engages in dissensus.

The work of Brus reveals an important element of the early performance art which explored the self in relation to the political and the social order on and through the body. Stiles (2012, p. 806) describes his work as ‘psychologically intense, physically brutal direct actions’, acting as precursor to the self-exploratory performances distinctive to the performance art

37 It is worth noting that Brus’ interest in challenging nationalism through work such as this resonates with Parr’s continual attack on the manifestation of nationalist sentiment within Australia. This is evident in his work Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (2003), which I will address in Chapter Six.

of the 1970s. Brus pushed personal boundaries as well as social. It is claimed that in Endurance test (Zerriessprobe) (1970) (Fig. 3) Brus drank his own urine in a frenzy and slashed his own shaven head with a knife (Stiles 2012, p. 806). Performance art during the time he was performing was imbued with this sense of psychological exploration and self- harming actions were often employed.

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Fig. 3 Endurance test (1970)

Valie Export became an important member of the Viennese Actionists and is considered a pioneering feminist performance, film and video-installation artist (Stiles 2012, p. 806). Pushing the boundaries of the body and engaging with multimedia techniques, Export worked with her body as a ‘semiotic sign’ seeking to ‘decode social constructions of gender and sexuality’ (Stiles 2012, p. 806). Export performed her well-documented public work Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and touch cinema) in ten European cities between 1968 and 1971. In this work, she wore a box as a mock movie theatre around her naked upper body so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front. She invited men, women and children on the street to come and touch her. As was the intention of the Viennese Actionists, Export’s work was provocative, political and public (Fig. 4).

Using both her body and her words, Export consciously problematised the position of women within the art world and their position within the new movement of performance

art. Export wrote her own manifesto for the Actionists in 1972 titled Women’s art: a manifesto (1972). In it she wrote:

[L]et women speak so that they can find themselves … the arts have been created to a large extent solely by men … we must destroy these notions of love, faith, family, motherhood and companionship, which were not created by us and thus replace them with new ones in accordance with our sensibility, with our wishes (Export in Stiles 2012, pp. 869–70).

Export wanted women to use art as a form of expression that would influence the consciousness of everyone. Her Women’s art: a manifesto was published in 1973 in Neues Forum and illuminates the desire of the Viennese Actionists to create works that were intended to be calls to action for social and political change using the body and art as a medium.

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Fig. 4 Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and touch cinema) (1960)

Works by artists such as Export and Brus are examples of art that calls for political change and challenges the social status quo. This disrupts the normative understanding of the artist’s body by locating it as a site of art whilst directly contesting accepted ideas within public discourse. Contesting ideas such as the role of women or the unquestioned acceptance of nationalism reveals a desire to locate their art and political ideas beyond the art world.

Fluxus Whilst Happenings were occurring as a new form of interactive performance and multimedia work, and the Viennese Actionists were creating art with stated political goals, other artists formed groups to create their own works based around manifestos. Artists including Wolf Vostell, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys and George Macunias were part of a loose international association known as Fluxus with Macunias as its self-appointed chairman. During the early 1960s, the Fluxus collective organised Fluxus festivals, produced Fluxus publications and theorised about what a social and political collective identity would look like for the Fluxus group (Stiles 2012, p. 802). For the Fluxus artists social goals were central to the works, with artists such as Vostell keen to politicise art. Fluxus works were generally labelled as actions, allowing anything from street spectacle and demonstrations to guerrilla theatre to become part of the Fluxus arsenal. It was perhaps their iconoclastic and anarchistic attitudes that made Fluxus an influential precursor to performance art and conceptual art. Indeed, Parr and his Australian-based collaborators in the 1960s were keen to create a dialogue with European artists, especially those connected to the Fluxus movement (Marsh 1993, p. 40). The influence of the Fluxus movement was important to Parr’s development as a performance artist.

Artist Yoko Ono was known as part of the Fluxus scene during the early 1960s. She created various performance actions in her New York loft featuring herself and other Fluxus artists. Taking art out of the gallery and imbuing it with political ideals and the everyday of life, Ono created many performative works including Cut piece (1965) (Fig. 5). Cut piece was performed at Carnegie Hall, New York where Ono sat in a black dress and asked the audience to come up and cut her dress to pieces with scissors. (Stiles 2012, p. 802). The work was discussed amongst the avant-garde artists of New York as it raised questions of her intentions, the role of the spectator and her personal safety (Beram & Broiss-Krimsky 2013, p. 63). Ono describes her own performance works as ‘an extrication from the various sensory perception’ (Stiles 2012, p. 859). She distinguishes them from Happenings, claiming her works ‘have no script as happenings do, though it has something that starts moving – the closest word for it may be a “wish” or “hope”’ (Stiles 2012, p. 859).

Cut piece (1965) explored the sensory in the spatial and temporal as Ono worked against the preconceived understanding of the audience as separate from the performer. She further broke down this arrangement as she made an offering, or in her words a ‘wish’ or a ‘hope’, for an unplanned interaction as her audience cut off her garment. Ono worked both with and independently of the Fluxus group. Fluxus artists were articulating a desire for their performative works not to be considered Happenings and whilst ‘Fluxus events were diverse in character, the single-action performance – what Macunias called a “monomorphic” event – came to distinguish Fluxus performance from happenings’ (Stiles 2012, p. 803). A monomorphic event is a performance work with a single action at its core and this defines a Fluxus work. As with Ono’s Cut piece there is a single thread to the action; Ono sits in a dress and the audience can come and cut it off her. This element perhaps distinguished Fluxus events from other practices at the time and there is much similarity here in form with Parr’s early work, as I discuss later in this chapter.

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Fig. 5 Cut piece (1965)

Fundamental to performance art as a form is an element of radicality in relation to art as an institution and the social order more broadly. Historically performance art resisted attempts to constrain art to its proper place within the consensus; the gallery and the artworld. The Happenings, the Viennese Actionists and the Fluxus movement all engaged the body of the artist to become the subject and the object of art. The body then became the site which disrupted the understanding of what art was and its function within the social order at the time.

My selective review of some key artistic movements and works that come under the umbrella of performance art has focused on the intersubjective relation between artist and spectator. The proximity to the artist, the invitation to perform actions on the body of the artist and the spatial arrangement of the work all challenge preconceived understandings of ‘viewing’ art. Such intersubjectivity opens the temporal space, encouraging a breakdown of normative spectatorship. Performance art encapsulates the demand for heterogenous temporalities by opening up multisensory-based experiences emerging from within the art (Rancière 2004, p. 26). This need to be present in a multisensory fashion highlights the importance of the intersubjective encounter and raises the issue of the ‘live’ in performance art. Whilst the live body is central to works such as those discussed, the potential for them to be analysed as part of the performance art genre is largely dependent on their non-live documentation. It is this notion of the live, in relation to the resulting documentation, which I address now.

Witnessing the live and documentation There is considerable discussion within the field of performance studies surrounding the process, use and value of documentation of a live event. Addressing the live (considered here as the performer’s body present in ‘real time’) is integral to the process of making meaning from Parr’s work in relation to this thesis.38 Given my research centres on performance art works by Parr which I did not attend, consideration of liveness is pertinent to both exploring and legitimising my reliance on the documents he left behind. This includes photos, videos, objects and stories told. Central to my method of reading Parr’s performance art is understanding that the documentation I draw on is a referent to a live work. His performance art exists beyond the moment of the live through the documentation circulating within the public sphere. The documentation of his work is imbued with the knowledge that the works were live and this informs my perception and reading of the work, as well as my understanding of its social context.

38 Here the live as a concept relies on the idea of ‘real time’ in relation to the performer’s body in the space. That is the moment when the performer’s physicality is corporeally present in a space performing the body as flesh and bones. Whilst ‘real time’ is a fluid term, within the context of this thesis it refers to those moments embedded in the physical world as opposed to those happening in other spaces such as the virtual world. I write this not to confine the concept of the live, but to articulate a relevant and working understanding of such terminology within the field of performance studies.

Liveness Historically, the element of liveness within performance art contributed to its intent to stand apart from and remain outside of the art market. As an ephemeral form, performance resisted the object status of painting and sculpture, for example. This resistance was thought to promise it a radical form that would withstand incorporation by the art world and the mainstream (Marsh 2014, p. 35). As such, the element of the live became both central to performance art practice but also a point of contention in relation to the resulting documentation and our engagement with it as scholars.39 Marsh suggests what became known as the liveness debate ‘sits as the eye in a storm around which a multifarious discourse has developed’ (2014, p. 9).40 Key proponents who speak to the topic of liveness, Peggy Phelan, Philip Auslander and Jones, each holds a theoretical position on the role of the live in performance art. Phelan (1993) argues that the live work disappears once it is no longer live and happening, whilst Auslander (2006, 2008) claims that any uniqueness to the live is negated by the action of documentation, suggesting an inherent mediatisation existent within the live. Jones (2009, 2012), however, posits an intersection where the uniqueness of the live is not negated by the new life of its reproduction as they co-exist both together and as separate works. Each of these theorists informs my practice of researching a live event through the artefacts that remain. This thesis utilises documentation to analyse the live performance art of Parr. With reference to performance art, I value the live as a moment that exists in the sensory realm and the world of presence and feeling. However, I do not value this moment over the

39 It is somewhat paradoxical to consider the art world has managed to incorporate and possibly engulf the ephemeral, allowing it to become concretised as the genre of performance art and finding a place in the art market. This brings to mind the ‘re-performance’ of live works from the 1970s. Seven easy pieces (2005) at New York’s Guggenheim Museum was an exhibition of performance art works originally performed in the 1960s and 70s by the likes of Vito Acconci and Gina Pane. In Seven easy pieces they were reproduced by Abramović, who directed people to perform them. Such exhibitions of past performance art I think reveal the art world’s capacity to commodify performance art. It reveals how the product itself may not be for sale in performance art, but the reputation of the artist is increased and they themselves become the commodity in relation to, but also apart from, the performance artwork. This further speaks in relation to the establishment of performance art as a tradition.

40 It is not my intention within this thesis to give a detailed account of the ‘liveness debate’ which is part of the field of performance studies. I do acknowledge it is an important area of concern and the work of people such as Phelan has greatly influenced the way ‘the live’ has developed as a discourse. For the purposes of this thesis the main areas I need to speak to from this debate are intersubjectivity and witnessing. Both these subjects pertain to Parr’s work, as well as to the protest-based self-harm of asylum seekers.

documentation that results or the remediation of the live that may occur.41 Whilst the live offers an intersubjective relation between participants and spectators, the documentary exchange also has the capacity to be intersubjective (Jones 1997, p. 12). An example of this is my own viewing of Parr’s face being sewn in closeup on video where he often audibly groans and grunts in discomfort. During this viewing I have experienced a sensory disruption of palpable empathy within my body towards the footage.42 Whilst I am not disturbed by the visuals of the skin sewing or blood, the sounds he makes affect me on a deep visceral level, at times inducing nausea. Whilst an anecdotal personal account in this instance, it speaks to the capacity of documentation to create an intersubjective experience where one ‘feels something’ within the body in relation to the artist’s body.

Perhaps then performance art documentation rests on the assumption that there is an ontological relationship between the performance and the document. Giving weight to the knowledge of the live moment behind documentation suggests that the documentation acts as an authentic referent to that live moment. Jones claims that the photograph, for example, gives authenticity to the performance work, going so far as to suggest the performance art event requires the document to anchor its indexicality (Jones 1997, p. 16).43 If this is the case, then performance art can be framed as dependent on documentation in order to attain symbolic status or cultural capital. In light of this, documentation is an important element in being able to develop a holistic understanding of

41 Phelan greatly privileges the live over documentation, locating documentation as a contested site in performance art which serves to reduce the form’s conceptual, social and cultural radicality, which for her is its traceless non-reproductivity and its capacity to refuse capitalist systems of exchange (1993, pp. 146–49). Contra Phelan, I suggest that in the bringing of the self to the live performance a knowledge of reproduction exists within the spectator’s ways of making meaning. The live can be seen to exist beyond the moment given the spectator’s own potential to reproduce the experience in myriad ways.

42 Parr has used footage from various performance art works as video for gallery installations as well as for artist talks. Whilst I watched archival footage of Close the concentration camps (2002), media from this work was shown at Monash University Museum of Art as part of the Direct democracy exhibition in 2013 which included closeup video of Parr’s face being sewn during a live performance from several years before.

43 Here Jones draws to some extent on Auslander, who argues the relation between the live and the documentation privileges the documentation, claiming it is the documentation which gives authenticity to the event and creates the event as art (Auslander 2006, p. 1). His position suggests art cannot exist outside of the discourse which creates it. Jones works with the position that whilst the documentation is vital to the reading of performance art, and indeed adds to its currency within discourse, it is in fact the ‘live’ which gives it an authenticity not found in other art forms (2009, p. 50).

a performance artwork. However, it does not occlude the element of the live as an essential part of performance art which holds a specificity not found in documentation.

At times the documentation process is explicitly occurring within the live event, thus becoming part of the live action. Parr, for example, structures his performance works with video cameras present and the process of documentation is obvious to the spectator. The audiovisual crew are not an external factor as Parr positions them inside the action space, at times obstructing the spectators’ view. Thus, in his work the audiovisual crew are part of the live work and highlight the performative actions. They further make the possibility of future remediation of the work apparent in the live moment. Thus, whilst performance art resonates as a live moment, the obviousness of the documentation process serves to heighten the spectator’s own potential relation to the reproductive economy within themselves as witness.44 Parr’s work serves to make explicit this cognisance of repetition and recording and the future life of the work.45

Jones (2009, p. 50), in relation to viewing live art involving the wounded body, asserts that ‘the experience of wounding firsthand is ontologically distinct from experiencing it through a picture, film or video’. If I reflect on an experience of being present at a live performance which includes wounding, there are a multitude of sensory perceptions taking place: sight, smell, sound, skin sensations, energetic output of those around the spectator. Whilst not necessarily quantifiable, these elements are not present in a comparative fashion when viewing an audio or visual document of the live performance, although one may experience a visceral response as I mentioned earlier. In the case of a photo or an audiovisual recording of a live performance, I consider our knowledge that the action took place and that the

44 Without discounting the unique or intersubjective moments within performance art, if the presence of the witness/spectator is vital to the work then their capacity to reproduce it (through memory, word of mouth, mobile phone recordings etc) suggests the economy of reproduction is embedded within the ontology of performance art.

45 Parr’s inclusion of visual or audio mechanisms in the documentation of his live work was/is not unique. For example, French performance artist Gina Pane, practising prior to Parr in the 1960s, was known for her inclusion of a photographer within her works. Pane’s works included actions such as cutting her skin with razors or cutting her hands with broken glass. Her awareness of the performance as an action for photographic images and future remediation affected the performances’ spatiotemporal qualities whilst being part of defining the present live action (O’Dell 1997, p. 77).

wound is not a special effect influences our interpretation of the media as an actual happening.46 Perhaps this locates the spectator present at the live event as a witness, whilst the viewer of documentation engages a different form of spectatorship. The concept of bearing witness in relation to spectatorship and testimony comes to mind with regards to this dynamic.

Bearing witness Based on the premise of an intersubjective exchange made possible through the live element of performance art, I would like to consider the spectator as a possible witness. The spectator as witness has been explored by Bryoni Trezise and Caroline Wake, who speak through the intersection of trauma studies and performance. They claim that witnessing when associated with live performance art may position the spectator at the scene of trauma or accident (Trezise & Wake 2013, p. 17). I agree with their assertion, specifically when considered in relation to Parr, who creates a physical boundary between himself and the spectator. He acts trauma upon himself and the spectator witnesses this scene. Parr extends no offer of involvement. However, as I have discussed for Abramović, Export and Ono, their performance art is physically inclusive of the spectator; perhaps then their works create both spectator and witness given this invitation to participate. The spectator of performance art, which here is aligned with the scene of trauma, becomes a witness, or one who can bear testimony to the live action. Those who view the documents and traces of the live work thus become spectators of that testimony.47 This results in two audiences who play important roles in how we read the documentation of performance art. Those who view documentation with the knowledge of spectators being present conceptually place those spectators as witnesses to the live event. This knowledge of witnesses thus prompts one to consider the cultural and social positioning of those present in order make meaning of the work. As I will discuss in Chapter Eight with reference to Parr, his choice to perform in

46 In relation to Parr this knowledge of the wound as ‘actually happening’ resonates with the ‘actual’ self- harming taking place in Immigration Detention Centres. There is an underlying perception of ‘realness’ in both scenarios. This contradicts the media’s portrayal of the protesting asylum seekers as ‘frauds’ and ‘criminals’ and I will speak to this in Chapters Five and Seven.

47 I acknowledge that the space between witness and spectator is blurred. I am suggesting here that when reading documentation of a live work, the spectator of the live iteration becomes located as a witness, yet during the event they may have been considered a spectator within the discourse of art.

a gallery speaks in relation to the work’s politics given the specificity of the spectators within that space. The gallery versus public street space, for example, affects one’s perception of those present as spectators or witnesses and thus informs the reading of the work.

The knowledge of live witnesses at an event gives weight to an event’s authenticity. When considered witnesses, the spectators play a role in creating a distinct tenor around the event. They offer a testimony that an event took place and I consider the knowledge of the origins and context of a past work feeds our understanding of its documentation in the present. The document is a referent to a live moment and this is imbued in what remains.48 This dynamic plays out not just in performance art, but also in relation to witness testimony to the protests by asylum seekers in detention. Witness testimony such as smuggled footage, for example, is similarly imbued with a sense of authenticity. In this case it acts in refusal to government attempts to shut down and make invisible the ‘live’ of protests hidden behind prison walls.

This raises an interesting intersection of witnessing with regards to the government policies of censorship of information pertaining to immigration detention. The live performance art, as discussed above, becomes contingent on the spectator as witness. Government policies of detention which exclude asylum seekers from the polis act to shut down the potential for witnessing. These policies are contingent on secrecy. Within the performance art space, reproduction or remediation of the work is acknowledged through the witness and the documentation of the live event. However, this very possibility of protests reproduced by being documented exists as a threat to government policies that render asylum seekers’ lives invisible.

Witnessing is thus an important element within performance art as a genre and also to the visibility of protest both outside of and within the polis. The act of being a witness to a live moment is imbued with something unique. In the case of performance art, the possibility of

48 My position here is contrary to Auslander’s. He claims that our perception of the performance, our approach to it as an object of interpretation and evaluation, and our reading of its historical significance are unchanged by knowing that a live event took place (Auslander 2006, p. 7).

an unpredictable action occurring in real time promises that the spectator is a witness to a singular experience. They may have specific knowledge when recounting the experience as one who was present. Intersubjectivity is arguably achievable through the viewing of a video or a photograph and not just through a live exchange. Even if contemporary performance art sits in a space of privileged potential with regards to an authentic bodily encounter, there is still a space of failure for documentation to secure this authenticity effectively (Jones & Heathfield 2012, p. 16).49 Thus, as a researcher I need to read the traces and documents that remain as media sites of performance art with witnesses. Such a reading needs to encompass the potential of unknown elements of the live and reflect that I was not a witness to the event. If authenticity is not a ‘given’ then my engagement with documentation is one which sees motioning back (but not a return) to the first iteration of the performance artwork in the documentation itself. The possible unknowns can then ground my analysis as I am acknowledging the multisensory potential of the event and its documentation.

We can analyse performance art works with an acknowledgement of the potential of that which cannot be known. This can occur whilst acknowledging the complexity of mediation as part of the spectatorial experience and the artist’s subjective understanding of the work and self. Perhaps, as Jones and Heathfield (2012, p. 32) suggest in relation to the live, given the multiple potentialities of the live within any one performance ‘one should search less for its ontology and more for its ontogenesis: the many natures of its becomings’. Thus, throughout my analysis within this thesis, I seek to find meaning both in the live and in the documentation as both inseparable and autonomous, open to multiple encounters.

Referent to the live Within performance art, the documentation of the work places the event firmly in history whilst acting as a new iteration of the work. The documented version of the artwork, when in the public domain, is recontextualised and given a new site. This may encourage a connection through memory or other signifiers to its political and historical moment of creation.

49 Here I refer to performance art as a genre when it occurs within the gallery space, which inhibits the potential of certain people to attend.

Documentation acts as a link to the initial live presentation of the work specifically because it is positioned within art discourse. Rancière contends that the museum is a space which potentially accommodates not only all kinds of prosaic objects, but also multiple types of information or debate on issues within the public sphere that may challenge mainstream perceptions (2010, p. 139). This idea of the museum likewise applies to the art gallery, where ways of reframing political issues addressed through art have the capacity to affect a disruption in public discourse and the consensus. The documentation of performance art, whether it documents works performed inside or outside the gallery, can similarly act in this way.

Performance art offers a multiplicity of sites and situations, both live and non-live, that contribute to the perception of life within public discourse. The politics of performance art can remain potent beyond the live moment. The documentation of the event allows the work’s potency to shift and continue in a new form. Its capacity to provoke thought or influence discourse surrounding an issue that existed at a particular place during a particular time remains. In the case of the object created as performance art documentation, it remains as an important artefact signalling to a point in time and space where the live work took place. This speaks to the social and political context of the time and invites the spectator to reflect on the politics of the work.

3.2 Mike Parr and Australian Performance Art This section of the chapter provides an outline of moments and themes from Parr’s artistic life. I outline a selection of elements and influences which I consider are important to Parr’s artistic output, including: his early works; the influence of the European performance art scene on his own artistic development; his consistent questioning of the role of the spectator in relation to the artist; the inherent physicality in both his performance and non- performance works; his use of self-harm as an aesthetic value; and his works in relation to contemporary political debates.

Overview of Parr Parr’s body of work spans from 1971 to today and throughout this time he has consistently placed his body as a central subject of his work. Whilst he is known for working in a variety of artistic mediums such as printmaking and drawing, performance art has been a consistent practice in his oeuvre, contributing significantly to his overall success and reputation as an artist. His early work existed alongside the first generation of experiments in performance art in the United States and Europe, locating him as an originator of the form (Scheer 2009, p. 2). Like other performance artists, his early works placed the body of the artist as central to the artwork with an intention to disturb ‘the representational frame of the artwork and thus the ontological status of art’ (Scheer 2009, p. 2). Parr’s exploration of ‘self’ in relation to the world around him through his body and performance art is vital to understanding his art. This understanding extends to his more recent political works, which form part of his ongoing performance art practice.

Parr was part of a movement of artists within Australia who were experimenting with creating artworks that involved installation, performance, sound, video, sculpture and other forms of creative expression. They aimed to experiment and challenge the traditional conventions of viewing in a gallery in order to offer the spectator a new or immersive experience (Marsh 1993, p. 8). Performance art as an emerging form was integral to this experimentation. Such experimental live practice played with the notions of subjectivity and spectatorship. Tactics to skew any perceived predictability of the performance medium were used such as: involving the spectator in the work; offering unconventional modes of spectatorship; mirrors reflecting the audience; visible still cameras or video cameras filming whilst the work was made live in real time. Thus, artists were aiming to mobilise a shift from the normative roles of the spectator and the artist within the work, as I have discussed earlier in this chapter.

These unconventional spatial arrangements within performance art open possibilities for the spectator to have a heightened self-consciousness about their presence at the performance and a consideration of their voyeurism or complicity in the happening of the work. Performance art which engages in such tactics aims for the spectator to be conscious and present in the act of viewing, thus making the spectator part of the overall mise-en-

scène. This attempt to implicate the spectator in the work is part of performance art’s active resistance to the formalist traditions of art viewing. It acts as a refusal of the formalist trope that a critical distance or objective viewpoint is present when viewing art. Parr’s work sought to complicate the specatorial gaze and this, in line with the developing genre, gave his work a political edge.

Inhibodress 1970–1972 During his early adult life, Parr was publishing poetry in small local magazines. Whilst he retrospectively criticises his own writing as ‘sloppy and indulgent’ (Parr in Bromfield 1990, p. 3), his writings were a precursor to the development of his performance art, which was often based on a series of written instructions. Between 1970 and 1972 Parr became one of a group of Sydney artists who formed Inhibodress, an artist-run gallery focused on resisting the formalist tradition which was central to art discourse at the time. Inhibodress was an important art space in Australian art history and was developed by Parr, Peter Kennedy and Tim Johnson. Parr wanted to create a space where ‘situations and ideas’ were formed and developed with a focus on political and conceptual work (Parr in Cramer 1989, p. 7).

Inhibodress artists looked to experimentation with form, working with the body, performance, still images, words and video. It was during this time that Parr’s interest in writing and poetry saw the opening of one of his early exhibitions at Inhibodress in March 1971. Word situations (1971) was an exhibition of numerous A4 sheets of paper with a single word repeatedly ‘typed in a pattern or shape corresponding to its meaning’ (Parr in Cramer 1989, p. 12). Parr’s idea behind Word situations was to explore the visual metaphors when playing with their form, their sense and their shape in relation to perception of meaning (Cramer 1989, p. 12). It was through the artist collective Inhibodress that Parr was able to develop his creative practice and begin exhibiting his work.

During the early 1970s Parr collaborated closely with fellow Inhibodress artist Kennedy. Marsh describes them as operating as a ‘dynamic team’ as they shared a desire to challenge a deeply conservative art world (1993, p. 40). Parr, Kennedy and Johnson were some of the first protagonists of experimental performance in Australia; however, they did not have a significant position within the mainstream art world (Marsh 1993, p. 33). Their

collaborations extended to forging connections with international artists in order to create a dialogue, particularly with European artists such as those connected to the Fluxus movement (Marsh 1993, p. 40). Inhibodress received significant attention from both artists and critics. Donald Brook, a prominent Australian art critic at the time who wrote for the National Review and the Sydney Morning Herald, was a strong supporter of Inhibodress, as was local art historian and critic Terry Smith. Parr notes that the critical support Inhibodress received was crucial to the gallery’s development and it would not have survived more than a few months without it (Parr in Cramer 1989, p. 68). The support by these men within the world of art criticism was vital to Parr, Kennedy and Johnson as emerging artists. It allowed the experimental nature of both their art and their artist-run gallery to develop their performance art in a similar vein to what was occurring in Europe and the US during that period.

I would like to note here that there is ongoing theoretical discussion regarding problems of inclusion and the positioning of performance art as a legitimate genre within Australian art history discourse (Marsh 1993). Specifically, there is a notable lack of women artists represented in the discourse of performance art in Australia, yet women artists have been producing performance in the Australian context since the early 1970s. As Nick Waterlow claimed over twenty years ago, ‘although male artists such as Stelarc, Parr, Danko and Kennedy are central to the narrative of performance, so are equally complex artists such as Bonita Ely, Joan Grounds, Lyndal Jones and Jude Walton’ (1994, p. 4). These four artists are women and, as Marsh has noted, performance art as a form has historically been attractive to women artists as it was not fully entrenched within the art world hierarchy (1993). Performance art’s radicality and focus on the body have been historically used by women artists to explore their cultural position given its refusal of this hierarchy.50

50 The absence of women from the discourse of performance art within Australian art history, as noted by Marsh, is highly problematic. I consider this gendered omission of great importance to scholarship within the field of performance art which requires ongoing critical enquiry. Whilst I have chosen to study Parr, who is a key male Australian performance artist, I have chosen him not because of his prominence as an artist per se. My decision to research Parr here is specifically located in his creation of performance art that utilises self- deprivation and acts of harm against his own body, in works which spoke directly to the politics of the asylum seeker protests. His work is a conduit for me to speak to the detention of asylum seekers in a specific way. Throughout my thesis I do consistently draw on the work of women and feminist performance artists, highlighting their central position to the development and ongoing engagement with this genre.

Parr, Kennedy and Johnson shared strong political ideals, such as their opposition to the Vietnam war, and a desire to express these through their art practice (Cramer 1989, p. 68).51 By mid-1971 Parr was making a shift from language pieces like Word situations (1971) to instructional style performance art (Cramer 1989, p. 69). Parr describes these initial explorations as working with performance as art to enact ‘meaningless acts of violence’ towards his own person (Cramer 1989, p. 17). Parr’s idea that his early works were ‘meaningless acts of violence’ is somewhat of an underestimation of how this form of performance art was challenging the international art world during this time. For instance, Parr’s pragmatic and instructional titles such as Light a candle. Hold your finger in the flame for as long as possible (1972) resonated with the intention to move away from object-based and formalist art as was occurring internationally. This performance was literally him holding his finger in a flame until he could not stand it. Parr was placing his body in the gallery space and executing a simple set of self-harming actions on it, which I note resonates with the work of Fluxus discussed earlier. As such, his experimentation with these instructional pieces was part of developing a practice that consistently challenged the formalist model of the art world whilst simultaneously exploring his own subjectivity in the broader social world. Whilst I speak to this later in this chapter, Parr’s body of performance work developed and deepened as a form over time. He says in relation to his performances, ‘I became obsessed with working out the meaning of what I was doing both as art and as psychology’ (Parr in Cramer 1989, p. 68). His obsession with meaning and his desire to explore and understand the self are evident in the progression of his work.

Inhibodress closed down as a physical space in 1973 but continued as a concept. Parr travelled to Europe in 1973, touring works previously created at Inhibodress (Cramer 1989, p. 71). Whilst Parr claims he did not feel isolated in Australia as an experimental artist, he considered his travels to Europe fundamental to the development of his work at the time (Marsh 1993, p. 40). It was during this trip to Europe that he decided to concentrate

51 Parr was active in the anti-Vietnam movement in the early 1970s and describes himself as ‘incredibly political’ during this time (Parr in Cramer 1989, p. 68). He was a conscientious objector against conscription, even though his disability would have excused him from compulsory enlistment (Parr has only one full arm) (Young 2009). He did this as an expression of his anti-authoritarian beliefs and this rejection of authority carries into his artwork (Cramer 1989, p. 68).

exclusively on performance art as he felt that ‘issues of great complexity had been provoked by this form’ and thus required his sole attention (Parr in Cramer 1989, p. 71). Through his travels he was able to meet artists such as Valie Export and Arnulf Rainer, both of whom were actively part of the developing genre of performance art during this time.

Parr’s performance art continued to develop on his return to Australia. He began using actions of self-violence to explore the role of the audience as both spectators to, and complicit in, his actions. The experience of travelling in Europe perhaps allowed him to develop the political and social dimensions of his work due to the artistic environment in Europe at the time being more conducive to experimental performance art (Marsh 1993, p. 37). Certainly Parr’s performance art work Cathartic action: social gestus no. 5 (the ‘armchop’), performed in July 1977 after this first trip to Europe, displayed a shift in his work and made form-based references to the work of Brus and Muehl from the late 1960s.52 In Cathartic action: social gestus no. 5 (the ‘armchop’) Parr is described as wearing a prosthetic arm filled with meat and blood which he ‘abruptly hacked’ off with a tomahawk in front of the audience (Scheer 2009, p. 28) (Fig. 6). Scheer describes this work as creating a traumatic action before an audience, many of whom were not aware that Parr only had one arm. Film of the action shows people shocked into speechlessness at Parr’s act of self-violence (Scheer 2009, p. 28). At this time such actions were new to the Australian art scene and Parr’s experimentation was clearly influenced by his European experience.

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 6 Cathartic action: social gestus no. 5 (the ‘armchop’) (1977)

52 I discuss the work of Brus earlier in this chapter. Interestingly, Parr claims to have not been familiar with the work of the Vienna Actionist movement which Brus and Muehl were part of. As stated in an interview with Tony Bond, ‘I had no knowledge of the Weiner Aktionismus in 1973’ (Parr in Bond 2004). This, however, does not discount the importance of the similarities in form and content evidenced in Parr’s work (especially in relation to Brus and his anti-nationalist sentiment).

Parr’s trip to Europe was of importance to the development of his performance art as he was able to escape the ‘cultural vacuum’ of the Australian art world (Marsh 1993, p. 37). I would speculate that his engagement with the European art community also had a positive impact on his professional standing as an artist here in Australia. His contact with European artists who were active on the international scene would have created opportunities for him to meet other influential people in the art world. For example, whilst in Vienna in 1978 Nick Waterlow, then Director of the Biennale of Sydney, visited Parr and invited him to present work at the 1979 Biennale (Parr 2008). The 1979 Biennale included European-based performance artists such as Abramović and Ulay, and was considered controversial in its move away from formal and object-based art (Waterlow 2017). Parr’s newly formed links to the European art community furthered his artistic career both in Australia and abroad, and indeed he returned to Sydney with a dedication to develop his performance art as a practice (Parr 2008).

The Black boxes, 1978–1982 On his return, Parr began to work on a key series, Black boxes (1978–1982). When discussing both Parr’s and Orr’s work as significant to the history of performance art in Australia, Marsh describes this period as a time when both artists worked through their ideas to produce more sophisticated practices (1993, p. 102). Marsh describes the work produced by Parr for the Third Biennale of Sydney in 1979 titled Black box: theatre of self correction as boxes that were black on the outside (14 feet long, 12 feet wide and 10 feet high) and installed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The outside of the box had 8 holes cut into it which allowed the viewer to see inside, where Parr produced six live performances at different times inside the box (Marsh 1993, p. 47). Marsh describes the setup of the viewing as ‘an attempt to assess the relationship between the artist and his audience’ (1993, p. 117). Within the black box, large transparent photographs of earlier performances were also displayed at various times, engaging the work in a kind of self-referencing to the past whilst a live work was taking place in the present (Marsh 1993, p. 120). Parr also placed mirrors in the boxes serving to fragment the image and disrupt the gaze of the viewer.53

53 As noted earlier in this chapter, Export did a work in 1968 which used boxes on her body with holes for touching her.

This configuration of the box as a viewing space acted as a tactic to engage the audience in the act of viewing by restricting their view, which heightened their self-awareness as spectator. The use of past mediatised works (videos, sound or photos derived from past actions) is something Parr has experimented with consistently within his installations. Whilst to some extent it canonises the artist, it also highlights the act of viewing, the role of documentation and the element of time in his work. In Black boxes the viewing holes cut into the box function like a viewfinder on a camera and Parr seems to be playing with the notion of the camera as a mode of seeing or perhaps controlled looking. I read his use of mirrors as a method to displace the viewer’s clarity by allowing multiple images to reflect back at each other or onto each other. They create a disruption for the viewer as they look into the box to see Parr’s work. Disruptions of the visual field and the use of multiple forms of media within the box complicate the presence of Parr’s live artist body. He presents a complex installation which calls on the spectator to consider their position as viewer of the artwork and the artist’s body.

The Black boxes as a concept are of particular interest to my thesis due to Parr’s exploration with the audience, their spectatorship, their access to the artist and his equal artistic focus on the live and documentation co-occurring. This has been an ongoing theme of his work including his work Asylum (2015) at the Dark Mofo Festival in Tasmania. Asylum saw numerous images and videos of pre-performed works scattered in an abandoned psychiatric asylum whilst he was installed as a live artist in the space for ten days. Parr used mirrors in Asylum and spectators needed to bring a mirror as condition of entry to the work. Similarly, he utilised mirrors in Black boxes to disrupt the viewing as he did again in Close the concentration camps. Parr has engaged in a questioning of the audience and artist relationship, issues of spectatorship and documentation from early on in his career as an artist. As Marsh succinctly writes:

Parr says that his earlier works in the 1970s had been about ‘being stared at’ … In the Black box and the works that followed Parr addressed this problem by framing the gaze of the audience in a way that stressed their voyeurism (Marsh 1993, p. 121).

Parr’s interest in exploring the possible manipulation of the spectatorial gaze has been an integral element of his work throughout his artistic career and aligns more broadly with performance art as a form.

The Black boxes as installations represented a change in the form of Parr’s work when compared to the earlier works such as Word situation or Cathartic action: social gestus no. 5 (the ‘armchop’). However, his major focus was still on the obsessive and dramatic actions of previous works and his attempts to ‘speak the unspeakable’ continued to dominate his work (Marsh 1993, p. 121). Parr similarly continued to experiment with video during this period in works such as Totem murder 2 (1977). Here he began to explore issues of the family and kinship and the unspeakable or subtextual elements of such complex relationships. Totem murder 2 is a video showing Parr and his father (who was a chicken farmer) posed between rows of dead chickens whose heads they had chopped off (Marsh 1993, p. 112). Like many of Parr’s works, Totem murder 2 was carefully constructed and planned. However, he still engaged with acts of violence as a way to explore his internal urges, which in this case acted out issues in relation to kinship, his relationship with his father.

Parr created a number of works involving the beheading of chickens during the mid-1970s. His use of animals, blood and other parts of dead carcasses was not happening in a cultural vacuum. For example, Ana Mendieta was a Cuban artist living in New York who created a series of bird-themed performances three years before Totem murder 2 including a video work Untitled (blood and feathers #2) (1974). This video was a short film of three-and-a-half minutes documenting a live performance by the artist at Old Man’s Creek in Iowa. Mendieta covered herself in blood, then rolled in white chicken feathers whilst standing in the creek being ‘present’ with nature (Manchester 2009). This use of animals by Mendieta to explore her relationship with nature and the feminine was a theme being engaged with across international performance art practices. The contextualisation of these acts of violence towards animals or use of their body parts for art allows for complex meanings to unfold before the spectator. It implicates the spectator in the death of an animal for almost ritualistic purposes. Be they personal questions the artist is exploring such as the body in society or larger ethical questions surrounding the use of animals, these performances proved provocative.54

54 This issue resurfaced in Australia recently. There were protests over the use of animal bodies in a performance directed by one of the original Viennese Actionists, Hermann Nitsch, in his work 150.Action (17 June 2017, Dark Park, Hobart). This work sparked political debate within Australia regarding the use of animals for art. It speaks to the potential to position the spectator as witness to, and thus complicit in, the perceived vπiolence of such artworks.

Parr’s works have been described by Marsh as ‘compulsive urges to act’ (1993, p. 97). His drive to perform in this manner, whether live and/or filmed, is part of the exploration of his self in relation to his own psychological compulsions and the Australian culture in which he is embedded. Further, this exploration of the self through seemingly extreme or compulsive actions on the body is central to the possibility of an intersubjective encounter with the spectator. Parr’s use of self-harm is essential to his task of drawing the audience into the work as ‘non-passive’ spectators. It acts as an invitation for them to witness what Marsh (1993, p. 97) describes as his ‘intensive psychological dramas’ including placing them as part of the action to some extent. Regardless of his selected medium: live performance actions, video recordings, photographs of past works or viewing a work through holes, Parr’s art acts out urges he experiences within himself. These urges are expressed within the contained framework of artistic practice and, whilst the spectator is present to witness his cathartic release, I consider it important to acknowledge Parr’s conscious and purposeful relationship to his audience as central within his performance art.

The Self-portrait project After gaining both local and international recognition for his performance art throughout the 1980s, Parr moved away from performance and focused on producing images. He began working intensely with photographs, prints, dry-point etchings and installations, in what became identified within the field of art history as the Self-portrait project (Scheer 2009, p. 40). The Self- portrait project spans years and includes thousands of self-portraits exhibited in both Australia and internationally. The print works in the Self-portrait project drew on the documentation and themes from his performance work, moving it to a new medium. The prints continued his focus on his drive to express his internal subjective urges and experiences. The resulting imagery did not represent a massive shift in aesthetic direction and in ways reinforced his earlier artistic works where he remained the subject of the work.

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 7 Language and chaos I (1989–1990)

Parr’s print and painting works are not the focus of my research, yet elements of his works cross over. Printmaking for him was at once a physical and performative action and the resulting print work acts as a trace of this encounter (Scheer 2009, p. 44). The prints became like remains of his physical and emotional exertion of the act of printmaking. Although these works were object-based, Parr refers to some of them as ‘proto-performances, where an object or process is substituted for direct work on the body’ (Parr in Scheer 2009, p. 44). Thus, I read Parr’s self-portraits as containing a visceral sense of aggression and emotion as if he was pushing out an internalised self-violent energy which then comes to ‘life’ on the print.55 The physicality involved in the creation of the work is of high importance and is evidenced in the visual surface of his print works. The prints are deeply ingrained etchings or furious charcoal faces that engaged Parr’s body in the process of their creation (Fig. 7). These prints displayed a continuation of his initial creative drive and psychological explorations of the self within a new medium and a new form output.

55 An example of Parr’s series of drypoint prints is the series Language and chaos (1989–1990). In these self- portraits Parr’s face is printed with deep, dark, thick and chaotic lines. The line work is complex and entwined, almost reminiscent of heavy-pressured scribbling. In his process Parr reused copper plates, layering self-portrait upon self-portrait each time he created new work (Coulter-Smith 1994). Whilst Coulter-Smith is interested in the psychoanalytic meaning behind the work and the idea that Parr is repetitively ‘effacing the self’, my interest is in the physicality behind the work. According to Coulter-Smith, Parr used a metal grinder on copper plates, as well as drypoint tools, to engage physically with his work (1994). Thus, Language and chaos acts as an example of his self-proclaimed violent and aggressive printing methods which resonate with his performance art practices.

Parr’s expressions of wounding, aggression and the marks he left behind on his body become referred onto the paper, metal, canvas or other surface via his printing process. Speaking in relation to his drypoint prints, he says that they are:

[V]iolently aggressive and require a long sustained discharge of energy. I felt that I was slashing a reflection that preceded me. It occurred to me not long after, that I was cutting into my body in the same way as I had done in the earliest performance … that the self- portrait heads had become radical avatars of the body (Parr in Coulter-Smith 1994, p. 52).

Thus, the process of making the portraits comes to the fore when Parr is working and can be considered more important than what is left behind or the creation of an object of beauty (Scheer 2009, p. 45). Scheer states that the drypoints, ‘with their frenzied distortion of the contours of the head, are clearly an attempt to find an objective correlative to the live art experience’ (2009, p. 46). I consider such frenzied distortion an attempt to visually represent the energy behind Parr’s expressive intention. He is harnessing the physical energy and exertion required when printmaking and allowing this to be evident in the resulting print. I view it as commensurate with an act of purging. Thus, the energy and intent of his new works had a certain resonance with Parr’s performance art actions such as Cathartic action: social gestus no. 5 (the ‘armchop’) in terms of the physicality involved in their production.

The Bride performances During the 1990s Parr began to re-engage with performance primarily through a series of works titled the Bride performances. The Bride performances are a continuation of the performance art Parr was making in the 1970s in which he submitted his body to painful experiences of self-harm (Scheer 2009, p. 59). This return to working with self-harm as an aesthetic value speaks to Parr’s approach to art throughout the course of his life. He describes this return to performance art as a way of ‘breaking up the stability of art … in terms of my “talents” and “technical procedures”’ (Parr 2001). His identity as an artist centres around the disruption of art as a formalist discipline, but also the disruption of his own work and how he executes his creative compulsions. Having established himself as painter and printmaker during the 1980s, Parr was ready to disturb this pattern by returning

to performance art. However, there is a shift in form and content apparent in his work during this return.

During an interview with Scheer and Nick Tsouslas in 1997, Parr talks about his missing arm and how this traumatically affected his life, particularly his family’s evasiveness about the details of why he has no arm (Parr 2008). Parr claims that his early works were an artistic response to his previous ‘psychotic episodes’ (his term) where he severely cut himself with razors as acts of self-harm (2008). These early episodes were not intentionally ‘artistic’ and were acted out in private and he describes the acts as leaving him feeling ‘euphoric, dissociated’ afterwards (Parr 2008). Accordingly, he states that his early performance art was dealing with feelings of self-aggression and through performance art he was consolidating his control over these states. ‘The early performances began as compulsions, hallucinations … (t)errifying ideas that possessed me’ (Parr 2008). Thus, whilst his early works were exploring the initial urges to engage in acts of aggression and harm towards the self, by the 1990s Parr began to integrate his methods as part of his performance art practice in relation to the genre. By the 1990s the aesthetics of self-harm that Parr engaged in were integral to his practice and to his public persona as a performance artist.

In the interview with Scheer and Tsouslas cited above, Parr discusses his interest in disrupting the symbolic order. This was prevalent in much of his early work, but during the 1990s there was a shift. Parr reasons that he ceased to perform as aggressively as he did in the 1970s because, in his words: [T]oo much has become intelligible to me … So in that respect the work of the 1990s is different to that of the 1970s, but the abreactive and the breaking of the image, remains very important to me (Parr 2008).56

Thus, Parr continued harming his body in performance art as a means to explore the disruption of the status quo of the body, of the image and of art discourse. However, it is evident that his work shifted to encompass a new complexity of form when contrasted with

56 Parr uses the term ‘abreactive’ at times to describe the intention or force behind his work. The term comes from Freudian psychoanalysis and suggests the expression of repressed difficult emotions or trauma (Farlex 2012). Parr uses ‘abreactive’ to describe his acting out of his own traumatic memories as a stimulus to creating artworks and as a description for what he wishes the audience to view and experience with him.

the earlier compulsive acting out. It was the Bride performances that signalled this shift and Parr notes that the image of the bride became ‘the predominant theme’ of his work throughout the 1990s (Scheer 2009, p. 59). Perhaps twenty years of making art prompted Parr to consider his own work conceptually and its location within art discourse.

The Bride performances retain Parr’s focus on his own body as a site of action and art. He works with impulses that are political; he actively assaults the social, its constructs and repressions within his work (Marsh 2016, p. 75). Marsh claims that although his earlier works are based on sets of instructions where he engaged in ‘abreaction’ or the expression of undisclosed trauma, the works from the 1990s and beyond engage more directly with social and political issues (2016, p. 75). In Blood box (Artspace, Sydney, 1998), for example, Parr utilised the concept of the bride within the gallery space. In this work Parr, who hadn’t slept for 24 hours, dressed as a bride in white and sat whilst having blood extracted from his vein into a plastic medical-type vessel. He then entered a purpose-built glass box via a ladder where he remained on his own dressed as the bride. The collected blood was given to the bride (Parr) and he squirted it around the glass walls of the box as if creating a curtain of blood dripping down the glass. Parr as bride went to sleep whilst spectators came and went from the gallery space. What the spectators saw was a glass box with blood dripping down the inside where a man dressed as a bride was sleeping (Marsh 2016, p. 74) (Fig. 8).

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 8 Blood box (1998)

Parr as the sleeping and blood-drained bride is as a concept, an object and an image for consumption by the spectator. Scheer was present for the entire performance of Blood box.57 He claims that Parr’s performance art offers a critique of passive participation in ‘meaningless consumerism as a ritual of exchange’ and he locates the Bride performances within this schema (Scheer 2009, p. 69).58 Scheer’s perspective overlooks the gender of the image of the bride. I read the gender of the bride as of high visual and symbolic significance, especially given Parr adorns his male body with female accoutrements, such as the white wedding dress. His performance of this feminine image raises the issue of the exchange of women by disrupting the normative image of the bride in a patriarchal society. I question the idea that such an exchange can be considered ‘meaningless consumerism’ as Scheer suggests. I do not equate symbols or rituals of female control, such as marriage and the bride, as acts of ‘meaningless consumerism’. In Blood box the ‘body of a woman’, which has been decorated for a ritual of exchange within the patriarchal order, has been intercepted by Parr, a white male artist, who takes on her decorative symbols for the purposes of his art. His performance presents a bleeding and exhausted bride in a glass box. Whilst it may not be the blood of someone who identifies as a woman, the ‘gendered’ blood is significant within Blood box. Multiple lenses can be applied to consider the blood of woman: blood and the loss of virginity; the blood of menstruation; the blood of childbirth; or the blood of violent rape. When set against the purity of the white dress and the exhausted body of Parr dressed as a bride, the complexity of possible readings inclusive of gender goes beyond Scheer’s or Parr’s claims to an attempt to subvert meaningless consumerism.

Of relevance to my reading above, Parr claims the Bride performances have ‘(n)othing to do with cross dressing or political assertion of gender difference’ (2008). It is widely understood that an artist’s intention may be in conflict with the meaning made by individual spectators, and indeed such a claim by Parr brings this disjuncture to the fore and is

57 Scheer, present for the entirety of the performance, was engaged by Parr to take notes for the entire time. It is interesting to see the shift in his writing and thoughts as he too became fatigued at the level of endurance required to stay awake and present for the full length of the night (Scheer 2009).

58 Scheer is a scholar and friend of Parr who at times has collaborated with him. He states with regards to Parr’s ‘public’ who see his work, ‘I form part of that public but have also been studying these works and writing about them for almost 20 years (since 1996). In this time, the artist and myself have become occasional collaborators, passionate interlocutors and friends. So, if I have come to lack objective distance in the case of Mike Parr, perhaps I can make up for it in insider knowledge’ (Scheer 2014).

somewhat disingenuous.59 His discounting of gender in relation to his use of the bridal image is relevant to my task of locating his work within contemporary political debates. Parr is an artist who makes claims to politics and my research seeks to address exactly how his work ‘does’ politics. Given that I rely on a mix of publicly available documents, including some which Parr has self-published, I am mindful of his own perspective being self- referential or coloured by his own location within contemporary art discourse and the social order more broadly.

Perhaps to consider Rancière for a moment here, I would suggest that the Bride performances serve to highlight the concept of disrupting the consensus through art. Contra Parr, I suggest the bride becomes that which challenges a set of implicit rules and conventions in relation to the heteronormative gendered institution of marriage. The performance is intended to incite people into different ways of thinking because it seeks to create discomfort. Such discomfort within the spectator challenges norms of viewing within the gallery, whilst simultaneously commenting on a social institution within public discourse. However, given the work takes place in the gallery, any disruption risks being limited to the art community. I will speak in detail about this with consideration of Rancière in Chapter Eight.

A political shift in Parr’s work The Bride performances represent an important stage in Parr’s oeuvre and the questions they raise speak to Parr’s artistic trajectory as he more publicly began to articulate the political intentions of his performance art. It is his works produced at the beginning of the twenty-first century which began to show a strong focus with regards to a directness in the expression of his political concerns, and I turn to those now.

Parr continued to focus on presenting his performance artworks within the gallery space. He chose to predominantly locate his practice here, whilst other Australian performance artists

59 I think here of Roland Barthes’ consideration of the ‘death of the author’ where, once a work is public, the limitations envisaged by the author, or artist, are liberated to be read in multiple ways (1977).

such as Orr often located their performative practice in site-specific settings.60 Parr has predominantly (but not exclusively) installed his body, be it bleeding, exhausted or what Marsh describes as ‘dirty and untidy’, in the contemporary gallery as a way of disrupting the sterility of the modernist white cube space (2016). The modernist white cube refers to the displaying of artworks in spaces that are ‘white’ and considered ‘neutral’. The intention behind providing a ‘neutralised’ space for exhibitions is to separate the art from the world, to remove the ‘visual noise’, thus allowing the art to be viewed in a ‘calm space’. Brian O’Doherty brought the concept and phrase to the fore in his article ‘Inside the white cube’ published in Artforum in 1976. As a modernist trope, the gallery as a white-walled, minimal space reinforces the separation of art from the social world, allowing the viewer to consider the work in an apparently ‘pure’ or neutral space.61 This perspective is an ideological one that performance art, including that of Parr, has consistently subverted by bringing the social and the political into the gallery space.

Marsh notes the importance of Parr’s work within the space of the gallery structure:

Parr’s body of work from the early 1970s until the present is a dirty and untidy practice that challenges the white cube; over and again he makes reference to these formalist tropes – piercing and probing them and exploding the obscenities behind these ideological structures (Marsh 2016, p. 75).

Parr’s focus on disrupting meaning and skewing social norms whilst simultaneously challenging ideas of formalism in art has continued to be a central concern within his performance artworks. As discussed, his performance art runs over hours or days with the live body present and exhausted, punctured, bleeding and in varying states of being. Between 2001 and 2003 Parr continued this trajectory; however, he became focused on his

60 By ‘site-specific’ I refer to the practice of making performative works outside of established gallery or event spaces. Artists may decide to create works in the outdoors or in an abandoned factory, for example, and their work will specifically speak to the location. The artist will develop the work with the site in mind and respond to the environment as part of and through their performance practice. Parr creates more site-specific performance art in his recent work such as Asylum (2010) and Under the bitumen (2018).

61 I acknowledge that this is a simplified discussion of the concept of the white cube gallery for the purpose of locating Parr’s work within this idea.

own statements critiquing the contemporary political landscape. For example, his work Water from the mouth (Artspace, Sydney, 26 April–5 May 2001) launched this more concerted assault on political issues and Scheer describes it as ‘the first of Parr’s new phase of political works’ (2009, p. 98). During Water from the mouth Parr was immersed inside a large box structure made of wood and cardboard for ten days. He did not eat or have any direct contact with visitors to the gallery. Each day he would urinate into a metal bucket which would then be placed near the entrance of the gallery, releasing its odour for incoming visitors. Spectators could not see Parr directly in the box but relied on a live feed of real-time video. The video was projected onto a gallery wall and speakers in the gallery amplified sounds from inside the box. The real-time video and sound were streamed onto the internet. Parr’s key activity in the box was simply to occupy the space for the set period of time (Scheer 2009, p. 98) (Fig. 9).

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 9 Water from the mouth (2001)

Water from the mouth is reminiscent in form to Black boxes and continues to display Parr’s ongoing concern with positioning the artist as central within the artwork. Similarly, the use of time and duration is a recurrent artistic device in his performance art. In a work such as Water from the mouth Parr’s political motivations are directed on and through his own body via self-deprivation, locating himself and his suffering at the centre of the work (Scheer 2009, p. 99). This allows his body to become a site which explores his personal experience of suffering and trauma. The spectator is affected by smell, sound and video, yet not given access to the body of Parr through anything but video footage. Thus, he sets up a

conceptual space which speaks to the role of the spectator through denying specific senses such as viewing his body directly and in a non-mediated fashion. Such a setup encourages the spectator to consider themselves in the act of viewing and perceiving, a theme and focus which is ongoing in Parr’s work.

Parr poses Water from the mouth as a consideration of issues of incarceration and he set out to achieve this through the language of performance art (2008). His spectators were made to be acutely aware of the role of looking and being present at the performance of the work. Parr did not specifically articulate a reference to the treatment of detained people seeking asylum in Australia through this work. However, the correlation between his self- incarceration and the incarceration of others is important when understanding the development of his work over the next few years. Thus, whilst Water from the mouth was not didactic or explicit in its political intent, notions pertaining to incarceration and deprivation of liberties were explored at a deep personal level through the work. This work was a vital step in his development of more overtly political works such as Close the concentration camps.

Summary Through this chapter I have located Parr as being part of the historical development of performance art practices and the emergence of performance art as a genre. The form and style of both his performance and non-performance work have sought to challenge notions of purity and neutrality within the gallery space. Similarly, both forms have made his own body the locus of his work. He is consistently the subject and the object of his performance art, which has a strong political undercurrent. These themes and practices locate Parr at the forefront of Australian performance art and also see him embedded in the genre internationally.

The concepts of unresolved suffering and isolation have been themes within Parr’s oeuvre. In the early part of his career this was focused on via works which spoke to his own situation, such as expressions of angst towards his family and society more broadly. However, it is his works in the twenty-first century which become more specifically located in contemporary political debates within public discourse. These more recent works push

the politics of issues such as the mandatory detention of asylum seekers to the fore of his performance art. Through his art he seeks to mobilise his own expressions of suffering and trauma to speak to that of others whom the government seeks to render invisible. It is these works which are the primary concern of this thesis and which I will speak to in the following chapters. In order to further investigate the political within Parr’s work, I will now outline the theoretical framework through which I analyse the invisibility of asylum seekers in detention within an Australian context.

Chapter Four: Biopolitics, Bare Life, Grievability and Dissensus

This is what life has become, after all . . . / This is one model constructed for human life / Killing time by leveraging the queue as technology / Killing time through manipulating and exploiting the body / The body left vulnerable / The body an object to be searched / Examined by the hands of others / The body susceptible to the gaze of others / A program for pissing all over life / (Boochani & Tofighian 2018, p. 307)

Introduction Rancière’s theory of dissensus forms the basis of my understanding of how the ‘political’ functions in relation to both performance art and the protests of people seeking asylum in Australia who were and are held in detention. His conceptualisation of the nature of politics as disruption allows for a salient discussion in relation to politics as that which occurs outside the consensus. As I have discussed in Chapter Two, the notion of consensus within the democracies of the Global North is one which is hierarchical and based on a distribution of democratic rights and agency. However, some people are allotted no space to speak and be heard within the social order and are thus not visible subjects within the consensus. For Rancière, politics happens when the invisible, those he terms surplus subjects, attempt to speak and be heard within a space that denies them a place.

Rancière’s concerns focus on the aesthetics of the social order and the visibility of the subject within that space. Whilst he does speak to the body in his notion of the surplus subject, it is not a prominent theme in his articulation of the enactment of politics. In this chapter, I utilise the work of Butler and Agamben to deepen my discussion of the surplus subject specifically due to their focus on the physical body of the subject. Butler’s concept of ‘grievable’ life and Agamben’s theory of ‘bare life’ construct a critical framework through

which I articulate the politico-legal process of exclusion from the polis acted out on and through the bodies and lives of asylum seekers. The focus on the incarceration of the body I consider through the lens of biopolitics. Whilst differing in their approaches, both Butler and Agamben theorise in a manner which is informed by Foucault’s writings on biopolitics and this chapter addresses each theorist’s position.

Within this chapter I consider Butler’s concepts of ‘framing’, ‘precarity’ and ‘grievability’ and her focus on the bodies and lives of those rendered invisible. Her use of these concepts provides a sense of how life is framed within the polis via government rhetoric and the media’s portrayal of specific groups of people. With regards to people seeking asylum, she allows my analysis to consider how their bodies and lives are framed by the Australian government as lives not worth grieving for.

Further, I look to Agamben’s writing on ‘bare life’, ‘exclusion’, governmentality and the legal frameworks of sovereignty as a method of articulating certain underlying forces working to create policies of mandatory detention of displaced or stateless peoples. What is of interest here with regards to Agamben is his articulation of how the bodies of certain people can be legally excluded from the polis through government policies of administrating life. His focus on citizenship, biopolitics and ‘the camp’ as a space where the bodies and lives of those excluded are sent to constructs an apt picture of the cruelty inherent in Australia’s policies of immigration detention.

The final section of this chapter considers the differences between Rancière’s conceptualisation of the political and Agamben’s conceptualisation of politics with regards to the potential for political agency within the subject. Agamben’s theoretical work explicates the workings of state forces which exclude and incarcerate the bodies of non- citizens, pushing them towards a quality of bare life. However, it is Rancière’s theory of dissensus which gives a sense of agency and resistance to the discussion of the excluded who are foregrounded within this thesis.

4.1 The Governing of Life Governmentality When considering governmentality, it is crucial to address the work of Foucault. Governmentality as a concept is not used by him in the sense of political structures of the state; it is the manner in which the population as both individuals and as groups may be directed (Foucault 1994b, p. 138). As a mode of power, governmentality looks to regulate the population through the control of bodies and people. It is operative through both state and non-state institutions, discourses and norms. Foucault articulates governmentality as the: ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculation and tactic that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security (Foucault 1994b, p. 244).

Specifically, governmentality as a web of institutions, procedures, analyses, reflective practices and tactical calculations that manage a given population underlies the premise of my argument that Australian Immigration Detention Centres are institutionally part of the broader functioning of governmentality. Further, they do more than just manage a population; they are part of the discourse surrounding the construction and general perception of the detained population. Embedded in this network of knowledge production, Immigration Detention Centres are part of the framing mechanisms which position people seeking asylum as a threat to the citizen population.

As one of a multitude of institutions and techniques of population management and control, Immigration Detention Centres form a part of the apparatus of government. By apparatus I refer to Foucault’s use of the term outlined as a:

resolutely heterogeneous grouping composing discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, policy decision, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophic, moral and philanthropic propositions; in sum, the said and the not-said, these are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is a network that can be established between these elements (Foucault 1980, p. 194).

For Foucault then, the various elements within the apparatus are somewhat joined and disjoined by strategic logic which operates against a background of discursive formations. The apparatus embodies a strategic bricolage which is consistently articulated and reiterated by a specific form of social collectivity (Rabinow & Rose 2003 p. xvi). It is the coming together of the various elements of function and control by the state and other forms of governmentality. Such elements are central to the act of governing in a manner which categorises the individual so that recognition within the polis is premised on this categorisation. The apparatus is strategic in that it seeks opportunities to control life through various societal systems and structures such as schools, workplaces and prisons, yet it is made up of a multiplicity of elements within society which may or may not be directly connected.

Of interest here is Foucault’s assertion that racism is inscribed within biopower (2013, p. 74). Whilst I will address the racial dynamic of Australia’s immigration policy in Chapter Five, given that biopolitics is based on a categorisation of life then racism is indeed a way of ‘separating out the groups that exist within a population’ (Foucault 2013, p. 74). Such a separation based on race or citizenship, for example, leads to placing certain people at risk, not of being killed necessarily, but being allowed or exposed to dying. Thus, racism is a mechanism of managing the population which produces certain groups of people as threats to and within the population.

An example of racism as a biopolitical categorisation practice is the introduction of the cashless welfare card in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, Australia. Initially the BasicsCard, as it was called, was introduced as part of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER).62 The NTER specifically targeted Indigenous Australians living

62 On 21 June 2007, the Australian government announced a ‘national emergency response’ to protect Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory from sexual abuse and family violence. Whilst my intention is not to give a detailed account of the NTER, the response involved altering a number of legislations including suspending elements of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) in order to forcibly intervene into the lives of certain Australian Indigenous populations. These interventions included quarantining of income support, more stringent policy to manage alcohol in the Northern Territory, compulsory health checks for all Aboriginal children, Commonwealth acquisition and control of land leased by Indigenous people known as ‘Town Camps’ and removal of customary law as a mitigating factor for sentencing within the courts (Australian Human Rights Commission 2008; Gibson 2017).

in 73 Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory including Barunga, Galiwinku and Yuendumu. Whilst there were a host of changes to legislation enacted via emergency orders, one change saw all recipients of government welfare payments in the prescribed Aboriginal communities forced onto ‘Income Management’. Under this system, a specific quantity (at least half) of all payments were quarantined and could not be paid as cash. Use of quarantined payments needed to be negotiated with the government welfare agency Centrelink (Vincent 2019). Payments were generally paid onto the BasicsCard, which could only be used on approved items at approved stores (Vincent 2019). Various iterations of the card occurred with bipartisan support over the ensuing years.

On the surface this appears to be an administrative process to ensure welfare recipients were spending government payments on food and necessities and not cigarettes, gambling or alcohol. However, the NTER and the cashless welfare card as it has played out in Australia caused hardship to Indigenous people revealing a deep-seated racism underpinning the policy. Whilst it does not ‘kill’ Indigenous Australians per se, the policy separates a group of people on racial grounds with punitive policies affecting their sense of value of life. This amounts to a devaluing of some lives in comparison to others in the citizen population, thus increasing the precarity of that group. It was documented that there was a ‘spike’ in youth suicides (almost six-fold) during the period of the NT Intervention which included the BasicsCard’s introduction, alongside a doubling of incarceration of Indigenous people (Gibson 2017). Whilst the cashless welfare card was one element of the NTER, it stands as an example of how racist categorisation in a Foucauldian sense exposes a specific group of people to death although it does not ‘kill’ them per se.

This leads me to suggest then that the focus of the apparatus of government is inclusive and opportunistic. As part of the apparatus of government, Immigration Detention Centres act to process asylum seekers, especially those who arrive by boat, in order to confirm their identity and process their claim for asylum. The administrative act of processing a claim for asylum is both an individualising process and a totalising one in a Foucauldian sense. Processing constructs the individual subject as an asylum seeker, which further serves to locate them within the overarching totalising power structure as ‘unauthorised non-citizen’. This process of categorisation as outside of the space of the citizen frames the asylum

seeker as a security threat who requires incarceration until the governing agency deems otherwise. Through these legal and administrative processes, the perception of the bodies and lives of asylum seekers as a security threat to the Australian polis is produced within the broader discourse of nationalism and immigration. Thus, their incarceration serves to construct the perception within public discourse that detention is a necessary action to maintain national security in relation to people seeking asylum.

Biopolitics Drawing on Foucault, I deploy the phrase ‘biopolitics’ as the calculated treatment and management of life resulting in state power which may ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1990, p. 138, emphasis in original). Foucault (1990, p. 140) notes in his essay Right of death and power over life that during the classical period, alongside the development of schools, universities and workshops, issues of birth rates, public health, housing etc became of political and economic importance. He claims that this marked the beginning of a period of ‘biopower’ with an increase in multiple and diverse techniques of managing and controlling populations through the subjugation of the body (Foucault 1990, p. 140). These techniques became instruments of the state utilised to ensure the maintenance of power relations within the social body. It is important to note here that biopower operates primarily through knowledge, yet key to its functioning is the mobilisation of its discursive elements as ‘strategies of power’ (Mills 2018, p. 23). With the understanding that the modern state is not ‘sovereign’ in its functioning, biopower is separated from the sovereign as it is tasked to take charge of life, unlike the sovereign which shows its power via death (Foucault 1990, p. 144). The modern state, however, is not reducible to biopower or biopolitics given that it is one element within the broader function of the apparatus of power.63 The modern state does, however, have the population as its main target and brings together elements such as biopolitics and governmentality as mechanisms of control.

63 Such an apparatus of power is inclusive of corporations and lobby groups, for example, which affect both the modern state and the normative structures of the social order.

In a move away from Foucault, Agamben considers biopolitics inherently part of sovereign power. He places the production of the biopolitical body as the primary function of the sovereign and claims that once bare life is included in the political realm, then bare life sits at the heart of the sovereign (Agamben 1998, p. 6).64 Agamben then locates the functioning of governmentality as an extension of the sovereign’s ultimate control and investment in life and death. Indeed, he is critical of Foucault suggesting a ‘correction’ may be necessary in relation to holding the technologies of governing and the role of the sovereign apart, as for Agamben they are linked (1998, p. 9).

Whilst I speak to the positioning of bare life within the domain of the sovereign later in this chapter, I note here that I consider it valuable to engage with both theorists when considering the political context of the detention of people seeking asylum in Australia. Foucault articulates the role of governmentality as monitoring and creating structures of control over the individual and social body. Agamben, however, outlines how the construction of people as excluded from the citizen body and the politico-legal forces that allow this to happen are linked to the sovereign power, which he sees as the power of death. Whilst I have noted that the modern state is not sovereign in Foucauldian terms, both Agamben and Butler consider elements of the modern state’s functioning as akin to that of the sovereign. Agamben informs much of my argument with regards to the sovereign exception as that which creates bare life as a state of existence located on the threshold of life and death. This threshold is the space I argue Australian Immigration Detention Centres push detained asylum seekers towards. Whilst I further argue that resistance within Immigration Detention Centres by detainees sees a failure by the state to produce bare life subjects, I engage with Agamben here specifically to contextualise how immigration policies of detention work within a governmental framework.

64 For Agamben, politics and political subjectivity are linked to agency within the consensus. Unlike Rancière, who claims that politics and the political exist in acts of resistance against the social order and the consensus, Agamben sees the political as part of the subjectivity of those who are included in the social order. I discuss this contrast between Rancière and Agamben later in this chapter.

4.2 Butler and Grievable Life Butler’s concepts of ‘precariousness’ and ‘grievability’ and their relation to what she terms ‘frames of recognition’ provide a clear framework to consider how certain lives are valued disproportionately to others (2009). Butler engages with liveability by addressing grief; however, she does not construct an account of grief per se. I interpret her interest in grief as a method to uncover and articulate the precariousness of life and the vulnerability of one human in relation to another.

Within Butler’s writing on grievable life, precariousness is based on the premise that as humans we rely on others for our existence. We have an inherent ‘dependency on people we know, barely know or know not at all’ (Butler 2009, p. 14). It is this inherent dependence or interdependence on the other that puts us in a constant state of precarity which, for Butler, is an unequally distributed state. She uses ‘precarity’ to describe the political implications of a population’s precariousness. Such a population may suffer from failing social or economic networks, for example; thus, their precariousness is heightened (Butler

2009, p. 26). Thus, precarity is unequally distributed within the current global configuration. Butler argues that our lives are constantly in the hands of others and this leads to her premise that precariousness is not a simple feature of a single life, but instead a generalised condition (2009, p. 22). The ‘other’ may affect us in any number of ways; they may be loving towards us, they may harm or kill us, they may help us, or they may be neutral towards us. However, whilst the human condition is vulnerable to others, it is also capable of causing harm to others. As such, this idea of precarious life refers to a concept of social ontology (Butler 2009, p. 19).

Butler’s idea that a life is precarious rests on the premise that the possibility of living relies fundamentally on social and political conditions allowing life, not simply an ‘internal drive to live’ (2009, p. 21). She claims that there ‘is not life, without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social’ (Butler 2009, p. 19). When seen as part of a social ontology, her idea of precarity considers adequate social conditions

are necessary for living, resulting in a necessary interdependence of and between people.65 This interdependence results in a consistent vulnerability present in the human condition requiring a sustaining of the social environment where precarity is equally distributed.

In her book Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence Butler (2006, p. 26) sees the body as bound up by a physical vulnerability present from birth and this creates a body that is socially dependent:

The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well (Butler 2006, p. 26).

For Butler, the body is a point of ‘departure’ when thinking through precarity. She considers the physical body as part of a social phenomenon, which due to exposure to others is vulnerable by definition. The body:

yields to social crafting and force, the body is vulnerable. It is not, however, a mere surface upon which social meanings are inscribed, but that which suffers, enjoys, and responds to the exteriority of the world (Butler 2009 p. 33).

Butler’s situating of the body within the social field as inherently susceptible to outside forces, both physical and social, resonates with my understanding of the vulnerability of the body. (Butler 2006, p. 26). As a physical being, the body is vulnerable with boundaries that can be penetrated or broken, and Butler considers the boundary of the body as never fully belonging to the subject. It is always caught in the play of interdependence on the other, be they known or unknown. It is this permeability of perceived boundaries which speaks to both performance art and the embodied protests of people seeking asylum. In performance art, the artist chooses to place their body before the spectator open to an ‘unknown’ intersubjective encounter, as discussed in Chapter Three. The bodies of the people arriving

65 The drive for an intersubjective encounter within performance art, as I have discussed in Chapter Three, resonates with this idea of ‘interdependence amongst all people’. Performance artists such as Abramović in her work Rhythm O (1974) can be seen to have drawn on ideas of vulnerability before the other in order to create works where the spectator can choose to exploit or protect the artist.

by boat to seek asylum in Australia are also vulnerable to an ‘unknown’; however, they are detained by force and exploited by the other (government, border police, prison guards etc). Yet it is through their bodies that some people seeking asylum have found a specific site where an expression of agency and political resistance is manifested.

When considering the ideas of precarity and the vulnerability of the self, embedded in the ontology of the self is the knowledge that both the physical boundary of the self and the psychological boundary of one’s subjectivity are not always stable. Both are at risk from actions of things located inside and outside of the self. The body is leaky and can and does break. The body is not static and its condition shifts, just as one’s subjectivity shifts and changes as it relates to others and the environment. As Butler claims:

The boundary of who I am is the boundary of the body, but the boundary of the body never fully belongs to me. Survival depends less on the established boundary to the self than on the constitutive sociality of the body (Butler 2009, p. 54).

In line with Butler’s thought, I consider it is this vulnerability of the self, both physical and social, and one’s dependence on the collective social body that are exploited during torture. The interdependence of one person on another is abused to such an extent that the victim becomes ‘willing’ to submit to the other to end the constant breaking of their subjective boundary’ (Butler 2009, p. 61). Torture obscenely exploits and abuses this notion of self and renders the victim open, permeable and defenceless. If we consider mandatory detention a form of torture which engages in the exploitation of one human’s vulnerability by another, then people seeking asylum who are detained in Australian Immigration Detention Centres are subject to a heightened state of precarity.66

66 Whilst some may consider it arguable as to whether the mandatory detention of people seeking asylum in Australian is torture, I note that the United Nations Special Rapporteur Juan Mendez did, in 2015, find Australia was not providing a space ‘free of torture’ for detainees under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) (Méndez 2015, p. 9). Mendez states that ‘the Government of Australia, by failing to provide adequate detention conditions; end the practice of detention of children; and put a stop to the escalating violence and tension at the regional processing centre, has violated the right of the asylum seekers including children to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as provided by articles 1 and 16 of the CAT’ (Méndez 2015, pp. 7–8).

Precariousness as a generalised social condition is reliant on an understanding of the body as fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world (Butler 2009, p. 34). This precariousness of the body extends to one’s perception of the self holistically, and thus informing one’s development as a social subject. My understanding of Butler’s precariousness relies on the premise that we all live with a vulnerability to others which is inherent to bodily life. Bodily life positions us as vulnerable to unknown forces outside ourselves, and the social conditions that create these forces may increase or lessen our vulnerability and thus precarity. This vulnerability can be highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions (Butler 2006).

It is the underlying social forces that construct this drive to preserve the life of the other and recognise it as precarious that I consider lie at the heart of Butler’s argument. Only when one’s life is recognised as valuable within the social and political realm is one’s precarity lessened and one’s life considered by others to be worth preserving. This concept of precarity and the vulnerability of life is why the notions of grief and mourning are important to Butler’s discussion. She considers grief and mourning moments of undoing that reveal our life as always in relation with the other. It is primarily an openness to the other that can create what Butler (2006, p. 30) considers ‘a point of identification with suffering itself’ If we do not recognise the life of another as a life of importance and worth preserving, then we will not grieve the loss and will conceive of them as ungrieveable.67

Frames of recognition For Butler, it is difficult to recognise life outside of the frames in which it is given. Further, those ‘frames not only structure how we come to know and identify life but constitute sustaining conditions for those very lives’ (Butler 2009, pp. 23–24). These conditions are made up of various things such as: shelter, clean water, food and access to health care, but also an environment in which one’s life is not disproportionately put at risk. Therefore, an environment that recognises our lives as lives worth living becomes essential. Butler argues,

67 This concept of recognising the life before us as one of suffering and thus grievable speaks to the placement of the body of the artist at the centre of performance art. As I discuss in Chapters Three and Eight, the performance artist who undergoes suffering or pain before the spectator may be calling on this ethics of recognition of grievability as a mode of challenging the spectator to be more than a complicit voyeur.

and I agree with her, that these conditions are both politically and ethically our responsibility to each other and this dependence on one another is ultimately what makes all life precarious (2009, p. 23). If lives are represented (by the media or the government, for example) without acknowledgement of their dependence on others for survival, then we are failing ethically to allow all living humans the right to a grievable life (Butler 2009, p. 23).

I would like to consider an example of this lack of recognition of a life worth preserving in the non-naming of civilians who die during a war. Those civilians who die during an attack such as an airstrike, but are not the target, are at times described by the government and the news media as ‘collateral damage’.68 A similar phrase is ‘bug splat’, which is used to describe a person killed by a drone (Hastings 2012). One incident which particularly stands out is the use of the phrase ‘collateral damage’ in relation to the killing of 200 people during airstrikes in Iraq in 2017. The US military accepted responsibility for the killings and Brigadier-General Rick Uribe was quoted as saying in relation to the incident that ‘[we] are very careful about how much collateral damage we are going to cause’ (Hennessy-Fiske 2017). I speculate that the deaths of 200 civilians are difficult to equate with being ‘careful’. Further, the terminology ‘collateral damage’ does not allow those civilians who were killed the full possibility of being apprehended as lives worth preserving or grievable lives. Such terminology is a refusal of their personhood and frames the victims as not worthy of recognition in a way such that one would recognise a person one would grieve the loss of. They were not named, nor even called ‘people’. As a member of the polis, one is not encouraged to grieve over lives lost as collateral damage and thus their precariousness is negated by the use of this language. This is not an isolated incident, as this language is generally understood as appropriate within the mainstream media. My key point here is that through constant reference to and usage of phrases such as ‘collateral damage’ and the constant framing of war as inevitable in contemporary life, consumers of this media discourse may become desensitised to the loss of life. The rhetoric of war socially displaces

68 ‘Collateral damage’ is just one of numerous terms in war that obscure the deaths involved. Take for example Bruce Riedel, former President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, who was quoted as saying in relation to terrorist suspects in the Middle East: ‘(t)he problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower ... You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back’ (Riedel in Miller 2012). Here Riedel is referring to ongoing armed attacks on areas of the Middle East with alleged terrorist connections.

one population from another and thus reduces the capacity to apprehend the grievability of those ‘enemy’ civilians killed during combat.69

Recognition of a grievable life is thus influenced and governed by cultural frames and Butler argues that a lack of recognition is part of what the framing seeks to achieve. When referring to framing, she speaks of frames that guide our interpretation of lives with a specific interest in the cultural frames that regulate perception within the population (Butler 2009, p. 10). Butler asserts that the frame seeks to contain, convey and determine what is and can be seen (2009, p. 10). Such frames are found at work in government policy and political rhetoric constructing normative modes of viewing one’s subjectivity in relation to others in the world.70 The frame’s capacity to function as that which reinforces and creates norms is dependent on its iterability. Frames shape perception and formulate one’s own ontological understanding of the social ontology through which one understands the self and the body, both independently and in relation to others. The perceptual realities produced through frames do not precisely lead to outcomes. For Butler, frames are part of creating unilateral perceptions and integral to the process of developing public discourse in relation to the local, national and international world (2009, p. 29). Similarly, this framing is both evident in and imbricated in the development of government policy.

I note here that news media outlets in the early part of the twenty-first century were forced to rely on Australian government sources for the official voice of the story pertaining to people seeking asylum. The results of a study published in Media International Australia in 2003 that found that 91% of government documents, primarily media releases, were considered ‘negative in their overall tenor towards asylum seekers’ (Klocker & Dunn 2003, p. 75). As I will discuss further in Chapter Five, the government voice was the primary source

69 I would like to mention an example which reveals how one person can become desensitised to the life of another during combat. ‘An Iraq War veteran serving five life terms for raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her parents and sister says he didn’t think of Iraqi civilians as humans after being exposed to extreme war zone violence’ (Barroguquere 2010).

70 Such political rhetoric is communicated through the news media and, when addressing the news media within this thesis, I am referring to the ‘mainstream’ media outlets which in an Australian context are primarily owned and controlled by News Corporation and Fairfax (now owned by Channel 9 and called ‘Nine’). Australia has been noted as having a significantly high concentration of traditional media ownership, with News Corporation and Fairfax Media owning the majority of national and capital city newspapers (Dwyer 2016).

of information with regards to asylum seekers. As such it reasonable to argue that that this negative ‘tenor’ would have formed the dominant ‘tone’ within public discourse at the time.

I have discussed how the precariousness of life and a subject’s grievability are differentially distributed amongst the population. This manifests perceptually and through perception is made material via institutions, social policy, governmental waging of war and state- sanctioned violence (Butler 2009, p. 25). This is evident in populations under constant threat of attack. Governments continue to engage in war without protecting the situation of ‘enemy’ civilians and instead we see these civilians living in a state of extreme precariousness. Those who are inculcated by these dominant frames of meaning may fail to recognise the precarity experienced by others. Butler asks us to look at the consistent waging of war and the framing of such cultural phenomena as entwined, to a large part, in the operation of rendering certain lives ungrievable. She suggests that these frames of grievability are operative in imprisonment and torture, for example. These are sites where the apprehension of the precariousness of life is paramount to experiencing the other as a life, a grievable life. Butler argues that in certain political situations a person’s life will not be framed as grievable, thus in specific contexts allowing for their rights to be infringed or their body tortured. (Butler 2009, p. 24).

Butler turns to Abu Ghraib to furnish an example of the tortured body. She draws on the work of Susan Sontag to consider the framing of the lives of tortured prisoners.71 In April 2004, photographs of prisoners held in Abu Ghraib (a military prison located in Iraq) being tortured through humiliating and sexualised rituals enacted by US military personnel were released to the media (Alfano 2006). A complex analysis of this specific example is beyond the scope of this thesis, and thus I would just like to consider the operative frames at work in relation to these acts and subsequent photographs. Within the frames of war, the prisoners subject to humiliation were not perceived as grievable lives by US military personnel acting out the torture. In ‘Regarding the torture of others’ Sontag (2004) suggests that the reader, when looking at these photographs of torture, abuse and humiliation, may

71 Sontag’s article in the New York Times, ‘Regarding the torture of others’, provides a comprehensive consideration of the photographs of the Abu Ghraib prisoners and their circulation within the public sphere (2004).

ask themselves: how someone can do this and then ‘grin’ to take a photo? Butler argues that such photos specifically capture the lives of those being tortured as ungrievable and thus torture can happen whilst a photo is taken (2010, p. 93). If we are to consider who set up these images, framed them, acted in them and ‘snapped’ them, then what is being left out of the frame also becomes important to their contextualisation.

In the above example, it is the army officers who are viewing the lives of the prisoners through frames of ungrievability, and thus the officers are able to enact torture. The frames of recognition ‘available’ to the soldiers enacting the torture act to ensure that the people being tortured do not ‘readily conform to a visual, corporeal or socially recognizable identity’ (Butler 2009, p. 94). This exclusion of the victims from the field of what Butler terms a ‘recognisable identity’ erases or reduces the soldiers’ capacity to perceive the prisoners’ suffering and vulnerability as grievable. This erasure of recognition of grievability is what, in Butler’s terms, would allow such torture to be inflicted upon the other. Both Sontag and Butler, and I agree with them, do not lay the ‘blame’ for such actions on the individual soldiers involved in taking and posing for photos per se, but instead look to the pervasive political and cultural framing of war as inevitable as responsible for the possibility of torture. Whilst I do not contend the soldiers are completely innocent in this circumstance, they are not the source or cause of this type of behaviour within the armed forces. Once the images began to circulate beyond the armed forces, they became controversial, perhaps because they provided a ‘shocking’ visual image within public discourse and reminded some members of the general public of a specific, mostly unseen, ‘reality’ of war.

War is framed as an inevitable part of international relations and prisoners of war are implicitly an essential component of war. Further, imprisonment and torture are embedded within the understanding of what war is. This is especially the case in relation to extracting intelligence, and these are the operative frames behind the photographs taken of prisoners being tortured, sexually humiliated and punished at Abu Ghraib. Whilst the US government charged certain individuals involved in taking the photos with various crimes, I argue, as does Butler, that the frames which shape the life of the enemy or the prisoner of war as ungrievable are deeply embedded within military culture and government discourse. My

earlier discussion on the drone kills and the use of language which reduces the loss of human life to ‘collateral damage’ speaks to this framing within government discourse. Thus, the soldiers were acting out a tacit, and to some extent explicit, understanding of what imprisonment of the enemy means.

The framing of lives as ungrievable extends beyond examples of war or torture. As Butler argues, the way in which governments and the media frame war underpins more than just the operation of war and its reach extends into racist immigration policies (2009, p. 26). It is the framing within the public sphere of the lives of undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers or ethnic minorities as ungrievable that allows the detention of and so-called ‘legal’ violence against these groups and individuals to occur. This framing may result in them having certain civil liberties or legal and human rights suspended by the framing of immigration issues as a ‘war at home’ (Butler 2009, p. 26). This understanding applies to people seeking asylum in Australia. They are subject to having their right to seek asylum and safe haven removed as they are framed as ‘illegal’, ‘criminals’ and a national security threat. Through a combination of rhetoric and policy, the framing of the lives of people seeking asylum in Australia as ungrievable becomes part of what allows the state-sanctioned violence of mandatory and indefinite detention to occur. A close reading of this rhetoric and the policies which exclude asylum seekers from being framed as grievable will be discussed in Chapters Five and Six.

4.3 Agamben: Inclusive Exclusion, State of Exception and Bare Life Agamben has theorised at length the systems of power within government and the way in which these manage the population. His tracing of the politico-legal history of parts of Europe develops his schema of sovereign power and how it manifests in society through law. He places a specific focus on the contemporary position of the refugee and the vulnerability of all people living under a global political system whose main function is to politicise and control forms of life. Through my readings of Agamben’s key texts Homo sacer (1998) and State of exception (2005a) I consider his focus on the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of ‘bare life’ from the political as a pertinent framework to understand the political schema underlying the policies of mandatory detention of people seeking asylum in Australia.

With reference to Agamben, I explore three key notions of his work: ‘inclusive exclusion’, ‘bare life’ and ‘the state or space of exception’, and their relation to Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Firstly, the idea of ‘inclusive exclusion’ is central to my application of Agamben’s ideas when thinking through the governmental forces at work within the Australian government’s policies of mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Agamben uses language that positions the body as inherently political in his writing. He argues that the production of the body as a ‘biopolitical body’ can be considered as the ‘original activity of sovereign power’ (Agamben 1998, p. 6). This suggests that political power through governmentality is a form of sovereign power. Agamben draws on the ideas of Carl Schmitt when considering the power of the sovereign to deem a normal situation within the polis as an exception.72 Where an exception is deemed, the sovereign can overrule the law in order to enact certain policies. Thus, part of the functioning of the sovereign is to ensure that a relation of what Agamben terms ‘inclusive exclusion’ is maintained. Inclusion in this sense is being a political subject and having a place within the polis, whilst exclusion is not having political subjectivity and thus no space within the polis. Whilst a political subject can enjoy a politically qualified life, for Agamben it is always in relation to bare life. The underlying premise is that there is always the potential for a sovereign ban which will enact an exclusion of the person from political life but not free them of the law.

Secondly, the notion of ‘bare life’ is one Agamben has theorised extensively.73 He utilises the two Greek terms zoe and bios to articulate his conceptualisation of living life. Zoe is simply life, existence or being alive. Zoe is the biological fact of having life; thus zoe is unqualified life and this is key for Agamben. It exists prior to becoming part of the social sphere. Bios, as used by Agamben, is life but specifically a political life; it is that which has emerged from zoe. Unlike zoe, however, bios is linguistic and is where one exists in a collective political space. Bios is a politically qualified life (Murray & Whyte 2011, p. 61).

72 At various points in his text Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life Agamben draws on Schmitt to articulate his understanding of the sovereign and the role of the exception (1998, pp. 8–19).

73 It has been noted by Catherine Mills in her detailed analysis of Agamben and Foucault in Biopolitics that Agamben begins to veer away from or reconfigure some of his early theorising of the role of the centrality of the sovereign power and the state of exception in contemporary politics after Homo sacer and State of exception (Mills 2018, p. 117). I consider they are relevant and pertinent modes of understanding the roles of the exception within successive Australian governments’ refugee policies and I do at points throughout the thesis discuss the blurred boundaries of sovereign power and governmentality as working concepts.

Bare life (or nuda vita in Italian, which also translates to ‘naked life’) is neither of these but the space between them. It is what is produced by the split between zoe and bios. Using the logic of Agamben, one cannot return to zoe as it is a pre-linguistic condition. Hence if one is abandoned politically by the state, one does not return to zoe nor does one continue to exist as bios, given that a qualified or political life is no longer able to be lived. What exists then is bare life, which represents the crisis of the political, where one has been stripped of certain rights and yet is still ‘living’ within the political sphere where one can be punished by law.

The space between zoe and bios, when understood as bare life, is experienced when one exists in Agamben’s ‘state of exception’, which is the third concept I discuss here. This state or space occurs during an exception in the law, where there is a suspension of law by the sovereign power.74 It is a space where the government or sovereign power deems a suspension of law in order to facilitate the enactment of that which is deemed as crucial to, for example, national security. Given certain social or political circumstances, the government has the capacity to suspend certain laws or civil liberties by declaring a state of emergency. The conditions, however, are contingent on a number of variables deemed relevant by any given government. A contemporary example is the counter-terrorist laws developed and implemented by Western democracies since the September 11 attacks in the US. Agamben identifies the ‘military order’ used to create counter-terrorist laws as constituting an exception (2005a, p. 3). The order was issued by the US President on 13 November 2001, authorising the ‘indefinite detention’ of any ‘noncitizens’ suspected of involvement in terrorist activities (Agamben 2005a, p. 3). I suggest such an order is a clear example of a government using the suspension of law on the basis that certain conditions exist to qualify such a suspension. Here the state acts as a sovereign power.

74 At points within my thesis I use the terms ‘state of exception’ and ‘space of exception’. For my purposes I define the ‘state of exception’ as a condition of being that has been created by the sovereign power (or government, as discussed in the body of the text). The ‘space of exception’ I define as a conceptual or physical space which seeks to create bare life. Thus, a detained asylum seeker exists in a ‘state of exception’ as they are relegated to a bare life; however, the Immigration Detention Centre is a ‘space of exception’ as it both contains and creates the ‘state of exception’ and the resulting quality of a bare life existence.

To exemplify the suspension of law within an Australia context, I look to a legal case which was used to indefinitely detain an individual in a space outside of the law. In the case of Al- Kateb v. Godwin (2004), the High Court of Australia ruled to allow the indefinite detention of an asylum seeker named Ahmed al-Kateb, whose refugee application had been denied (Al-Kateb v. Godwin 2004). Whilst al-Kateb was found to not be a genuine refugee by Australian authorities, he was willing to be returned to Kuwait. Due to international non- cooperation, he could not be returned to his country of prior citizenship (al-Kateb was Palestinian-born and living in Kuwait before coming to Australia seeking asylum). It was deemed that indefinite detention was an appropriate action for managing his life, given that the High Court did not have a legal precedent on how to proceed.

Indefinite detention occupies a contentious relation to the law within Australia as whilst it is not considered standard practice inside the law, it is executed in an alarming number of cases. The Al-Kateb v. Godwin case is one scenario pertaining to asylum seekers. To give another example that speaks to Agamben’s theorising of the government’s capacity to selectively decide when and under what circumstances to deem an exception to the law or legal precedent, I turn to the ‘unfit to stand trial’ scenario. There are a number of cases involving Indigenous Australians being indefinitely held in prison due to their cognitive inability to testify (Australian Law Reform Commission 2017). Deemed unfit to stand trial, those charged can spend more time in prison than the maximum penalty legislated for the crime they have been charged with. For example, in one case the Australian Human Rights Commission found an Indigenous Australian man deemed unfit to stand trial had been in detention for over four years despite a maximum criminal penalty of 12 months’ imprisonment for the alleged crime (Australian Law Reform Commission 2017). These people exist in a state of exception; they are not protected by the state and are punished by the law without trial.

In the case of a stateless person in Australia, indefinite and mandatory detention can be implemented through a suspension in law as evident in the Al-Kateb v. Godwin case. Within Agamben’s framework, I argue that when people such as al-Kateb are held in government detention for an undefined period with no charges laid, they come to exist within a state of

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exception.75 Further, in Agamben’s terms, through the state of exception they are relegated to exist in a state of bare life where they have been abandoned by a sovereign power yet are not free of the law and in fact detained by the state. My brief outline of what is a complex legal scenario reveals how Agamben’s concept of bare life comes to exist where the law cannot offer protection and thus enforces arbitrary indefinite detention. The enactor of the sovereign power, the government, is not willing to endow the rights of the citizen on the detained asylum seeker. Thus, this scenario stands as an example of Agamben’s state of exception and the concept of inclusive exclusion working to create bare life.76

Within the framework of my thesis, people seeking asylum are people who are forced to leave the country in which they are a citizen or stateless person, and thus become non- citizens in other parts of the world.77 Unable to return ‘home’, asylum seekers and stateless people rely on another nation to ‘host’ them and award them protection and safe haven. A refugee camp or an immigration processing centre may well be where a refugee will live as they seek asylum. Agamben asserts that ‘the camp’ or detention centre is a physical manifestation where the state of exception can reach its limit point. Within the camp or detention centre, the refugee or person seeking asylum does not have the same legal rights as a citizen of the host nation yet are expected to act within that nation’s laws.

75 Of interest to my discussion of the Al-Kateb v. Godwin case is the recent High Court Case, Plaintiff M47/2018 v. Minister for Home Affairs & Anor, where a similar legal scenario is playing out. Asylum seeker M47 (they are referred to by this as their name cannot be published), who arrived by plane in January 2010, has been held in detention for 9 years due to an inability to confirm their identity or place of birth. This case is current and speaks to the ongoing functioning of the government acting to keep people in a state of bare life due to lacking a precedent. Like the al-Kateb case, this ruling effectively sees the government acting outside of the law by continuing the indefinite detention of M47; M47 clearly remains held in a state of exception (High Court of Australia 2018).

76 It is also worth noting that some ‘citizens’ are not awarded all ‘legal protections’ or do not ‘count equally’ within the consensus/polis. High incarceration rates of Indigenous Australian men stands as an example of this. In 2017 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners accounted for 27% of the total Australian prisoner population. The total Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in Australia aged 18 years and over in 2017 was ‘approximately 2% of the Australian population aged 18 years and over’ (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). Such disproportionate numbers are indicative of the inequalities of being ‘counted’ even when technically a citizen.

77 The Rohingya are an example of stateless people. They are a Muslim minority in Myanmar who have been fleeing violence in Myanmar since the 1990s (UNHCR 2019).

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If we apply this concept to the Australian experience, then people seeking asylum are mandatorily detained in Immigration Detention Centres until they receive refugee status from the government. The length of time this process will take is generally an unknown quantity and indeed is often stymied by administrative tactics of delay. As such, whilst in detention people seeking asylum are stripped of the usual rights of an Australian citizen and forced to exist within a state of exception. In contrast to Agamben, I argue that this positioning does not totally exclude the refugee from political life per se; it more specifically shuts down their capacity to have any perceived agency within it or enact the rights of a citizen. However, if they break the law from within this state of exception, they can be punished.78

With reference to administrative tactics of delay, which I discuss at various points throughout this thesis, it is worth considering how they are structurally part of the immigration detention system. A regime where people are referred to by numbers and where queuing for basic amenities such as a toilet or breakfast can take hours reveals such tactics as an integral part of an apparatus of oppression. It serves to remind the asylum seeker in detention that they are not protected by the law, yet are wholly dependent on the state which manages the rule of law. Such tactics of indefinite detention function to push the detained asylum seeker towards a quality of bare life. They are consistently reminded of their dependence on a system which strategically condemns them to a life that is not valued as worth preserving beyond the most basic of physical existence.

A contemporary example of this structural enforcement of bare life and exclusion has been playing out in Australian Immigration Detention Centres on Nauru and Manus Island. Boochani’s recent publication No friend but the mountains outlines the administrative

78 A recent example of this in relation to the indefinite detention of people seeking asylum is the September 2018 ‘riots’ at Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre in Western Australia. After an attempted suicide by a detainee who had previously been denied medical care for mental health issues, fires were lit inside the facility and major unrest occurred. Police were mobilised in response to regain control of the centre. The Australian Government Border Force spokesperson, whilst refusing to give details of the incident, did say they would ‘take all appropriate steps to stamp out such activity and if criminal offences have occurred, they will be referred to police’ (Carmody & Meachim 2018). Thus the detainees, whilst excluded from the law and any protections from it, are still culpable if seen to have ‘broken’ the law. As such, whilst the state of exception holds these detainees outside of the law, they are not ‘free’ of the law.

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tactics he and his fellow asylum seekers have been subject to as part of the system of cruelty in which they are incarcerated for seeking asylum in Australia (Boochani & Tofighian 2018). His book, in the form of a novel, details the corporate services’ enforced conditions of incarceration and how this serves to create bare life in a refugee population.79 Boochani gives countless examples of the conditions of detention which humiliate and degrade asylum seekers, such as the endless queues for limited food, medication, phones and toilets which are usually overflowing beyond being usable. His assertion is that such a system of queuing for necessities ensures the detainees become ‘reduced to an animal in order to survive’ (Boochani & Tofighian 2018, p. 232). Very succinctly, Boochani describes what I consider the tactics of structural exclusion in the following passage:

The atmosphere in the prison is constituted by micro-level and macro-level disciplinary measures designed to create animosity between prisoners. Hatred runs through every prisoner. In the prison, hatred makes prisoners more insular. The weight of hatred is so intense that the prisoners will suddenly collapse on a dark night and give up resisting … surrender to a system that induces and amplifies hatred … and accept refoulment (Boochani & Tofighian 2018, p. 165).

Boochani here describes how the constant exclusion and unending discipline of the Immigration Detention Centre system are aimed at killing any sense of agency within the detainee in order to ensure compliance. The end result, according to Boochani, is a coerced surrender which sees an asylum seeker sent back to the country they have escaped from (Boochani & Tofighian 2018). This results in indefinite detention where one is condemned to live a bare life in Agamben’s terms, or alternatively the acceptance of refoulment. The system places the asylum seeker in a space where cruelty and exclusion are the key operative mechanisms.

79 I refer to the work of Boochani from within the Manus prison at various points throughout this thesis as I consider his activism whilst detained integral to the increase in understanding of the cruelty of the Australian immigration detention system. Whilst not the sole reason, his location inside the prison as a detainee gives his stories special standing with those who wish to challenge the government narrative and as such allows for a connection to be made with the Australian polis and international human rights activists. I note that Boochani is not the only detainee or ex-detainee working in this way.

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The asylum seeker held in detention is left on the threshold of the law and life. They are at once excluded from the law yet are not ‘outside’ or ‘free’ of the law either. Instead they are both at the mercy of the law and have no recourse to it. This notion of being on the threshold, or in a state of exception, seeks to push a person such as an asylum seeker in indefinite detention to a bare life existence in Agamben’s terms. Thus, detainees in Australian Immigration Detention Centres are without political life. Instead they are expected to accept bare life where their existence becomes little more than the bodies in which they must live. However, asylum seekers in detention have actively resisted bare life through their protests for political recognition. As such, whilst Agamben has provided a salient model for framing the political exclusion of people seeking asylum from the polis, it is Rancière’s framework of dissensus which opens the discussion of agency and contestation against bare life taking place within spaces of detention.

4.4 Politics, Contestation and Bare Life Politics As I have discussed in Chapter Two, Rancière conceptualises the space of politics and the political as one of resistance or what he calls dissensus. He refuses to align the notion of the political and politics with governmentality, state actions or administrations. It is important to distinguish Rancière’s articulation of the political from both Agamben’s and Butler’s. It has been noted that Butler is rarely explicit in her conceptualisation of politics or the political (Chambers & Carvey 2008, p. 9). Whilst it can be difficult to pin down a focused articulation of the political, it is reasonable to contend that she rejects the notion of politics as something produced out of consensus. Butler, I would suggest, acknowledges the political sphere (especially in the context of Western democracy) as a space of consensus, but for her this consensus is contingent on it being in dispute. Thus, for Butler, politics takes place within the polis but it cannot exclude forms of agency and resistance undertaken by the dispossessed (Butler 2015, p. 79). This differs from Rancière’s rejection of the consensus as the political sphere and his allocation of the space outside of consensus as being the space where politics takes place. Further, unlike Agamben, Butler does not consider those outside of the ‘qualified’ political sphere as relegated to bare life and indeed makes claim to the capacity of those people ‘disaggregated from the plural’ as maintaining political agency which can manifest as resistance (2015, p. 77). Indeed, she claims that those outside

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political qualification, such as stateless people, through their resistance reveal the policing boundaries of the polis (Butler 2015, p. 70).

Agamben locates politics in the relation between the politically qualified subject and the sovereign power. Counter to this, Rancière’s concept of politics relates not specifically to the functioning of the sovereign or the state, but to that which works to reconfigure the normative social space through acts that create a dispute in what is considered sensible (2010, p. 37). Jessica Whyte (2009, p. 154) addresses a claim by Rancière that Agamben’s concept of bare life collapses the space of politics into a pure power relation between sovereignty and bare life (Rancière 2004, p. 302). In consideration of both theorists’ positions, Whyte (2009, p. 154) notes that Rancière reads within Agamben’s state of exception that there ‘is no space for contesting the borders of the political, and thus no politics at all’. Rancière rightly asserts that Agamben reduces politics to a relation between the sovereign power and an individual life, given that for Rancière politics is that which occurs outside of this ‘proper’ sovereign power and citizen relationship. Indeed, for Agamben, the only space outside of this relation is through ‘form-of-life’ where the political and biological are fused and no longer defined in a citizen–state–sovereign relation (2000, p. 3; Whyte 2013, p. 24).80 Rancière further claims that politics ‘is not a specific sphere of political life, separate from other spheres’ (2010, p. 70) and it is this understanding which informs my use of politics and the political within this thesis.81 As I have argued previously in Chapter Two, politics for Rancière is the space where ‘surplus’ identities, those who are outside of the distribution of the sensible, speak and try to be heard. Thus, I consider the political subject need not be considered a pre-existing collectivity of politically qualified individuals as per Agamben. Instead, they are a surplus subject outside of the consensus

80 For Agamben ‘form-of-life’ results from ‘intensification’ of bare life and leads to an inevitable or unavoidable collision where a new form of political community erupts, embodying his concept of form-of-life (2000, pp. 3– 4). Form-of-life is a life where the political and biological are fused and no longer defined in a citizen–state– sovereign relation. However, Whyte and others question how one can conceive of a praxis that would allow form-of-life to come to be, and I too wonder how such a seeming ‘catastrophe’ of bare life, if that is what it must be, would play out (Bailey 2009; Butler 2015; Owens 2009; Whyte 2009). Whilst my focus here is not the concept of form-of-life, it reveals a ‘weakness in his thought’ (Whyte 2013, p. 3) and discounts the concrete politics of people’s struggles for recognition, both historically and in the present.

81 I would also contend that this quote from Rancière is applicable to an understanding of Butler’s working with the political as a sphere which does not exist in exception of those who are not a ‘legitimised’ part of it. This understanding is elucidated throughout her text Notes toward a performative theory of assembly (Butler 2015).

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which disrupts the consensual space they are excluded from each time they speak to be heard.

Bare life Agamben’s concept of bare life serves to construct a life that is at the threshold of political subjectivity (1998, p. 8) and it is only the recognised citizen who lives a politically qualified life. Rancière, Butler and Whyte question if this concept risks shutting down a sense of potential agency for the bare life subject or those who live a politically unqualified life, and I agree with this concern. It becomes problematic when analysing political resistance, especially in the case of those relegated by the sovereign to a bare life existence such as refugees and asylum seekers living in camps. Similarly, Butler is critical of Agamben’s conceptualisation of the political sphere as only available to the politically qualified members of the polis (2015, p. 80). She suggests that his ‘vocabulary’ only articulates modes of agency as present within the political sphere; thus she expands her understanding of the political sphere to include the ‘stateless, the occupied, and the disenfranchised’ as they act against the dominant consensus (Butler 2015, p. 80). Thus, both Butler and Rancière see politics as more than that which is solely located within the consensus. Unlike Butler, Rancière considers it as specifically located outside of the consensus, as that which disrupts the consensual space of the polis. It is this articulation which I find most pertinent to my discussion of detained people seeking asylum enacting protest.

It is the moments of rupture that are of central interest within this thesis, as I argue that the actions within Australian Immigration Detention Centres function as an example where bare life is in fact resisted. Whilst Agamben provides a highly valuable theoretical understanding for diagnosing the present state of the sovereign exception I, like others, note the disconnect of his theory from concrete political action (Bailey 2009; Butler 2015; Owens 2009; Whyte 2013). Whilst bare life may be the goal of Immigration Detention Centres or camps, it is where I perceive some detainees enact political agency through their protests. As I will discuss at length in Chapter Seven, during August 2002 more than 100 asylum seekers detained at the Woomera IRPC protested via actions including sewing their lips shut, hunger strikes and digging graves in which they laid their bodies (Whyte 2007). Thus, my contention is that Agamben’s theoretical constructions of the state of exception and

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bare life are pertinent for my discussion of the position that people seeking asylum in Australia in detention occupy and speak to my perception of the denial of certain citizen ‘rights’. However, they risk overlooking the capacity for resistance by asylum seekers in detention, as well as other bare life subjects.

Rancière directly addresses Agamben’s work in his essay ‘Who is the subject of the rights of man’ (2010). Agamben’s focus on the bare life individual and the camp as its limit point proves problematic for Rancière as it discounts the potential for politics to manifest within those politically unqualified people designated to bare life (2010). My reading of this key difference is that Rancière requires the potential of the political through dissensus to be attributable to all sectors of the community. Conversely, Agamben divides the people into those who are politically qualified and those who are not; those who are not are deemed to have no voice.82 He suggests that nothing short of major civil dispute constitutes a ‘political’ rupture (Agamben 2005b). Such a proposition overlooks the risk of any new order arising from this rupture structuring itself along power structures that are similar or mimic the previous regime. It further fails to recognise the power of small or ongoing disruptions which may affect the social order. Conversely, for Rancière, those who are considered as having no space to speak and be heard within the distribution of the sensible can mobilise their own politics when they struggle to make a space for their demands to be recognisable. In light of this, Agamben’s notion of a politically qualified life being aligned in such stark contrast with bare life risks overlooking the inequalities inherent within the democratic consensus that would contain his politically qualified citizens.

82Agamben and Rancière disagree on what constitutes a political dispute. In contrast to Rancière, Agamben’s notion of political subjectivity can be considered as denying the possibility of political contestation (Whyte 2009, p. 156). This is evident in his placement of those considered to exist as bare life subjects in a space where their capacity to be speaking subjects is resolutely blocked by the sovereign ban (Agamben 1998). For him, any democratic dispute needs to be understood as the ‘possibility of stasis or civil war’ (Agamben 2005b, p. 58). This correlates with his assertion that a new form of politics as articulated in his form-of-life concept will only be achieved by an intensification of bare life (Agamben 2000, p. 3). Such an intensification I suggest would necessarily involve a situation of political struggle where a majority of citizens are pushed to live the inclusive exclusion of bare life as they fight to overthrow the sovereign and the governmental status quo. This is a major civil disruption which I contend implies that within Agamben’s framework small acts of rebellion cannot be considered a site of politics, disruption or change. Yet large acts of civil disturbance which Agamben considers the path to political transformation are at risk of structuring a new order that mimics the previous regime. His argument that bare life can become the space of a new form of politics is further problematic as the risk of death is inherent in an extreme physical manifestation of bare life.

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Rancière’s positioning of the political as that which is surplus to the consensus and thus aggravates the distribution of the sensible is key to understanding the necessity of micro- disruptions as functioning in a manner which ensures democracy is malleable. Rancière’s conceptualisation suggests that politics, when defined as dissensus and moments of disruption, becomes an essential part of any ongoing democratic process. Thus, dissensus becomes a space where people who are partitioned within unequal social spaces can challenge the consensus as they act to carve out a space to be heard and be visible. Dissensus is essential in a democracy as it allows normative perceptions within the distribution of the sensible to be disrupted and shifted. I consider that Rancière articulates this potential for movement and a redistribution of equality within the consensus through his discussion of surplus subjects and their political struggles for recognition, as I have discussed in Chapter Two.

My discussion thus far has explained that Agamben, Butler and Rancière diverge on their conceptualisations of the political. However, within this thesis I work with each theorist when addressing the functioning of the political in both protests by detained asylum seekers and performance art within public discours. My reading and engagement with Agamben informs my analysis of the position detained asylum seekers occupy in terms of their relation to the law, sovereign power, society and the nation-state. I use Agamben’s concept of bare life to exemplify the limit point of this relation with a qualification that he overlooks the potential of resistance from the detained subject. Thus, contra Agamben, I perceive the asylum seekers detained in Immigration Detention Centres as maintaining potential agency, which is expressed through their documented protests. Similarly, whilst Agamben uses the phrase ‘politically qualified’ citizen when discussing who occupies citizen-based legitimacy within the polis, I digress from his framework when using the word ‘citizen’ as legitimacy is not equally distributed throughout the citizen body. Through Butler’s thinking in relation to grievability, my thesis locates people seeking asylum as excluded from the polis and not recognised as grievable lives. To analyse the actions of detained asylum seekers who protested through acts such as lip-sewing and hunger strikes, I turn to Rancière to unpack what I consider to be moments of political resistance and dissensus against bare life. However, the idea that politics takes place when those who do not enjoy a fully politically

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qualified life try to be heard is crucial to using Rancière’s dissensus, and as such informs my reading of the political and the politics of art and activism.

4.5 Framing and Deeming In Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence Butler (2006, pp. 66–68) suggests that when populations are framed as ungrievable, this is done not necessarily by way of sovereign decree or judicial judgement, but often indirectly through government rulings and the upholding of social norms. Butler rightly problematises the matter of who makes these decisions which exist outside of the law, as discussed earlier in relation to al-Kateb. Butler (2006, p. 59) looks at the role of ‘indirect rule through government’ where rights are suspended. She argues that the act of deeming something necessary, as well as the government administrators that do this deeming, represents an overreach of bureaucratic power (Butler 2006, p. 59). Questioning the notion that sovereignty exists prior to governmentality (as does Agamben), Butler (2006, p. 59) is concerned that whilst government officials are ‘part of this apparatus of governmentality’ their power to ‘deem’ someone dangerous and constitute them effectively as such, is a sovereign power. In light of this, sovereign power becomes part of the apparatus of governmentality effectively placing certain elements of governing outside of the law in particular circumstances.

Agamben similarly considers the relation between sovereign power and the state’s role of deeming an exception to the law. He claims that the sovereign power, which once functioned outside of the state, is becoming less and less distinguishable from the state in modern politics given that the state takes on actions traditionally relegated to the role of the sovereign power (Agamben 2005a, p. 2). Thus, government administrators now enact policies usually reserved for the domain of a sovereign power which were enacted by the use of executive powers through declaring a state of emergency. Agamben claims that in modern politics, government bureaucrats can make decisions which place lives in a state of exception and thus this space exists outside of the law (2005a, p. 2). Thus, where these decisions are made at a level of government administration by the state, what was once an act of sovereign decree becomes an act of governmentality.

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This understanding of deeming developed by both Butler and Agamben underlies the act of mandatory detention of people seeking asylum in Australian. For example, in Australia it is immigration and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officers who make decisions about the perceived safety of a stateless person with regards to national security. This judgement of safety affects whether the person will be accepted as a genuine refugee and allowed to stay Australian or not.83 As in the case of Al-Kateb v. Godwin noted earlier, although not of ‘concern’ to ASIO al-Kateb was deemed as not a genuine refugee, yet due to international non-cooperation could not be returned to his country of prior citizenship. Thus, it was further deemed that indefinite detention was an appropriate action for managing his life given that the High Court did not have a precedent to cover such a legal scenario (Al-Kateb v. Godwin 2004). Indefinite detention is not considered ‘standard practice’ in Australia, yet the Act under which al-Kateb was detained did not in express terms address what action to take in relation to an ‘illegal alien’ who cannot be removed from the country (Burnside 2013). Whilst there were various subsequent hearings and al- Kateb was eventually given a visa to stay in Australia, without the support of pro bono legal representation who challenged the High Court decision he may well never have been released from immigration detention (‘Escape from a life in limbo’ 2016). Such a case evidences that whilst this action is framed as an exception, it replicates the role of the sovereign power where the decision to detain a person is taken on by government officials, which effectively places the government outside of the law.

Butler and Agamben, within their separate discussions of sovereignty, approach this suspension of law as something that both enacts and creates sovereign power. Both theorists consider the suspension of law as a tactic of government for creating a space where exception can become the rule and further the creation of new norms. For Agamben, when one is subject to existing legally in a state of exception, one is relegated to bare life. This state of exception sits both inside and outside of law, inside and outside of sovereignty:

83 As a point of interest, the Australian Human Rights Commission stated that as of 6 August 2013, ‘52 refugees faced indefinite detention in Australia because ASIO deemed them a security risk’ (Australian Human Rights Commission 2013).

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[T]he state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law (Agamben 2005a, p. 85).

Thus, the rule of the exception has become indistinguishable from the rule of law, allowing a suspension of law to become a norm within government administration. Whilst the exception is technically operative outside the law, it has come to act as a defining factor creating a blurry zone of indistinction between that which is the law and that which is an exception yet is used like the law by government actors (Agamben 2005). It is this use of the exception in a normative governing capacity that allows actions such as mandatory and indefinite detention to take place. Such detention occurs regardless of the legal standing of such actions within either domestic or international law.

Summary The mandatory detention and treatment of people seeking asylum in Australia function as evidence that norms and policies exist which seek to exclude the lives of asylum seekers from the polis. Successive Australian governments have created policies pertaining to the management of people seeking asylum in Australia, including mandatory detention and censorship. These policies and censorship are integral to creating a state of exception in which detainees are relegated to live a bare life. Such exclusion further acts to create the lives of those detained as ungrievable, in Butler’s terms. However, as I discuss throughout this thesis, the state fails to create bare life as detainees resist this status through their protests from within the camp.

Acts such as censorship and denial of access to legal counsel allow the government to influence the general public’s perception of people seeking asylum. The exclusion of people seeking asylum from the Australian polis ensures that the incarcerated become ungrievable lives and, further, these lives become perceived as a security threat. This threat is not only constructed via government officials naming asylum seekers ‘illegals’, for example, but the sheer act of containing them in Immigration Detention Centres, which operate as prisons,

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creates the perception of these people as not ‘safe’ or ‘worthy’ of being part of the Australian polis. Such rendering of lives as ungrievable, and thus invisible, further positions those lives as outside the polis.

As I shall go on to discuss in later chapters, when considered through Rancière’s articulation of the political, many detainees are able to and indeed do enact their agency to create a space for politics from within the Immigration Detention Centres. These acts of agency and resistance become distributed amongst the polis through various ‘non-official’ sources, which allows the political reality of their situation to become part of the public discourse. Such dispersion is integral to the functioning of dissensus as that which disrupts the distribution of the sensible with alternative perceptions of understanding. Firstly, however, I will discuss the issue of nationalism, which sits at the heart of the functioning of the Australian government’s immigration detention policies and practices.

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Chapter Five: Nationalism, Censorship and Exclusion

But I do not see myself in this picture. I only see a refugee, someone whose identity has been taken from him. Just bare life, standing beyond the borders of Australia waiting and staring (Boochani 2018a).

Introduction This chapter considers the way in which the Australian polis utilises the exclusion of people seeking asylum as part of the construction of its national identity. The Australian coastline has become part of the national narrative, with asylum seekers who cross this line by boat represented as a ‘threat’ to ‘the Australian’ way of life and as a disruption to the cultural and national identity.84 This chapter explores how people seeking asylum in Australia exist as a security threat in the national imagination and that this is grounded in a deep-seated anxiety toward the racialised other. I outline that the element of race cannot be ignored within the context of Australian nation-building, given the country’s colonial history and treatment of the Indigenous population and its racialised immigration policies. Thus, this chapter focuses on the construction of people seeking asylum as a racialised security threat. It locates their subsequent exclusion from the polis as central to the state-led task of nation- building. Parr has at various points addressed issues of nationalism and Australian identity within his performance art and I discuss this in reference to the ongoing project of nation- building in Australia.

The exclusion of people seeking asylum from the polis has been achieved by a number of measures. Immigration Detention Centres, as I discuss throughout this thesis, remove asylum seekers physically and also conceptually from the polis. Further, images and information with regards to asylum seekers and their incarceration, their boat journey to Australia and their stories of hardship were and continue to be subject to government suppression and control. I address this issue of censorship and the central role it plays in

84 As discussed in Chapter One, people seeking asylum and arriving by boat are specifically mandatorily and indefinitely detained under section 189 of the Migration Act 1958. Any person in Australia without a valid visa must be detained and placed in immigration detention. Whilst asylum seekers who arrive by other means such as an airplane can also be detained, it is not mandatory and there are specific circumstances under which this may occur (Asylum Seeker Resource Centre 2019; Australian Human Rights Commission 2016).

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creating the narrative of who can and who cannot be part of the Australian nation. The exclusion of people seeking asylum from the Australian citizen body is a focus in this chapter.

5.1 Imagining the Australian Nation Nationalism To begin my discussion on nationalism in the context of both Parr’s work and the exclusion of people seeking asylum from the Australian polis, I consider the way in which nationalist practices serve to create the Australian nation. Hage (2000, p. 28), in his book White nation: fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society, suggests that nationalist practices assume the following: an image of national space; an image of the nationalists themselves as the masters of this national space; and an image of the ‘ethnic/racial other’ as a mere object within this space. Thus, the nation is understood as a conceptual space built collectively over time and experienced by a population.

Whilst the space which occupies ‘nation’ is conceptual, it is equally represented by certain physical realities such as land or sea borders which contain the people belonging to the nation. It is, as Benedict Anderson asserts, an ‘imagined community’ (1991, p. 4). Anderson claims that the concept of nationalism is difficult to define or analyse as it has evolved as a phenomenon over time and because we as citizens are deeply enmeshed within its shifting structure (1991, p. 4). Anderson does, however, offer a definition of the nation which locates it as an imagined political community that is both ‘inherently limited and sovereign’ (1991, pp. 6–7). It is limited by boundaries created, both physical and conceptual, and it is sovereign in that it maintains political sovereignty inclusive of physical characteristics (land mass, for example) and its citizens.85 Whilst these limits may be elastic, they are essential as that which creates boundaries, especially with regards to other nations. Anderson further claims that the nation-based community is imagined because even those belonging to ‘the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even know of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (1991, pp. 6–7).

85 As noted earlier in this thesis including in Chapters One and Four, when I use the term ‘citizen’ I acknowledge that rights and privilege are not equally distributed between all citizens of Australia. I also note that the concept of ‘citizen’ is bound to the nation by definition.

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Central to Anderson’s discussion is the premise that nationhood is primarily imagined. It is a community that imagines itself as bound together and the boundaries which contain it are elastic and mutable. The boundaries are not static, yet they still ‘hold it together’. Pheng Cheah, however, suggests that Anderson is somewhat Eurocentric in his discussion. For Cheah, Anderson tends to overlook the experience of the subaltern in his analysis, thus failing to consider adequately the notion of nation in postcolonial states (Cheah 2003 p. 4). Cheah asserts that our studies into nationalism, through theorists such as Anderson, are limited by their focus on Europe and the North and are not wholly applicable to the experience of all nation states (2003). For Cheah (2003, p. 4) nationalism is philosophically bound up in multiple concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘culture’ and ‘organic life’. As such, the national makeup and how the concept of nation is mobilised will vary between cultures, countries and peoples.

To consider this element of difference which Cheah raises, I would like to look at the drive behind a nationalist sentiment. An example may be seen within a colonising state where there is both a tacit and an explicit understanding of nation that revolves around taking over, staking a claim, maintaining control and ensuring coherent or assimilated cultural identities even in a ‘multicultural’ country.86 Alternatively, for a postcolonial state that understanding of nation may be about banding together in uprising, struggle and maintaining some form of autonomy against the outside or colonising forces being resisted. The nationalist drive may similarly be utilised to overthrow the state internally, resulting in a civil disturbance or a civil war. These examples call on a sense of ‘we the people’ and a sense of national belonging; however, they originate from different social spaces and positions of power with different intentions and outcomes. This concept of unity or ‘the people’ is central to nationalism. Cheah refers to the notion of ‘the people’ as an idea of a ‘self-actualizing force that can transcend limitations imposed upon it’ (2003, p. 4). He rightly questions such an idea and the capacity of ‘universal freedom’ to be ‘actualized in a

86 I note that even within a multicultural country such as Australia assimilation is key to the functioning of the national identity and is an ongoing process. Therefore, ethnic or cultural difference in relation to what is considered ‘Australian’ or acceptable within the understanding of the nation becomes socially problematic as the ethnic or cultural ‘other’ will be deemed as not having assimilated and thus outside of the social order. This speaks to a blurring between the concepts of racism and xenophobia, where the prejudices are not necessarily rooted in ‘race’ but in cultural difference. Balibar and Wallerstein speak to the notion of cultural racism in their text Race, nation, class: ambiguous identities (1991).

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concrete proper body’ (Cheah 2003, p. 4). Thus, I have used the notion of ‘we the people’ here not as something that is concrete, but as a concept that is understood as an element of nationalist rhetoric. Language such as this is part of the discourse that constructs the sense of nation and a national identity, including within an Australian context.

Cheah encourages the discussion of nationalism as a combination of multiple concepts, or to use his phrase, a ‘constellation of concepts’ (2003, p. 4). This highlights the importance of moving beyond Anderson’s potentially simplified idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. Cheah calls on the reader to consider the ideology that functions within the creation of the nation and its role in relation to the state (2003). The nation with its elastic boundaries is not a free-flowing idea that changes easily, nor does it hear the voices of all its constituents. As I have discussed with regards to the idea of consensus, there are always surplus voices who are not allotted a space of equal visibility to other constituents of the nation. Further, Cheah considers there to be a potential split between the nation and the state, and that nationalism is a ‘reactive’ movement to ensure this connection is maintained (2003, p. 4). Thus, the nation is central to legitimatising the modern state. Policies that are promoted as being in the interest of recognised constituents are part of solidifying and necessitating the idea of nation. Further, almost by definition, national identity relies on the exclusion of specific voices as part of the operative functions which construct that identity.

The nation, the state, sovereignty and Australia On the premise of this split between nation and state, I would like to discuss the distinguishing elements of these concepts. Claire Sutherland contends that when discussing nationalism and the state:

[T]he nation refers to the cognitive, legitimating basis for authority, whereas the state embodies the territorial and institutional dimensions of authority (Sutherland 2012, p. 10).

Thus, the nation, its ideology and its rhetoric justify and legitimise state action. I would suggest this may explain why key actors within the modern state, such as politicians and lobby groups, promote a sense of nationhood. By utilising rhetoric which filters through the media into public discourse, particular values or ideas are deployed as being in the national

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interest and political goals are served. As Sutherland (2012, p. 10) argues, the state cannot exist without the nation or a national identity, but the nation can exist without the state. Further, with reference to Cheah, the understandings of nation, sovereignty and state functioning are largely Eurocentric.

In light of this, the link between the nation, the state and sovereignty is largely taken for granted in popular discourse within an Australian context, and the role of ideology is overlooked.87 Whilst it is useful to understand the global world as composed of sovereign nation-states, as Sutherland argues conceptually this is not a given (2012, p. 10). The state exists as a governing body, whilst the nation is a collective of values, beliefs and thus essentially an ideology. Therefore, the state and nation may or may not work in tandem. It is the state which needs a national construct to legitimate control, whilst the nation can exist without or even in opposition to the state. The example of an uprising of ‘nationals’ against state power, as discussed above in relation to Cheah, reveals this dynamic. This approach is useful to my discussion of how successive Australian governments have used nationalist rhetoric to establish an ideological support base from its recognised constituents to implement policies such as the mandatory detention of people seeking asylum. The Australian government utilises nationalist rhetoric to create an ‘us and them’ dynamic. Such a polarising tactic is part of the mechanisms that garner and maintain support for state policies relating to the indefinite and mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Thus, from a perspective of rights, nationalist rhetoric in this instance is deployed via public discourse to allow state-sanctioned violence within Australia.

Australia, as a former British colony, conquered the Indigenous people of Australia and violently imparted the British rule of law and way of life. In her book The white possessive:

87 It is worth considering here the case of Indigenous Australians, who never ceded sovereignty to the British colonisers who invaded their country. Irene Watson in her article ‘Aboriginal laws: the sovereignty of terra nullius’ explicates that the state continues to use European notions of sovereignty to overpower Aboriginal laws (2002). Whilst I will not provide a detailed account of the problematic legal status of terra nullius here, I note that Indigenous Australians express a different understanding of sovereignty to that of European colonising states. For example, Watson states that ‘Aboriginal Law holds the position of the European idea of sovereignty’ (2002). The concept of law in this instance is not one that is enforced by arms, nor is it exclusive in its ‘embrace’ (Watson 2002). Here ‘law’ is a spiritual and ancestral connection to country and place, and this is lived through the people of the lands (Watson 2002). As such, it is clear that Australia as a sovereign nation-state exists in relation to a violent removal of Aboriginal Law and through this maintains its power over country.

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property, power and Indigenous sovereignty (2015) Moreton-Robinson speaks at length about what she terms the ‘white patriarchal sovereignty’ that is at the heart of Australian nationalism. White patriarchal sovereignty is a regime of power which in the context of Australia stems from the ‘illegal act of possession’ and thus is structurally embedded in the state and the judiciary (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 138). Basing her understanding of ‘Australia’ as something that was ‘taken’ from the Indigenous people and ‘illegally’ possessed by white Anglo people, she constructs an argument that this very concept of possession is central to Australia and its identity as a nation (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Further, the act of possession by the British, which dispossessed Indigenous Australians of their land and their lives, creates an ongoing sense of anxiety at the core of the Australian national identity (Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. 147). As Moreton-Robinson (2015, p. 147) states, ‘the omnipresence of Indigenous sovereignty is part of the ontological condition that shapes patriarchal white sovereignty’s investment in itself and its anxiety about dispossession’. This anxiety of dispossession exists then in relation to Indigenous Australians never having ceded sovereignty and the white Anglo nation-state as a legitimising element of Australia as ‘sovereign’. Thus, ‘whiteness’ and race indelibly mark the cultural foundation of Australia as a nation and of how nationhood is experienced.

Given Indigenous Australians never ceded sovereignty to the British, the historical containment, killing and policies which have denied Indigenous Australians certain political rights illustrates that Australia, as a nation, is founded on the exclusion of those deemed ‘other’ or not ‘white’.88 As Perera (2007, p. 8) claims, Australia as a colony has a ‘collective narrative that affirms war and colonial conquest and reiterates the logic of empire’. Central to Australian national identity is the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and self- determination. Australia’s moves to sovereignty and Federation in 1901 were structured on a narrative of state-sanctioned violence and racism, with one of the first Commonwealth laws passed being the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. The key aim of this legislation was to limit non-white immigration to Australia, particularly Asian immigration, in order to preserve the predominance of the British within Australia (National Archives of Australia

88 I note that such policies and government practices are historically and structurally imbricated within Australia’s political system and are not enacted by just one party or ‘side’ of the political spectrum. I also note that at different times historically, immigration has been encouraged for specific ethnic groups.

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2019). In a contemporary frame, Australia’s sovereignty is enacted through state practices such as border protection policies, regional hegemony in the Pacific and military interventionism (Perera 2007, p. 3). Perera (2007, p. 4) outlines that key areas of national policy, such as the treatment of Indigenous Australians, immigration control and our relations in the Pacific region, are attempts to utilise forms of biopolitical intervention and governmentality to both manage the population and define citizenship and national identity. Perera (2007, p. 5) further links the Australian government’s attempts to contain or control the Indigenous population and any show of self-sovereignty to the biopolitical tactics used to consolidate national borders through immigration and refugee policy.89

In light of Perera’s discussion, the conceptualisation of an Australian nation has been built on the premise that there is a threat ‘outside’ the country’s physical boundaries and therefore border security is required to protect the nation. This fear of a threat from outside the borders of Australia is located within the anxiety of dispossession, when considered in relation to Indigenous Australians never having ceded sovereignty, as per Moreton- Robinson (2015). This deep-seated anxiety influences policies surrounding border protection, for example, and further plays out as racism towards non-Anglo migrants, specifically those constructed as non-white within this schema.90

Perera proposes that the human body becomes a site for the nation to perform its ‘stateness’ and in the context of contemporary Australia, one of these bodies or sites is that of the asylum seeker (2007, p. 5). This understanding informs my discussion of the treatment and exclusion of people who seek asylum in Australia, especially those who arrive via boat. What seems to be a disproportionate level of concern for boat arrivals was, and is, located in this anxiety of dispossession. Government rhetoric, administrative policies of exclusion, mandatory detention and censorship exemplify Australia’s acts of stateness and sovereign control over its borders through the racialised bodies of people seeking asylum.

89 The NTER addressed in Chapter Five is an example of biopolitical control over the lives of Indigenous Australians.

90 I note that the article ‘Anxieties of dispossession: whiteness, history, and Australia’s war in Vietnam’ by Alison Ravenscroft addresses this anxiety in relation to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. She considers this war to be a significant moment of re-inscription of Australian national identity as ‘white’ (Ravenscroft 2004).

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This practice of racialised exclusion began with the killing and containment of Indigenous Australians directly after the ‘illegal possession’ of Australia by British colonists.91 The Australian government continues to enact its sovereignty over what is essentially ‘stolen land’ through a show of force at its borders. Marketed within the public sphere as ‘stopping the boats’, the Australian government’s border protection policies serve to consolidate the Australian national identity by constructing, in this case the primarily Muslim, asylum seeker as the enemy (Perera 2007, p. 7).

Perera’s analysis is pertinent to my assertion that the construction of asylum seekers, specifically those who arrive by boat, is as that which must be excluded from the citizen body. John Howard, the Australian Liberal Party Prime Minister in 2001, publicly stated in relation to asylum seekers who arrive by boat, ‘(w)e will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’ (2001). Such a statement clearly capitalises on the rhetoric of nation-building. It illuminates precisely how the government called on an implicit sense of the nation (‘we’) and the underlying sense of control the administrative powers of the state exercise over who can become part of the Australian national body. His comment tacitly reinforces, firstly, who is to be excluded from the Australian citizen body and, secondly, the national geographical borders as physically vulnerable and in need of protection by the state. In line with Perera’s argument, such comments show the emphasis on the territoriality of the state, and similarly link the defence of national ground with the exercise of new mechanisms of ‘sovereign violence’ over the bodies both within and outside of its borders (Perera 2007, p. 7). Such acts of exclusion place particular bodies, identities and histories legitimately within the nation, whilst others become located as outside of that locus and thus the enemy.

91 Acts of exclusion which began during the occupation of Australia, such as forcing Indigenous Australians to live on missions, have not ceased. They continue to be enacted in a contemporary context. Welfare cards, high imprisonment rates, particularly amongst men, and military intervention on Indigenous communities as part of the NTER are a few examples of state-enacted ‘exceptional’ treatment of Indigenous Australians. The majority of Australian citizens are not subject to such treatment.

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5.2 Mike Parr and Representations of Everyday Nationalism Within his performance art, Parr has explored what it means to be an ‘Australian’ and the construction of nationalism. His interest in the Australian nation and migration is well evidenced in his collaboratively published book Bleed, bled, said (Storer 2006). The back cover of the book is an image of a 1940s Australian immigration brochure which was originally on ships carrying post-WWII refugees (Storer 2006) (Fig. 10). Whilst the publication itself is a series of discussions between Parr and other artists or critics, the focus on national immigration propaganda on the back cover speaks to his interest in the construction of his own identity as a white Australian male within the construct of the nation. The image shows an Anglo-appearing man and woman with their two children, all framed within a silhouette of Australia and the words ‘Australia and your future’ as a title.

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 10 Back cover of Bleed, bled, said (Storer 2006)

The image was part of the post-WWII immigration project undertaken by Australia to increase the population to ensure future prosperity. As Arthur Caldwell, Australian Minister for Immigration, announced in 1945: ‘Australia wants, and will welcome, new healthy citizens who are determined to become good Australians’ (Migration Heritage 2019).92 This notion of welcoming people who will become ‘good Australians’ resonates with the image in

92 This information comes from an archived website, ‘Objects in time’, published by the Migration Heritage Centre in New South Wales. It outlines two waves of post-WWII migration. The first intake began with Displaced Persons from Europe between 1947 and 1953 where the Australian Government assisted over 170,000 people to migrate to Australia. The second was Europeans arriving in the 1950s and 1960s, which consisted of people seeking employment and better living conditions. I include this for context to the contemporary issues I discuss throughout this chapter and thesis (Migration Heritage 2019).

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the shipping brochure of a ‘happy Anglo family’. Whilst the issue of migration during this period of Australian history is complex, this example reveals the message has always been clear that Australians are a specific ‘group’ of people with respect to what makes up the nation. Both tacit and explicit ideologies underpin the sense of national identity within Australia.

The works by Parr that my thesis analyses can be read as reflecting on nationalism and what it is to be Australian. His publication mentioned above prompts the spectator to consider the implications of Australian nationalism. Through various artistic tactics such as his inclusion of the Australian flag, explicit references to migrants and refugees, and his use of Australian dictionaries, Parr draws attention to the role of nationalism in everyday life. In his work Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) (2003), for example, the title itself is an active attempt to disrupt the popular narrative of Australian nationalism (Fig. 11). The phrase ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi’ points directly to the common chant expressing patriotic zeal sung at sporting matches. This chant is part of normative Australian masculinity, particularly as it is often chanted at men’s cricket matches where international teams compete. In Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) Parr places a small Australian flag in the stump that is his left arm which serves to disrupt the ‘proper’ placement and usage of signs of everyday nationalism. The flag highlights his disabled arm, placing Parr, as a white male body, outside of the patriarchal normative construct of able- bodied masculinity. Such a construct is inherently linked to the understanding of the Australian nation built on the back of hard-working Aussie ‘battlers’, who remain central to the colonial settler narrative of Australia. He has also sewn his face and bloodied his shirt, defacing the masculinity attached to both the flag and the chant which is the title of the work.

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Image subject to copyright

Fig. 11 Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) (2003)

Performance art such as Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) uses object displacement to speak to the concept and image of the Australian nation by seeking to question its validity and functioning. The absurdity such displacement constructs within the art space lends itself to conversations surrounding how people ‘act out’ nationalism. Thus, in this case Parr’s performance art functions to disrupt the dominant narratives circulating within public discourse regarding how nationalism is expressed and enacted. By raising issues of nationalism within his performance art, Parr adds a disruption to the discourse of who belongs to this image of Australia and, importantly for this thesis, who is excluded. Such a disruption, whilst perhaps micro in nature, is still an act of dissensus through art. These disruptions and their location within politics will be discussed specifically in Chapter Eight.

5.3 People Seeking Asylum in Australia The numbers of refugees and people seeking asylum coming to Australia by boat is statistically less than those who arrive by air. (Phillips 2012) Regardless of this factor, it is those who arrive by boat who are and have been subjected to the harshest policies of detention by successive Australian governments. In 2001–02 for example, the period during which Parr performed Close the concentration camps, Australia saw only 2222 asylum seekers arrive by boat compared with 7026 arriving by air (Phillips 2012). On average

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Australia accepts 13,000 refugees per year who arrive by plane or boat (Phillips 2012). This leads me to the question: why was there so much focus on what was statistically a small number of people attempting to enter Australia via the sea during this time? Stratton (2009, p. 2) claims, in answer to this question, that they serve as a distraction, especially given ‘Australia has a history of dislike of migration’. Stratton (2001, p. 170) draws on the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 to suggest that Federation served to ideologically create Australia the island as a country with a single law governing a single land mass or a unified territory. Such a policy reinforced the coastline as the border of white Australia and established racial boundaries, both physically and conceptually. The panic around asylum seekers arriving by boat in recent history is indeed a racial panic which is historically situated and entrenched in Australian culture and its sense of national identity.

As much as being what Stratton terms ‘a distraction’, or a result of Australia as having a ‘dislike of migration’, I further suggest that the government’s hypervigilance around people seeking asylum who arrive by boat is central to the overall construction of the Australian national identity. This identity is fundamentally racist and exclusionary, as I have discussed above. Expressive of this hypervigilance and focus on the Australian coastline are the government’s policies and rhetoric which frame asylum seekers arriving by boat as ‘illegals’, ‘boat people’ and, to some extent, ‘enemies’ of the Australian people, and by extension the state. Use of such rhetoric in reference to asylum seekers was widespread throughout public discourse in the early part of the twenty-first century, for example, a headline of the Herald Sun newspaper: ‘Mass suicide bid by illegals’ (Madigan 2002). Similarly, ABC Television ran a Four Corners episode with the title ‘The queue jumpers’ (ABC 2000). Such rhetoric positions asylum seekers who arrive by boat as both illegitimate by ‘jumping’ an apparent ‘queue’ for seeking asylum and as illegal, and thus posing a threat to border security.

During the time of this rhetoric, I note that many asylum seekers coming to Australia were of ‘Middle Eastern’ descent. Whilst asylum seekers may be persecuted minorities within their country of origin (such as the Hazaras in Iran), once removed from this space they become part of the white homogenised idea of being ‘Middle Eastern’. Joseph Pugliese (2002) outlines the dynamic of this phrase as opening up a geopolitical space based on

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appearance which designates certain people as ‘potential terrorists’.93 This concept aligns with the increasing government rhetoric of criminality surrounding asylum seekers in the early twenty-first century, which was a time when a high proportion of asylum seekers coming to Australia were from the Middle East.94 In line with Pugliese’s argument, I consider the stereotyping of the body of asylum seekers as ‘illegal’ and ‘criminal’ was part of the racist trope connected to the Middle Eastern person as terrorist.

People seeking asylum in Australia were excluded from the sense of nation by being framed as not fitting the stereotype of an immigrant Australia wanted. Rhetoric such as ‘we decide who comes to Australia’, to use Howard’s expression, further framed certain populations of asylum seekers as ‘undesirable’. People ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ were captured within this frame. Similarly, government policies of mandatory detention and the censorship surrounding their lives served to further isolate asylum seekers physically, politically and socially from the Australian ‘people’ and thus the nation.95

Exclusion of the asylum seeker body from the Australian nation Against this backdrop of nation-building and the concept of the nation as an imagined community discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is integral (Hage 2000; Moreton- Robinson 2015; Perera 2007; Pugliese 2002). Indeed, it is integral to the task of nation- building. Within contemporary Australia access to people seeking asylum held in detention has been limited to anyone other than government officials. Non-government persons, the media and human rights workers have been consistently blocked by policies which both

93 Pugliese’s article The locus of the non: the racial fault-line of ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ considers at length the dynamic of being ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ specifically in Australia post 9/11 (2002). His article addresses the violent essentialism inherent in the phrase ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ and how it is synonymous with criminality (Pugliese 2002).

94 People seeking asylum in Australia in the early 2000s who were coming from Middle Eastern countries such as Afghanistan were often fleeing situations of war which Australia had military involvement in. Whilst not the focus of my thesis, I acknowledge the ‘push factor’ in relation to the demographic of people seeking asylum at any one time.

95 It is interesting to consider the isolation of people seeking asylum in remote areas of Australia in relation to the isolation of displaced Indigenous Australians. Palm Island stands as an example of exiling those who are not designated worthy of full recognition as citizens within the Australian polis. Palm Island, which was designated as an Aboriginal reserve in 1914, is just one place where Indigenous Australians were forcibly sent to live regardless of their homeland. Deirdre Tedmanson addresses Palm Island through Agamben’s notion of ‘the camp’ in her article ‘Isle of exception: sovereign power and Palm Island’ (2008).

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restrict access to detention centres and control their presence within these spaces. Such policies of censorship increase the precarity of those detained as this essentially hides the conditions of their incarceration. This removal from the eyes of the polity reduces the capacity of the general population to understand and develop empathy for their lives past, present or future. It serves to erase the perception of precarity during and post detention, whilst simultaneously framing detainees’ lives as ungrievable within public discourse. This erasure is part of the overall bricolage of actions which serve to firm up the boundaries of the Australian nation. It speaks to who can and who cannot be visible within the Australian polis and thus the concept of the nation.

In order to further contextualise the nature of the asylum seeker debate, I now outline some of the key areas of contestation in recent history to highlight the restrictions on the availability of information surrounding the detention of asylum seekers in Australia. In 1999 Australia experienced an increase in the number of asylum seekers, with more people arriving by boat in that year than during the entire preceding decade (Manne & Corlett 2004). Most of these arrivals were from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, which had not been common places of origin for those seeking asylum in Australia; previously people from the Asian region had been Australia’s main source of refugees (Manne & Corlett 2004, p. 5). Australia received nine and a half thousand asylum seekers from the Middle East between 1999 and 2001; compared to the rest of the Global North which generally received several hundred thousand asylum seekers each year, it was the largest number of people Australia had ever had to process at one time (Manne & Corlett 2004, p. 6). As Manne and Corlett (2004, p. 7) note, it posed genuine legal, administrative, political and ethical problems for Australia. The balance between maintaining the country’s obligations to the UN Refugee Convention to process claims for asylum, ‘housing’ the applicants and deterring future arrivals was seen as a challenge.

During 1992 the Labor Government led by Paul Keating had introduced mandatory detention of ‘unauthorised arrivals’ under the Migration Act (Burnside 2008, p. 11). The 1996-elected Liberal Coalition Government, led by John Howard, made further policy changes in the early 2000s that were exclusionary in their nature. These changes to migration legislation occurred in direct response to what is known as the Tampa affair and

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stand out as a major moment in the trajectory of increasingly exclusionary policies the government was proposing for managing people seeking asylum by boat.96 The Tampa affair began on 26 August 2001, when a Norwegian freighter named the Tampa responded to a call by Australian Search and Rescue to assist a fishing boat in distress not far from Christmas Island (Hancock 2001, p. 1). The Tampa did so and took on board the ship 433 asylum seekers headed for Australia (Hancock 2001, p. 1). The Tampa was instructed by Australian officials to remain in the ‘contiguous zone’ (a belt of water contiguous to the territorial sea and used to hold vessels under investigation), where it waited for 48 hours without any assistance from Australia (Hancock 2001, p. 1). On 29 August 2001, when no assistance was rendered from Australian authorities, the Tampa attempted to take the asylum seekers to Christmas Island and was interdicted by members of the Special Air Services (SAS), a unit of the Australian army. This was the same day the government introduced the Border Protection Bill to parliament (Hancock 2001, p. 2). The Border Protection Bill was designed to increase the powers of Australian personnel to use ‘reasonable’ means, including force, to detain a ship or remove it from territorial waters. On 2 September 2001, the Royal Australian Navy took the asylum seekers on the Tampa to Nauru. From Nauru, 131 people seeking asylum were sent to New Zealand, whilst the remaining 302 had their claims for asylum processed on Nauru in due course (National Museum of Australia 2017).

The government’s Border Protection Bill failed in the senate. In response to this, it then introduced legislation that removed certain areas of the Pacific region from Australia’s migration zone. Specifically, the proposed legislation would excise Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef from the ‘migration’ zone. This effectively meant that any arrivals claiming asylum within these waters would be outside of Australia’s migration regime and thus not eligible to come to Australia. This Migration Amendment (Excision Migration Zone) Bill 2001 was announced by John Howard on 8 September 2001 and legislated in Parliament on 18

96 This is only one event of this nature, which I have chosen because it is nested in specific policy changes and is generally well known. The change sought to clearly exclude people seeking asylum from the Australian nation by redefining the migration zone and thus ensuring they could not make contact with Australia’s physical boundaries. It is tied up in the anxiety around the shoreline and reconsolidates for the Australian people the nation as bound by sea. Further, it then demands asylum seekers are housed on Pacific islands, reiterating that the nation of Australia will not accept them into care.

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September 2001 (Parliament of Australia 2001b). This change would legally allow asylum seekers to be processed offshore in places such as Nauru.97

Such a timeline of actions highlights the anxiety the government felt towards boats of people seeking asylum arriving on Australian soil. The initial attempt to create a bill that protected the country’s borders via the use of reasonable force on ships deemed to be carrying ‘illegal immigrants’ was rejected. Thus, the government saw that it could best protect its borders by excising tracts of water (whilst still holding territorial power over them) that were traditionally part of Australia’s migration zone. Such actions illuminate the understanding that the Australian nation is linked to its land territory, which is surrounded by sea and thus inherently vulnerable to incoming vessels. The changes to the migration zone allowed for Australia to process asylum seekers in places such as Nauru and Christmas Island, ensuring that asylum seekers were excluded from Australian territory and thus the community and the nation. Further, during the Tampa affair the Australian government shut down the port and airspace at Christmas Island to limit access to media and non- government personnel to ensure no ‘humanising’ images of asylum seekers could be taken (Burnside 2008, p. 16). Thus, whilst legislating policy to exclude the asylum seeker body from Australian migration zones, the government simultaneously shut down the potential for images of people seeking asylum to be taken and circulated. Such censorship, whilst decreasing the likelihood of the Australian public viewing people seeking asylum as anything other than ‘illegals’ and ‘boat people’, further locates them as being ungrievable lives.

Whilst actions were in place to set up offshore processing of asylum seekers, new onshore processing had been set up after 1999 with Immigration Detention Centres constructed in remote Australian locations such as Woomera and Port Hedland. Built in deserts located thousands of kilometres from the majority of the Australian population, these centres added to the exclusionary nature of the processing of claims by people seeking asylum.

97 Three days after the Bill was announced the September 11 World Trade Center building bombings occurred in the US. The ensuing feeling was one of global insecurity, especially for key allies of the US such as Australia, after this major incident which was publicly linked to Muslim terrorists of Middle Eastern descent. I speculate this would have added to an environment, within the Australian Parliament and community, where tightening Australia’s own border security was justified if not considered essential. Thus, passing the bill seven days after such a major global security event seems to be fitting for Australia within a global context at that time.

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Further, a new visa type called a Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) was introduced in 1999 for those whose claims for protection were approved. Refugees were issued with a TPV which did not give permanent residency but was a three-year visa which required refugees to reapply for refugee status once the three years expired (Burnside 2008, p. 11).

Alongside these policy changes, the rhetoric used during this time to describe asylum seekers by the government and media continued to focus on phrases such as ‘floods of boat people’, ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegals’, as discussed earlier. Such rhetoric had the potential to foster a sense of distrust towards asylum seekers and create misinformation about the legality of seeking asylum. Asylum seekers were removed from the general population of Australian society both physically and socially, often waiting several years in remote and overcrowded detention centres to have their claims processed. During these years, their access to anyone but government officials and contractors was severely limited and any sense of belonging to the community beyond the Immigration Detention Centre walls was removed. This exclusion from the public and social elements of Australian life served to render the lives of people seeking asylum in Australia ungrievable and also invisible.

Censorship behind the wire The outline above, albeit brief, serves to show that the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries was a period of dramatic policy changes within the political landscape of people seeking asylum in Australia. It has been noted that this was a period which raised concern within the international community with regards to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers from a human rights perspective (Leach 2003; Manne & Corlett 2004; Mares 2002; Marr & Wilkinson 2003). The Australian government’s restricted access to asylum seekers in detention and media censorship resulted in any news reports pertaining to the detention centres coming primarily through official channels. Journalists had to rely on government agencies resulting in almost all information coming through the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.

Referring to government restrictions, Peter Mares (2002, p. 12) claimed ‘no journalists are allowed into Australia’s six immigration detention centres except on occasional guided tours, during which detainees are kept at a distance’. An example of this occurred in August

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2000 when detainees in the Woomera IRPC rioted, threw rocks and attempted to push down the fence which surrounded the compound (Mares 2002). Guards spraying high- pressure water from hoses as well as tear gas at the detainees pushed them back into the compound. Information about this incident took two days to reach the media and the only reports were those that came through ‘official’ channels. The government had vetted all information made available to the public pertaining to the so-called riots. Mares (2002, p. 49) states with regards to this incident, ‘(t)he Immigration department later allowed journalists to inspect and photograph six buildings that were torched during the unrest, but no injured guards were made available for interview’. Manne and Corlett also outline that due to privacy concerns, journalists were not permitted to hold interviews inside the detention centres, which resulted in any disturbance inside the compounds being presented to the public by the government’s Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (Manne & Corlett 2004, pp. 11–12). An immigration officer was to accompany journalists inside the centre at all times, and photographs and films taken during such a visit would be viewed and signed off by the Department before publication.

Michael Leach outlines the situation during this time:

As the Government debated its various critics, one set of voices was never heard. Despite their pleas occasionally smuggled through the detention centres, an effective ban operated on communication with asylum seekers held in detention. As the former Australian Human Rights Commissioner Chris Sidoti noted, ‘[N]o other western country permits incommunicado detention of asylum-seekers.’ Brian Humphrey told the hearing (Parliament of Australia 2002) that Ross Hampton had directly instructed Defence photographers not to take pictures of asylum seekers. The Navy was apparently given explicit guidelines to ensure ‘no personalizing or humanizing images’ were to be taken ... Mr Reith’s [Minister for Defence] staff did not want to allow photographs to create sympathy for asylum seekers (Leach 2003, p. 29).

The Australian government’s restrictions on the media in relation to immigration detention became so blatantly problematic that ABC Television program Media Watch ran a story on the censorship and the plight of the asylum seeker in detention:

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If you wonder why you know nothing about the people in there, have rarely seen their faces unless they’re mutilating themselves on the wire and don’t know their stories, then this is the reason (‘Woomera or North Korea?’ 2002).

Media Watch then went on to compare Australia’s media policy for Immigration Detention Centres to the restriction by the North Korean government on media access in general. Media Watch further pointed out that whilst the government claimed the access restriction was to provide privacy for detainees, some detainees were pleading for media attention. Media Watch published the following letter written by a detainee from inside the camp during one of the hunger strikes:

We request the media to come inside and see the whole truth about persecution of people in the Australian Woomera refugee detention centre. We, the undersigned, request the media to be allowed into the camp to interview us on TV, radio and for newspapers so that we can tell our stories to the public (‘Woomera or North Korea?’ 2002).

The issue of censorship by the Australian government was internationally acknowledged, further highlighting the importance of the censorship issue politically. Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders) downgraded Australia’s rating on its International Press Freedom Index in 2003 from 12th to 50th most free country for reporters to work in (Romano 2007, p. 187).

For over ten years successive government immigration departments had imposed a regime of censorship over the detention camps, using the rationale that if the media printed an identifying photograph it might affect (possibly help) asylum seekers make a refugee claim, or put their families at risk in their country of origin. Marr and Wilkinson point out that this argument was really just for the benefit of the government (2003). Operation Relex was the name given to the patrolling of Australian waters by the military to intercept any Suspected Illegal Entry Vehicles (SIEV). Operation Relex was subject to the same media censorship rules as the Australian Immigration Detention Centres. However, with regards to Operation Relex, when the:

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government needed to defend its conduct of the operation, videotapes of asylum seekers – in closeup, clearly identifying them – would be released. In the end dozens of hours of these tapes would be made public (Marr & Wilkinson 2003, p. 134).

In light of the government releasing images and videotapes of people seeking asylum to the public when it suited them, I agree with Marr and Wilkinson (2003): the reason for censoring the media in these situations had less to do with asylum seeker privacy and was more part of protecting government activities whilst presenting a specific view of these policies and practices. Maintaining control over images of asylum seekers available to the public ensured the government could construct a narrative of asylum seekers which suited its national security agenda.

In Australia in 2001, as a response to the Tampa Affair discussed earlier in this chapter, the government instructed the Department of Defence that it was not to take any ‘humanising’ photographs of asylum seekers in boats (Parliament of Australia 2002). Further, the media was hindered from gaining free access to the asylum seekers held at Woomera IRPC (Hudson 2002). This suggests that when images of the precariousness of people seeking asylum are suppressed, such as in both of these incidents, the potential to view those lives as grievable is occluded. The government’s suppression of visual media suggests that it recognised the potential power the visual images of asylum seekers may have had on public discourse. This was a strategic part of the government’s media campaign against people seeking asylum who arrive by boat. The censoring policies by the government of both its own internal administration and independent journalists point to an acknowledgement of the political power that the images and also stories may hold. Personalised stories and images may have led to an asylum seeker narrative capable of a strong human-interest element, and as such the potential to garner empathy from members of the polis. This underpins my contention that the government sought strategic control over this narrative and thus censored information about asylum seekers.

Summary Through this chapter I have argued that the Australian government perceived the potential

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for public discourse to be influenced by photographs, videos or personal stories of asylum seekers in detention. Thus, it maintained strict control over who could access asylum seekers and censored material which could be used to subvert the dominant narrative. Such control was essential in maintaining the persona of the asylum seeker as ‘illegal’ or ‘criminal’ and not worthy of being part of the Australian community. Yet as discussed at various points of this thesis, seeking asylum is not illegal, nor is it a criminal act.

A narrative of exclusion was essential to maintaining the nationalist discourse as to who could and can be part of Australia and who may engage with the nation. Further, this narrative was racial in its underpinnings, as the people seeking asylum by boat during the period this thesis is primarily concerned with were generally from the Middle East. The ethnicity of asylum seekers was threatening to the whiteness of the nation’s identity. This construction of people seeking asylum as a security threat was fed further by the aligning of those from the Middle East with terrorism. As such, it served to heighten the anxiety of the Australian public in relation to Australia’s territorial borders.

The censorship surrounding Immigration Detention Centres and other asylum seeker– related matters meant that the greater majority of the Australian public had, as Marr and Wilkinson (2003, p. 134) claim, ‘only the haziest picture of what life was like behind the wire’ of the detention centres.98 It was this lack of visibility of asylum seekers that Parr’s performance art in the early part of the twenty-first century speaks to. Even whilst some asylum seekers in detention were sewing their lips together in protest at their incarceration, the media was not able to take or release photographs of this as an actual happening (Leach 2003, p. 28).99 Parr, in his self-proclaimed act of solidarity with asylum seekers, replicated

98 To qualify this statement, there were people within the Australian public who were aware of what was occurring inside Immigration Detention Centres. For example, I as an activist was at this time seeking out information through various channels, Parr as an artist was investigating policies of detention, journalists were working to get through the censorship, whilst other communities of people were finding ways to uncover what was taking place behind the wire fences.

99 Whilst on the whole scholarship argues images of asylum seekers with sewn lips were excluded from public discourse (Hudson 2002; Lusher & Haslam 2007; Manne & Corrlett 2004; Mares 2002; Marr & Wilkinson 2003), the occasional photo was smuggled out. One was published in the Herald Sun in an article entitled ‘Ringleader may be forced to disarm: protest death fear’ (Dunn 2002a). I have viewed the image from State Library of Victoria archives; it is somewhat grainy, but it is clear that a young man has a single stitch holding his mouth together and he is behind metal bars (Fig. 2).

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the act which the Australian and international public could not see otherwise. Whilst he was not an asylum seeker body, indeed he is a white Australian male body, his act of empathy sought to reveal an element of complicity by the Australian people in the censorship by their government. It served to speak to the construction of the asylum seeker as invisible, voiceless and outside of the nation. It is these nuances of his work which will be further explored in Chapters Seven and Eight. In the next chapter, however, I will turn to the matter of Immigration Detention Centres and their role in the exclusion of asylum seekers from the polis through an analysis of Not the Hilton, a Joint Standing Committee on Migration report investigating Australian Immigration Detention Centres published in 2000.

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Chapter Six: Not the Hilton: Administrative Exclusion and Bare Life

[T]he situation in the camps in Australia euphemistically called Immigration Reception and Processing Centres is appalling … The disturbances and the riots are expected and entirely predictable. There is a long and continuing history of self-harm in the camps and hunger strikes have become commonplace … The disturbances in the camps over the last year have been provoked, consciously or unconsciously I don’t know, by deliberate policy and administrative decisions (Sidoti 2002).

Introduction Parr’s Close the concentration camps (2002) includes visual slides of text excerpts from a Joint Standing Committee on Migration report (Fig. 12). Titled Not the Hilton: Immigration

Detention Centres inspection report it was a report on an investigation into Australian Immigration Detention Centres published in 2000, two years prior to Close the concentration camps. In this chapter I analyse Not the Hilton using the report as a catalyst to discuss how the lives of asylum seekers in detention were and continue to be framed by government policy. I ask two key questions: What governing mechanisms were operative within a report that reviewed the management of Australian Immigration Detention Centres? And how did such mechanisms and thus the report frame people seeking asylum? This chapter develops an understanding of the report and the issues it raises in relation to what I argue is the ‘non-incidental’ attempt to create a quality of bare life in Immigration Detention Centres.100 I suggest this report evidences that the biopolitical management of their lives is part of the framing mechanisms which operate to construct the lives of people seeking asylum in Australia as not part of the social sphere and thus ungrievable.

100 Contra Agamben I contend that some asylum seekers in detention resist bare life through their protest even though the biopolitical control of their lives by the state seeks to push them to that limit point. At times I use the phrase ‘quality of bare life’ to acknowledge my use of Agamben to frame government administrative and policy tactics, but my disagreement within him that these tactics succeed underlies the schema of this thesis.

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Image subject to copyright

Fig. 12 Slides from Close the concentration camp (2002): text excerpts from Not the Hilton (2000)

6.1 Not the Hilton Not the Hilton was a report produced from the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry in 2000.101 The inquiry was based on physical inspections of Australian Immigration Detention Centres, which were at the time under the governance of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.102 The report gives a ‘feel’ for what an Immigration Detention Centre was like physically, whilst revealing the conceptual framework of the governance strategies in place. The sole purpose of the Immigration Detention Centres was for the ‘detention for suspected unlawful non-citizens, some of whom may attempt to establish grounds for entry to Australia’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 2). I note, however, that the term ‘unlawful non-citizens’ used here is not a legally accurate way to speak of people seeking asylum. As discussed at various points throughout this thesis, it is not ‘illegal’ or ‘unlawful’ to seek asylum.103 Thus, the phrase ‘unlawful non-citizen’ can be read as a form of rhetoric which the Committee uses in the report. The term defines negatively both non-citizens and the act of seeking asylum. It creates a falsified sense of criminality around people seeking asylum and serves as a public communication tool to

101 For more information on the function of a joint standing committee in the Australian Parliament, see the publicly available information sheet (Parliament of Australia 2018).

102 At the time of writing, this governance was under the Department of Home Affairs (October 2019).

103 From the article ‘Asylum seekers and refugees: what are the facts?’ published on the Parliament of Australia website: ‘Asylum seekers irrespective of their mode of arrival, like others that arrive in Australia without a valid visa, are classified by Australian law to be “unlawful non-citizens”. However, the term “unlawful” does not mean that asylum seekers have committed a criminal offence. There is no offence under Australian law that criminalises the act of arriving in Australia nor the seeking of asylum without a valid visa’ (Phillips 2015).

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justify mandatory detention. However, within this framework the Committee outlines that detained ‘unlawful non-citizens’ are not permitted to enjoy the freedoms expected by an Australian citizen. As noted by the Committee (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 20) in reference to Immigration Reception and Processing Centres (IRPC): ‘(t)he IRPC is not a gaol, but the occupants are detainees who do not enjoy their liberty’. Whilst the Committee refers to the IRPCs as not being jails, my argument is that this contained and managed population is effectively imprisoned. Through my analysis I outline how the terms of reference and language of the Not the Hilton report illustrate the ‘prison-like’ nature of Australian Immigration Detention Centres.

Visits by the Committee to detention facilities were executed during what is described in the report as a ‘time of extreme pressure on the facilities from the arrival of unprecedented numbers of “boat people”’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. ix).104 Not the Hilton deals with issues specific to detention centre infrastructure and services, not specific government policies directed at the treatment of ‘boat people’:

The Committee did not seek information on individual cases, nor did it receive such information. This report therefore focuses on the operations of the centres, rather than on the detainees (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 2).

As such, the Committee did not engage in meetings with detainees at any point in its investigation. It is clear that the Committee responsible for the research and publication of Not the Hilton focused its investigation on the governing operations of the detention centres. Whilst its focus was not on the lives of detainees, despite this noted omission the report nonetheless speaks to the lives of those people detained for seeking asylum by boat through this very exclusion. Further, the issues raised within the report reflect the policies which govern the management of Immigration Detention Centres and thus the lives of people seeking asylum in Australia.

104 The use of the term ‘boat people’ by the Committee is an example of government agents using rhetoric. It refuses people seeking asylum in Australia and arriving by boat recognition as ‘people’ with lives beyond the boat. As an official government report, it fails to acknowledge their right under international law to which Australia is signatory to seek asylum by any mode of transport.

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Governmentality Given that the Committee was investigating various Immigration Detention Centres which specifically housed people seeking asylum, I would like to consider the exclusion and governing of this population of ‘unlawful non-citizens’ in relation to the ‘lawful’ population of Australia. Australian Immigration Detention Centres are, as an institution of government, part of the broader functioning of governmentality.105 The Not the Hilton report illustrates how Immigration Detention Centres, as one of the many institutions which manage a specific or single population, enact the double task of both detaining people seeking asylum and actively producing the knowledge within the polis of what a ‘secure’ Australia is. They are part of the discourse surrounding the construction of how the asylum seeker population is perceived.

The Not the Hilton report becomes part of the discursive formation of policy and law as it functions to produce data, information and statistics. The report focuses on the management of the Immigration Detention Centres through observation and consideration of the architectural arrangements, administrative methodology, security and provision of medical services. The detainees are specifically excluded from the terms of reference of the report and thus the Committee is bound into a refusal to discuss the voices or see the bodies of the people detained.106 This consolidates the understanding within the consensus that people seeking asylum have no space to speak and that as a population they must be excluded from Australian society. Their exclusion is part of the operative mechanisms which deny their personhood within both government frameworks and the polis.

105 As outlined in Chapter Four I utilise a Foucauldian concept of governmentality to discuss the web of ‘institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculation and tactic’ (Foucault 1994b, p. 244), as those elements which come together to manage the population.

106 The Not the Hilton report is predicated on the assumption that there is a need to speak of detention centres without direct reference to the people they detain. This is, however, noted as a deficiency in the opinion of the Committee. The final recommendation 25, 12.43 states: ‘(t)he committee recommends that, in future, in addition to the inspection visits, arrangements also be made to meet with representatives of detainees’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 90). Whilst the recommendation is brief and fails to articulate, for example, exactly why this is recommended or what it means by ‘representatives of detainees’ (although I would assume a lawyer or caseworker) I note that perhaps the committee was affected by the presence of the detainees even though there was no intended direct contact.

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Security Through their governance, Immigration Detention Centres communicate to the wider Australian population that the containment of people seeking asylum is necessary for national security. In Not the Hilton the articulation of the administrative tasks and the Committee’s concerns with security sends both overt and covert messages which frame detainees through the physical and managerial nature of their containment. Some of the techniques are articulated and clear, while others are implicit and illustrate Foucault’s consideration of both ‘the said and the non-said’ elements of the apparatus of governmentality (1994a, p. xvi). For example, in discussion of the Woomera IRPC the following quote contains both overt and covert messages:

Physical security for the site is maintained by a perimeter wire mesh fence topped with razor wire which is floodlit at night. This is complemented by the siting of the facility on Department of Defence land, which requires a permit to enter. Detainees are briefed on the risks associated with venturing into the dry and hot isolation surrounding the centre (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37).

This passage articulates clearly that a ‘perimeter wire mesh fence topped with razor wire’ provides physical security for the centre and sends an overt message that this is a physical attribute designed to ensure containment of the detainee population (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37). The second part of the passage reports that the facility is on Department of Defence land which requires a permit to enter and notes there are environmental dangers related to leaving the centre. Whilst this land was not actively used for military operations at the time, there is significance to placing people seeking asylum there. This passage communicates the message that asylum seekers are detained within the conceptual space of the military and that immigration detention is indeed an issue of national security. Further, the requirement for permits to enter the Woomera zone speaks not just to the physical isolation which is articulated in the passage, but of the social and political isolation the detainees experienced.107 If a permit was required, I question how

107 Woomera is an area in Australia which all people require a permit to enter (Department of Defence 2019). The climate of Woomera is prone to extremes. Desert temperatures of 46 degrees Celsius are reached during the summer period. There is very low rainfall and thus little water is available away from areas of human habitation (Weatherzone 2019).

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people from ‘the outside’ could make contact easily? Lawyers, members of the public and humanitarian personnel all required a permit to enter the land the Woomera IRPC was on and thus no one could enter this space unaccounted for by the authorities. The description of razor-wire fences on military land, the focus on isolation reminding the detainees that it was hot, dry and dangerous outside the prison walls, and the high priority given to exclusion all highlight the importance of containment and security within this section of the report.

As discussed the Committee notes that the detainees or their representatives were not asked to contribute to the report (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 2). Thus, the observation of the physical environment, management techniques and architectural arrangements are the focal points considered to fulfil the purpose of the report. The Committee’s brief, as outlined in the terms of reference, was to ‘to monitor detention practices’ and examine ‘custodial services operating at detention centres under DIMA control’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. xiii). The Committee executed this operation by visiting the various detention centres within the DIMA portfolio and making observations under the following key categories: management and staffing, detention, amenities, interpreting services, health, education, cultural, recreation and security (Parliament of Australia 2000a). Each Immigration Detention Centre studied by the report is considered in relation to these categories by the physical infrastructure, the systems and the processes in place to manage the lives of the detained asylum seekers.

Throughout the Not the Hilton report, security and management are central to how the lives of detainees are framed. Whilst the detained people seeking asylum are not explicitly part of the report, they exist within it regardless. The structures and infrastructure discussed have an inextricable relation to the lives contained within Immigration Detention Centres. The infrastructure that maintains the biological lives of the detained asylum seekers indirectly defines those lives within the report. The omission of the voices of the detainees reveals an ideological underpinning ensuring that asylum seekers are rendered invisible within public discourse. There is a subtext when excluding the voices of people seeking asylum which serves to continually induce the reader into a space of forgetting the people behind the report. Thus, the report aims to maintain its status as a bureaucratic exercise with perceived management outcomes by actively ignoring the lives lived by detainees. This

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is part of the web of actions which serves to frame people seeking asylum as invisible, voiceless and outside of the Australian nation.

The capacity to be able to separate detainees during unrest is an issue the Committee considers vital and it is noted repeatedly throughout the report. For example, when speaking of an Immigration Detention Centre in Derby, West Australia, the Committee notes: [T]here were no internal divisions within the detainees’ accommodation area at Curtin when the Committee inspected the site. This made the centre vulnerable to massing and incitement of detainees (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 27).

A suggested remedy to this lack of internal divisions was to erect an internal fence; ‘the Committee recommended that internal fencing be erected for security reasons’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 29). There are multiple reflections throughout the report regarding the perceived problem of no ‘separation detention’ to allow for the division of various groups of the asylum seeker population (Parliament of Australia 2000a, pp. 17, 44, 57, 59, 53, 63). In Woomera IRPC, for example, the Committee notes that the mixing of new arrivals with other detainees was undesirable as it interfered with processing procedures. There was a perceived need to ensure that ‘rehearsal and coaching’ of new arrivals by existing detainees with experience was avoided (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 33). This concern is reiterated a few pages later, noting ‘the Committee was concerned that there were, at the time of its visit, no separate detention facilities’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37). Such statements within the report evidence a deep concern the Committee had for control over the interactions between detainees. The concern with facilities for separation highlights the understanding that controlling the population was essential. The perception of the ‘risk’ that detainees might collectively organise is omnipresent throughout the report.

This consistent reiteration of matters of security throughout the report speaks to the key concern to avoid any form of disruption to Immigration Detention Centre management systems. Security measures go beyond buildings and fences, and are part of the daily activities of the detainees. For example:

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Each detainee has a photographic identification card which is used in the management of detainees’ movements at the facilities. It enables, for example, the staff to ascertain that all detainees are attending meals. There is an electronic check to prevent metal objects being taken from the mess hall (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37).

This example demonstrates that through techniques of photographic identification cards and metal detectors, the management of each person is optimised and security is maintained. The use of identification cards as a security measure allows ongoing surveillance of the detainees, ensuring they comply with the rules and engage in the routine of the centre. It is noted in the report that staff could ensure detainees are attending meals (complying with timetables, not on hunger strike) and check that they were not taking metal out of the mess hall (metal objects may be seen as potential weapons) (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37). These security measures are all biopolitical techniques of managing human life aimed at ensuring a secure, compliant environment. Such an environment is one which ensures the detainees’ sense of autonomy from or agency within the system is actively negated.

The rhetoric of the Not the Hilton report makes central the Immigration Detention Centres’ infrastructure. Given this, the detainees as people represent a threat to this key subject. When the Committee visited Woomera IRPC there was a ‘minor disruption’ at the centre. The Not the Hilton report notes that during its visit the Committee became aware of a situation where there was a body of people keen to gain the attention of these ‘outsiders’ representing the government (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 53). It is noted that within 15 minutes of the Committee’s unannounced entry to the accommodation area of the centre, a large group of detainees had assembled, waving placards protesting against their conditions (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 53). For the Committee, this confirmed its recommendation of ‘separation detention’ and served to raise its concern at the potential of the asylum seekers to form dissenting groups:

As the quick reaction to the unannounced visit of the Committee indicated, the detainees have an effective internal organisation in the centre (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37).

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Certainly, such internal organisation explicates the failure within the system of containment and illuminates the agency of detainees as they seek to have a voice. Regardless of their containment and their ‘assumed’ status as those who cannot speak and be heard, from the information within the report the asylum seekers very quickly organised and banded together, creating placards and shouting for their rights to be recognised.108 Whilst they were contained within a ‘prison-like’ environment which aimed to erase any autonomy and agency, their protest was a contestation against the power dynamic as they sought to be politically recognised. Such protest is dissensus in Rancière’s terms, as the detainees demand recognition of their voices and lives within the consensus.

6.2 Power, Biopolitics and Bare Life Power over life Woomera IRPC in particular was the site of significant controversy with regards to protests including ‘riots’ by asylum seekers in 2000 (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 112). Foucault states in The subject and power that a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship:

[W]hat defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their action: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon the body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities (Foucault 1994a, p. 789).

With this premise in mind and using the Not the Hilton report as an aid, the relation of power between the Australian government and the asylum seekers can be seen as not one of equal agency, especially within Immigration Detention Centres. The government and its agents have the legal capacity and the power to regulate the daily life of asylum seekers through security measures and restrictions. This biopolitical control of daily life comes to represent minor acts of discipline which combine to decrease the sense of autonomy of the

108 In Chapter Seven I will speak to the politics and power of organisation within Immigration Detention Centres by detainees and locate this as dissensus in Rancière’s terms.

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detainees. In comparison, the detainees are limited in their capacity to act on the actions of those who have power over them. This is due to a number of factors including the daily regulation of life, but also the threat of violence.

As I will discuss in Chapter Seven, attempts to challenge the power of the Immigration Detention Centre via protest saw violent responses from security. Water cannons, tear gas and other riot-control measures were activated during the protests at Woomera IRPC in 2002 (Mare 2002, p. 49). This government response of violence was deployed to destroy the possibility of agency within the asylum seeker population. However, whilst the capacity of asylum seekers to act upon the actions of those who contain them within Immigration Detention Centres may be limited, it is not obliterated completely. Their protest is a testament to their continued refusal to accept the conceptual and physical containment the government has placed them in.

Within the controlled environment of the Immigration Detention Centres, the asylum seekers have some potential to resist the power exerted over them. Indeed, this is explicated by the Committee’s constant concern for the potential of detainees to gather. The Not the Hilton report consistently discusses the need for Immigration Detention Centres to have the capacity to separate groups of people, whether it be for the purpose of discipline or to avoid ‘contagion’ behaviour. This concern is representative of the privately owned company that ran the detention facilities on behalf of the Australian government maintaining the balance of power. There is noted concern that ‘the detainees have an effective internal organisation in the centre’ when they confronted the Committee with placards of protest (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37). Similarly, there is constant referencing throughout the report to ensure ‘separation detention’ facilities are used to avoid ‘coaching’ of new arrivals and to avoid the centre being vulnerable to detainees joining together to incite action (Parliament of Australia 2000a, pp. 17, 44, 57, 59, 53, 63). The focus on separate areas of containment addresses both the body and the mind of the detainee as the Committee seeks to ensure that bodies can be separated to avoid detainees communicating and organising collectively. The detainees’ ability to engage effectively in a relationship of negotiated power with the authorities is structured to be undermined, thus ensuring the government via its agents maintains the dominant power position.

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Foucault suggests that if it is to be a genuine power relationship the ‘other’, the one over whom power is exercised, must ‘be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts’ (1994a, p. 789). The structure of the Immigration Detention Centres seeks to reduce the sense of agency, ensuring people seeking asylum are not ‘people who act’. With consideration of Foucault (1990, p. 139), people seeking asylum are managed in such a way that a multiplicity of ‘interventions and regulatory controls’ work to effect an organised form of ‘power over life’. The Committee’s concern with the mobilisation of asylum seekers during its unannounced visit demonstrates the expectation that the detainees are to be controlled and docile through the daily interventions into and regulation of their lives. The detention experience centres around a series of diverse management methods aimed at subjugating the body and mind, and at control of the detainee population (Foucault 1990, p. 140).

The issue of disciplinary power in relation to asylum seekers held in Immigration Detention Centres is also entrenched in their non-recognition as politically qualified subjects by the Australian government. They become constrained to an identity premised on being kept biologically alive due to international laws. Whilst the Not the Hilton report does not state that overt violence is part of daily functioning, given the nature of the containment it is reasonable to speculate that the threat of violence is continually present within Immigration Detention Centres. A power relation, regardless of how it is manifested, does not exclude the use of violence (Foucault 1994a). Violence, or the threat of violence, is integral to the maintenance of government power within Australian Immigration Detention Centres.

In Not the Hilton the consistent framing of people seeking asylum through the constraints, regulations and daily operations which manage their lives is an active denial of their individual potential to act. Whilst I do not consider this equates to a total loss of agency in this case, the government operations that regulate their lives can only do so in a relationship of power where the threat of violence is omnipresent. For example, isolation or chemical sedation109 are both used to quell the potential of a detainee asserting personal

109 With reference to chemical sedation, I note that in the prison and psychiatric industry, heavy sedation may be used and termed ‘chemical restraint’.

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agency within the system (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. xviii). The issue of ‘separation detention’ discussed earlier goes beyond the need to reduce disruption, and acts to decimate the detainees’ ongoing sense of agency, their capacity to make demands, and to discourage collective action.

As I have discussed, the administrative agencies that manage the lives of the people seeking asylum and living in detention are focused on security and containment through measures such as: separation detention, ID cards, regulatory control of daily life and monitoring the activities of all detainees. The Not the Hilton report makes clear that the need to reduce the likelihood of the power balance inside the centre being contested is paramount to the management of the Immigration Detention Centres. As was evident during the Woomera IRPC riots in 2002 when a contestation against the power dynamic within the Immigration Detention Centres took place, the management of the centre used force. I will discuss the details of the 2002 Woomera riots in Chapter Seven; however, they are a clear example of the use of force and violence given the deployment of water cannons and tear gas to disperse protesters.

Such a use of force is in line with Foucault’s understanding of how power operates when he claims that if power is faced with resistance, ‘it has no other option but to try to minimize it’ (1994a, p. 789). This dynamic of minimising dissent and resistance is a strong subtext within the tone of the Not the Hilton report, given its consistent concern with the control and behavioural management of detained asylum seekers. The report does not, for example, look to how the Immigration Detention Centres provide a general sense of health, wellbeing or advantage for the asylum seekers. For example, when writing about recreational facilities in the detention centre at Port Hedland, the committee notes:

It is in the interest of the management to ensure that the detainees’ concerns with their situation do not lead to disruptive behaviour. Provision of recreation opportunities is one means of decreasing risk (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 20).

From these sentences it is clear that recreation is considered to be a necessary component of the control and management of the detainee population. They reveal that the concern is

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not about providing quality of life for asylum seekers as they await processing, but ensuring the risk of disruptive behaviour is reduced. Multiple times throughout the report it is noted that recreational facilities, particularly those outdoors, are not useable by detainees; for example: ‘(a)lthough the detainees had plenty of space to move around in and there was shade available, the hot and dry conditions during the day discouraged outdoor activity’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 27). Further, ‘(t)he climate of Woomera in January is not conducive to outdoor activities’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 36). Recreation thus becomes about quelling the potential for disruption, not ensuring a positive outlook or possible flourishing of life for the detainees. As such, the lives of the detained people seeking asylum are framed within the report as lives not worthy of anything more than the most basic biological necessary care. For Agamben, such a level of care equates to bare life, which I speak to now.

Biopolitics and bare life Biopolitics is at the very heart of the operation of Australia’s Immigration Detention Centre’s. The Not the Hilton report seeks to reconfirm that it is not their personhood but the functioning administration that surrounds them that frames the value of their lives, in terms of their societal function. As noted in my earlier discussions of Agamben’s theory of bare life and the state of exception in Chapter Four, through governing techniques of both physical and political isolation the detainees are forced to exist in a state of exception. That is, they are not protected by the law but are punishable by it and thus they approach the quality of bare life.

The Australian Immigration Detention Centres push the concept of biopolitical control of life to its limit point.110 For Agamben, this limit point is bare life, where people such as asylum seekers in detention are without political life and become little more than the bodies in which they are condemned to live. Agamben interrogates how both the government and

110 Joanna Zylinska, in her discussion of refugee bodies as controlled bodies, claims that biopolitics describes the processes through which Western democracies administer life via regulatory and corrective mechanisms which consistently exercise power over the ‘species body’ (2004, p. 524). She further suggests that biopolitics serves to establish a normative framework for managing and regulating bare life within Agamben’s framework (Zylinska 2004, p. 533).

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the law use language to create and ensure the ongoing nexus of power. The bureaucratic language used in Not the Hilton is part of the apparatus of government that influences or maintains power over the general population’s perception of mandatory detention. Considered from within a schema of biopolitics, one aim of the Not the Hilton report may be to ensure that the general public feels it is protected from an ‘invasion by “parasites”’ (Zylinska 2004, p. 524).111 In this frame, the governing body is constructing a mechanism for there to be a sense of protection from what would be termed ‘the host’ community with the people seeking asylum as the ‘parasites’ that want to invade Australia. Thus, the Australian nation becomes ‘the host’. The Not the Hilton report is located within the broader apparatus of government that serves to create the sense that the Australian population is protected from invaders such as non-citizens, thus articulating that the wellbeing of the citizen and nation is of primary concern to the governing body. This method is strategically implemented to construct the very insecurities in the citizen population which the security measures are predicated on.

The example of rhetoric used by former Prime Minister John Howard discussed in Chapter Five shows the frames of control inherent in the government’s communication of asylum seeker policy. Howard stated: ‘(w)e will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’ (2001). Here Howard offers protection from a group of people exercising their right under international law to seek asylum. His language firstly constructs asylum seekers arriving by boat as a threat to the nation and secondly offers protection to his constituents through policy. Similarly, the constant referencing of security and cost-cutting measures within the Not the Hilton report, for example, is part of the mechanism to provide the ‘host nation’ with a sense that it is not only being protected from ‘invading parasites’, but also its national resources are not being overly consumed by these ‘parasites’.

This idea that there is a ‘host community’ that can be invaded by ‘undeserving parasites’ may be a somewhat colourful conceptualisation of the relation between the nation and

111 I use Zylinska here to demonstrate a biopolitical style of language which when used in relation to the governance of managing life becomes harsh and estranging, especially in relation to the personhood of the lives it speaks of.

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people seeking asylum. However, it provides a worthwhile articulation of how biopolitics may be operative in the construction of a group of people as a security threat. The rhetoric used by the Australian government and mainstream media which refers to the ‘floods’ of asylum seekers arriving by boat, the ‘illegals’ and the ‘Asian invasion’ as peddled by politicians such as Pauline Hanson actively seeks to construct a security threat within public discourse. The politics of seeking asylum are thus drawn into the sphere of national security and external threat, not protection of vulnerable people. Contemporary political concepts and language such as ‘border security’ and ‘sovereign border control’ abound in public discourse. They feed into this sense of a biopolitical construct which frames the nation’s sovereign boundaries as vulnerable to invasion by people seeking asylum. The rhetoric of risk has been continually hyperinflated. It speaks to the rhetoric of successive Australian governments that the nation is a strong, secure and homogenised force through the exclusion of the racialised other.

Luxury and Not the Hilton I would like now to consider the name of the report, Not the Hilton, in relation to the contents of the report. Firstly, it is general knowledge in the Global North (and possibly beyond) that any reference to the ‘Hilton’ resonates with a high-class hotel and restaurant chain. One does not need to look far to ascertain the significance of the Hilton chain in global hospitality and its reputation as an upmarket, high-quality establishment. As the brand development reads on the company’s website:

One of the most recognized names in the industry, Hilton Hotels & Resorts offers travellers a world of authentic experiences. The brand continues to be the innovative, forward-thinking global leader of hospitality. With products and services that meet the needs of tomorrow’s savvy global travelers, we shape experiences in which every guest feels cared for, valued, and respected (Hilton Brands 2014).

Given that the Hilton prides itself on its hospitality and capacity to care for, value and respect its travelling guests, the irony (if one considers it irony) in the title selected by the Committee leads me to question this choice of title. Is it that Not the Hilton suggests the detention centres are substandard in their provision of care? Or are we to read it as a signal

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that suggests to the detainees, and the Australian population, not to expect the living conditions of the Hilton Hotels if you are an asylum seeker? The title may well be a play on both of these concepts.

Regardless of the intention, I want to use the title as a springboard to consider some of the problems the Committee makes note of in its report and recommendations. The report does, to some extent, criticise the lack or inadequacy of certain provisions such as medical facilities, toilets and the amount of space for bunks. For example:

The Committee recommends that the expansion of on-site medical facilities be given priority

(Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 38). The Committee recommends that the provision of toilet and ablution facilities be increased

(Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 45). The Committee recommends the ratio of toilets and showers available to detainees be

increased (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. xvii). The Committee considered that the existing medical clinic … was too small for both the requirements of the staff and the handling of the large detainee population (Parliament of

Australia 2000a, p. 37).

These examples highlight how in the task of keeping the biological body alive medical treatment is essential, whilst toilet or washing facilities ensure an acceptable standard of hygiene can be maintained. Such facilities are essential to the management of a group of people who are not, through various international human rights agreements, allowed to be subject to conditions in which they may perish or die.112

My reading of the Not the Hilton report’s recommendations locates them as basic and as failing to suggest provisions which go beyond what is necessary to maintain a basic standard of human existence. As discussed earlier, recreational activities (which are noted as substandard) are surrounded in rhetoric which frames them as a preventive security

112 As mentioned in Chapter One, Australia has failed to ensure people do not die in detention: 2,020 people seeking asylum have died between 2000 and 2019, 57 of these in Immigration Detention Centres. Another 1,967 deaths occurred via drownings during interdiction at sea, and the remainder whilst in other forms of custody with Australian authorities or in the Australian community (Border Crossing Observatory 2019).

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technique. My analysis of the report locates a strong subtext throughout that the Immigration Detention Centres should not be providing enjoyment for detained asylum seekers. For example, the Committee takes issue with the provision of therapeutic massage in some of the Immigration Detention Centres, referencing it as problematic on numerous occasions. The term ‘massage’ is mentioned 14 times in the report in comparison to the term ‘toilet’ which is mentioned 9 times, ‘shower’ which is mentioned 8 times and ‘hygiene’ which is mentioned twice. Thus, I contend there seems to be a considerable interest in the provision of massage in Immigration Detention Centres and it is recommended by the Committee that it be ceased. The report states:

The Committee was concerned that provision of massage therapy would be misinterpreted by both the Australian public and the detainees (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 45). The Committee recommends that the practice of providing massage to detainees on a regular basis is discontinued (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. xix).

This focus on massage stands out firstly in its articulation of how the Australian public may perceive the provision of this service as a luxury and secondly as to how detainees may misinterpret the purpose of therapeutic massage. Unfortunately, the report does not make clear how the Australian public or detainees may misinterpret the use of massage. Given this lack of clarity by the Committee over the exact nature of the ‘misinterpretation’ I speculate on what is meant with consideration of other contributing factors in the report. The primary meaning of ‘misinterpretation’ in this case, I surmise, is that detainees should not be living a life that is inclusive of pleasurable or non-essential activities. That is, they are to be contained and kept biologically alive as required by international law. Therapeutic massage in this context can thus be seen as an unnecessary provision which may lead the detainees to consider themselves worthy of more than just the most basic of biological or medical interventions. The Australian public may ‘misinterpret’ the provision of massage therapy for detainees as the provision of a luxury, perhaps even one not all Australians can access or afford. On this premise, the Committee seems to consider that the Australian public would see massage as excessive, especially given the receiver is described throughout the report as a ‘suspected unlawful non-citizen’. Further, there is an implied risk that the detained people seeking asylum may consider themselves deserving of more than the

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provision of the most basic necessities to maintain life through accessing massage. It is not the intention of the Australian Immigration Detention Centres, within the schema of border control and nation-building, to provide a life worth living for detainees.

In the Not the Hilton report the Australian public is not heavily featured in the discussion. The report focuses on operations at the detention centres without discussion of how they are perceived in the outside world. Within the report the public is mentioned five times: four times as the ‘Australian public’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, pp. 18, 20, 71, 82) and once as ‘taxpayers’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 109). Each of the four times the ‘Australian public’ is referred to, this is regarding the use of therapeutic massage. The single time the ‘taxpayers’ are referred to is in the conclusion, where it is noted ‘(t)he Government has a responsibility to meet international obligations to asylum seekers and refugees and to ensure taxpayers’ money is properly expended’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 83). The report is approximately twenty thousand words in length and addresses a multitude of issues from medical facilities to security. Yet the only time the perception of the Australian public is raised is when the Committee takes issue with the provision of massage and with regards to pecuniary issues. Other recreational activities, as discussed, are framed and justified by their capacity to help maintain security within the centres. Massage raises a red flag that undeserved luxury is being provided in a place of detention which is clearly not to be mistaken for the Hilton Hotel.

The issue of massage was deemed newsworthy and the media took it up as an important element of the report when a government response was released in 2003, which I note is nearly three years after the report’s publication in 2000. The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, published an article referencing the report titled ‘Ruddock halted massages for asylum seekers’ in February 2003. The first line of the article reads, ‘(i)llegal immigrants were treated to free massages and other relaxation therapies at an immigration detention centre’ (‘Ruddock halted massages for asylum seekers’ 2003). This suggests that the provision of massage had the capacity to cause controversy within the public even though the practice had ceased according to this article. If we consider the government is not bound to keep asylum seekers in conditions beyond anything other than its obligations under international agreements, the provision of massage may be seen as special treatment

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for people who have been framed within the Australian polis as ‘illegals’, ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘quasi criminals’ (Romano 2007, p. 185). The issue of massage in the report highlights the ideology underpinning government policy that people seeking asylum are to be kept alive and that is all.

The Committee is concerned generally with operational efficiency, which includes management of fiscal resources. As already noted, ‘(t)he Government has a responsibility to meet international obligations to asylum seekers and refugees and to ensure taxpayers’ money is properly expended’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 83). Further, ‘DIMA should aim to maximise the return from its estimated expenditure’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 89). This notion of taxpayers’ funds being used in a way that maximises fiscal return is not just about the cost of the service, but about what this service signifies to the Australian people. The referencing in the report to the Australian public discussed above demonstrates how the broader understanding of publicly acceptable levels of care for asylum seekers is part of the Committee’s concern. This is a consistent subtext within the report which feeds into public discourse with regards to the value attributed to the lives of people seeking asylum.

Life as ‘adequate’ In the conclusion to the Not the Hilton report, when discussing amenities the Committee states that ‘(o)verall the Committee believed that the facilities were adequate’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 84). As noted earlier in this chapter, the judgement of adequacy of care is only based on the administrative and management procedures of the centres, and not the lived experiences of the asylum seekers contained within the Immigration Detention Centres. As such, the Committee’s terms of reference are specifically focused to ensure that only the basic conditions required to maintain human life are being provided.

The media release which pertains to this report focuses on three key points: the facilities are adequate, medical facilities need upgrading and subdivisions require construction in order to manage tense situations (Parliament of Australia 2000b). The media release highlights these as key areas of importance when considering Immigration Detention Centres. In the Not the Hilton media release, the term ‘adequate’ is used to describe the

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conditions in the centres (Parliament of Australia 2000b). However, this notion of ‘adequate’ lacks clear definition within the report and thus I propose that the concept of what is ‘adequate’ for detainees equates to the quality of a bare life existence. Within the Not the Hilton report ‘adequate’ does not mean thriving, positive or having potential. In this scenario ‘adequate’ means that the obligations to keep the physical life of ‘suspected unauthorized arrivals’ viable is being achieved. ‘Adequate’ means the ‘centre provides showers, shampoo, washing machines and disposable nappies’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 26). ‘Adequate’ means five toilets for 28 males (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 42), that men are in a separate area to women and children, and that ‘(c)ommunication was by message through a central control booth’ (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 54). ‘Adequate’ means that the Committee recommends on-site medical facilities require expansion (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 29). This expansion is required because the Committee saw a patient lying on the floor while being treated because no separate cubicles were available for patients in the clinic (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 26). The Not the Hilton report creates the understanding that ‘adequate’ comes to define only that which is required to ‘keep a life alive’. As such, this equates to keeping asylum seekers excluded, in a state of exception and existing within a bare life framework. This perception of maintaining a quality of bare life for asylum seekers resonates outward to the Australian general public, thus conveying the message that their lives are not grievable.

Summary The Not the Hilton report is heavily focused on management and administrative techniques of Immigration Detention Centres as being acceptable, or ‘adequate’, in their care of detainees. Being referenced as ‘suspected unlawful non-citizens’ and ‘detainees’ throughout the report serves to displace people seeking asylum from being considered people who are deserving of a social and political life, and visibility within the polis. Not the Hilton reveals it is the structures and systems that contain people seeking asylum that are the central concern of the government. Through this focus on infrastructure, security and the report’s language, asylum seekers are framed as ‘criminal’ and a ‘burden’ on the Australian taxpayer. Further, the language used and the primary assertions within the report consistently remind the reader that the exclusion of people seeking asylum from the polis is part of maintaining a secure nation. The detained asylum seekers are not actively represented in the report.

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They have no voice in it, no face in it, their stories are not told. However, they linger in the background, occasionally mentioned, but always alluded to and framed by the administrative management of their biological lives.

My analysis of Not the Hilton consolidates my contention that people seeking asylum are actively excluded from political and social life via government policy, administration and rhetoric. The biopolitical management of their lives is both degrading to their personhood and has a subtext which frames them as unworthy of a liveable life within public discourse. Whilst such control may aim to push the detainees towards a bare life existence in Agamben’s terms, many people seeking asylum whilst in detention have resisted this dynamic through their ongoing organisation and protests. It is these acts of protest, politics and dissensus which I will discuss in detail in Chapter Seven.

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Chapter Seven: Activism and ‘the Camp’: Lip-sewing as Dissensus

Someone controls you all the time. But with hunger strike, I control myself (Rahem in Schwartz 2003).

Introduction In this chapter, I consider the notion of ‘the camp’ and activism from within the space of immigration detention. I have discussed in Chapter Four Agamben’s theoretical position that spaces such as immigration detention facilities and refugee camps, which he names ‘the camp’, are where the limit point of the state of exception is located as bare life. Throughout this thesis I have argued that Australian Immigration Detention Centres are a site where the biopolitical management of asylum seekers bodies and lives seeks to create a quality of bare life. Now, drawing on Rancière, I engage with specific examples where I contend that some people seeking asylum and refugees have contested this push towards bare life. This reveals a space of politics both within and outside of the Immigration Detention Centre. Through this I illuminate how a certain ‘permeability’ of the camp exists conceptually and physically and thus there is a risk of seepage into public discourse of the politics occurring within the camp. Contra Agamben, I discuss how this seepage points to the failure of the state of exception to completely shut down the agency of detained asylum seekers through their exclusion from the polis. Their capacity for resistance against Agamben’s limit point of bare life is explicated through my discussion of protests in Australian Immigration Detention Centres with a specific focus on the Woomera site.

7.1 Woomera Immigration Reception and Processing Centre In the title of his work Close the concentration camps Parr’s use of the phrase ‘concentration camps’ is a direct claim situating Australian Immigration Detention Centres as concentration camps. As previously discussed, Agamben has developed the theoretical terrain of ‘the camp’ extensively with historical consideration of concentration camps. Referencing a government-enforced state of exception where certain laws are suspended via sovereign decree, Agamben considers the camp to be ‘the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule … it is now the permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order’ (1998, p. 169). He speaks of the

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camp as a space of exception where laws are suspended, political rights of a person are refused and inhabitants are reduced to bare life. It is where one is both inside and outside the law, experiencing a simultaneous legal and social exclusion and inclusion that create a ‘liminal’ zone of bare life. Bare life in this sense is the point of life where one is not wholly living yet not able to be killed; that is, one is neither ‘alive’ nor ‘dead’ but forced to live on the threshold.

The concept of the camp is a central element in Agamben’s articulation of the political subjectivity of the citizen and non-citizen. Throughout Agamben’s discussion of sovereignty and the exclusion of the non-citizen from the polis, sovereignty can be considered a ‘bordering practice’ that traces a threshold between what is inside and outside (Rigby & Schlembach 2009, p. 160). Agamben refers to the camp as the nomos of the modern, a space which designates a permanent spatial arrangement for managing what on the surface is a crisis involving stateless people (1998). However, the spatial arrangement is also that which continually redefines the threshold between citizen and non-citizen, or outside and inside. The camp does much more than separate citizens from non-citizens; it produces the citizen in relation to, and contingent on, the bare life of non-citizenship through this very separation (Rigby & Schlembach 2009, p. 160). Thus, the notion of the camp is central to understanding how the lives of refugees, stateless peoples and asylum seekers are viewed as outside of the polis. Whilst they are non-citizens by definition, within the Australian context the space of immigration detention also defines them as ‘non-refugee’ and further questions their right to even claim asylum.

With reference to my discussion of nationalism in Chapter Five, the containment of asylum seekers from the polis forms part of what consolidates the nation as bound and sovereign. It actively contributes to the perception of Australia as a nation of citizens which is continually defined by those it actively excludes. People seeking asylum disrupt the borders of the nation state and as such disrupt the notion of citizenship. Thus, a key narrative which works to define the lived concepts of the Australian nation and the Australian citizen results in people seeking asylum, in this case, becoming marked as the ‘racialised other’. To draw on Perera’s (2007) discussion of the colonial logic that underpins Australian national identity, the racialised other becomes a site for the nation to perform its stateness, which in turn

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produces citizenship. People seeking asylum, as ‘racialised other’, are excluded from the space that is the ‘Australian polis’. Historically, this is operative within the Australian colonial narrative of white sovereignty and forms the foundation on which citizenship is based.

Parr has included in the gallery installation of Close the concentration camps a selection of text-based slides taken from Not the Hilton. Although I have discussed this report at length in the previous chapter, I would like to briefly address how it illuminates the ‘physical dynamic’ of the construction of the space of exception. The report reveals the physical exterior of Australian Immigration Detention Centres as a boundary that contains non- citizens in the name of ‘border protection’ and ‘national security’. Through high barbed-wire fences, administrative tactics and the censorship described in Not the Hilton the exterior of Australian Immigration Detention Centres as a space of exception is designed to be impermeable (Parliament of Australia 2000a, p. 37). Such a sense of impermeability serves to remove people seeking asylum from the social and political space of the citizen. It contains the identity and personhood of asylum seekers behind prison walls away from the polis. With reference to Rancière (2010), such impermeability is designed specifically for the containment of asylum seekers and constructs them as surplus bodies and voices in relation to the consensus.113 Further, the containment of people seeking asylum within this space of exception contributes to the consensus being able to continually define itself as outside of this space. The containment of the surplus bodies inside this space of exception becomes relevant to how the lives of asylum seekers are framed, whilst government policies of censorship work to manage the visibility and containment of surplus voices and their potential to speak.114

Rancière (2010) in Who is the subject of the rights of man? considers Agamben’s concept of the space of exception as tending towards shutting down the possibility of contesting the borders of politics. Indeed, as I have discussed in Chapter Six, Agamben does not allow a space for uprising or resistance within his articulation of bare life and the camp as a space of

113 Chapter Two of this thesis includes a discussion of Rancière’s theoretical consideration of the surplus subject.

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exception (Whyte 2009, p. 156). However, the potential for the camp to become a site of political contestation exists when understood through Rancière’s framework of dissensus. Whilst bare life is contained and maintained within the interior of the camp, the camp’s boundaries are in fact permeable. Whilst state administration of camp life is designed to shut down this permeability of camp boundaries, it has been seen to fail in the case of Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Even the use of guards and their show of force to contain the people seeking asylum inside the camp reveals the contingency of the boundaries of the detention centres, not their immutability (Rigby & Schlembach 2013, p. 164).115 Thus, the camp exists as a place of potential political contestation and this is acknowledged by the state. This knowledge results in the camp boundaries being heavily controlled by guards in conjunction with policies of censorship and other restrictive administrative procedures.

Seepage from ‘the camp’ Stories, images and narratives which bypass official channels and government control occupy a different space to the ‘official voice’ when they become part of public discourse. As discussed in Chapter Three in the context of performance art, leaked images or stories become testimony to an actual event that has taken place. They can attain certain qualities of authenticity which work to set them apart from the official story. They become like ‘stolen moments’ told by someone who was there, a witness. Perhaps this specificity allows them to seep into people’s imagination and perception in ways contrary to the intentions of an official story.

Sontag (2003, p. 24) in Regarding the pain of others claims that the photograph of an atrocity holds a specific weight of bearing witness and it is through a sense of the ‘authenticity’ of this witness status that people want or need to believe the narrative associated with the image. The one who took the photograph attains witness status, perhaps becoming the ‘one who was there’ and can tell the story. Those subjects whose

115 An example of the use of force is evidenced in the riots at Woomera IRPC in August 2002, where water cannons, tear gas and batons were deployed against detainees by the Centre Emergency Response Team (CERT) brought in to remove the ‘ringleaders’ responsible for organising protests regarding the poor living conditions (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, pp.163–67).

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images ‘call out’ from a space of atrocity or extreme distress are located in a space where the images need to represent their suffering in a way which is unique, thus separating them from the viewer and encouraging a call to action (Sontag 2003, p. 100). The protests at Woomera IRPC relied on images or stories leaking and seeping out to become evidence which was disseminated by people ‘outside’ the Australian Immigration Detention Centres such as activists, ex-detainees and journalists. Those who smuggled out images or could retell ‘unofficial’ stories became witnesses and the information they dispersed entered public discourse with the sense of authenticity outlined by Sontag. This element of authenticity offers a unique perspective. Images and stories which are not part of the official government narrative counter the dominant narrative and serve to increase the potential for dissensus outside of the fences of the detention centre.116

Woomera: riots against bare life Between 1999 and 2002 Woomera IRPC detained a total of approximately 4100 people seeking asylum. The facilities were inadequate to house this number of people, with reports that the centre had only eight toilets for 1800 people and two drinking taps, one of which was reported as constantly broken (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 112). As a result this centre was bound to become a site of distress and disruption as the punishing and isolated living conditions served to break down people’s capacity to cope with the precarity of displacement.

To gain a sense of the environment of Woomera IRPC at the time, I turn to the book Human rights overboard: seeking asylum in Australia, a publication of the ‘people’s inquiry into detention’.117 The report notes the following:

116 Boochani created a movie of life inside Manus prison in 2017. All of the footage of Chauku, tell us the time was taken on a mobile phone and illegally smuggled out. It is interesting to consider how the element of authenticity of this film is heightened given the knowledge of how the footage was gathered. In a discussion of the film SBS News states: ‘Mr Boochani is releasing a new movie shot solely on his smartphone, which had to be kept secret from the authorities at the detention centre’ (Germian 2017). From this opening line, the knowledge of the footage as shot on a small device and kept secret gives the movie a certain sense of authenticity. Thus, the movie becomes imbued with a sense of ‘witness’ in terms of the story it tells.

117 Human rights overboard: seeking asylum in Australia is the published version of ‘the people’s inquiry into detention’ undertaken by the Australian Council of Heads of Social Work. The inquiry was ‘established as open, independent, transparent and inclusive, to bear witness to events in Australian immigration detention facilities, whose operations were largely shrouded in official secrecy’ (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 19). The text

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ACM118 documents presented to the inquiry show that during a typical two-week period in Woomera in 2001: one person escaped, two people were under regular observations, there were two incidents of damage, nine people were taken to hospital and two to the medical unit, two people self-harmed, one was on hunger strike, one compound mounted a passive protest and restraints were used on 10 people (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 158).

This passage helps create a sense of the interior life of Woomera IRPC and communicates the mere provision of bare life and resistance against this. Tension regarding the isolation, treatment and conditions of detention of people seeking asylum was bound to eventually reach a breaking point. Significantly, on Good Friday (29 March) 2002 Australian protesters breached the fence of Woomera and detainees were able to climb the perimeter fence (Banham, Nicholson & Teutsch 2002). Images exist of asylum seekers holding placards such as ‘freedom or death’ and an image circulated of a young man poised with his fist in the air on the Immigration Detention Centre fence in an attempt to escape (Banham, Nicholson & Teutsch 2002) (Fig. 13). Later, in August 2002 more than 100 asylum seekers detained at Woomera IRPC protested using actions such as sewing their lips shut, hunger strikes and digging graves in which they laid their bodies (Whyte 2007). Whilst unrest was occurring in other detention centres around Australia such as Port Hedland and Curtin (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008) Woomera IRPC became a focal point of the protests. Protesting asylum seekers were supported by Australian activists and select journalists willing to document the story and convey the harshness of life inside Immigration Detention Centres. Thus, Woomera IRPC became a symbol of the cruelty of the Australian government’s asylum policy and as such gained worldwide attention.119

includes testimonials from people with experience of immigration detention including guards, medical professional, former detainees, former DIMA workers and lawyers.

118 Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), was a government contractor utilised to provide immigration detention services.

119 An example of the increased international attention towards Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum can be seen when, in 2008, the UNHRC reported that ‘a system combining mandatory, automatic, indiscriminate and indefinite detention without real access to court challenge is not practiced by any other country in the world’ (in Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 15).

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Image subject to copyright

Fig. 13 Detainees’ breakout bid (2002)

Information about life inside Australian Immigration Detention Centres was made public via the reporting of incidents and unrest by journalists, activists and workers who spoke out. However, the censorship surrounding these spaces was operative to ensure that the official voice of the government was the primary information available to mainstream media outlets, thus functioning as the dominant narrative.120 Whilst dissenting voices were speaking, they were marginal within public discourse.121 The official governmental voice aimed to reinforce the perception that the mandatory detention of people seeking asylum was necessary for national security. The underlying ideology that people seeking asylum in Australia have no right or place to speak and be heard I perceive was central to this.

Mainstream news media outlets tend to show support for the government line on Immigration Detention Centres and asylum seeker policy, often engaging in rhetoric which frames detainees as ‘illegals’ or ‘criminals. Then Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock’s official response to the lip-sewing in Woomera IRPC is a clear example of the reinforcement

120 As discussed in Chapter Five, government policies of censorship in relation to Australian Immigration Detention Centres are highly restrictive, ensuring the official government voice is the primary method of communication regarding life inside the centres (Leach 2003; Manne & Corlett 2004; Mares 2002; Marr & Wilkinson 2003).

121 One example is ‘Girt by sea: Australia, the refugees and the politics of fear’ (2002). This article by Mungo MacCallum, published in the Quarterly Essay, discusses how the punitive policies towards seeking asylum were being used for political gain within the system of government elections. Similarly, opinion pieces such as Natasha Stott Despoja’s (2002) ‘The children behind barbed wire degrade us all’, published in The Age, reveal voices dissenting from the government’s narrative were present in public discourse to some extent.

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of a dominant government message. In his statements pertaining to the lip-sewing and hunger strikes which took place at Woomera IRPC in 2002, Ruddock said:

Lip-sewing is a practice unknown in our culture but we’ve seen it before amongst detainees and it’s something that offends the sensitivities of Australians. They believe it will influence decisions. It can’t and it won’t (BBC News 2002a).

This statement circulated widely amongst news media outlets worldwide and was Ruddock’s primary message, functioning as an attempt to shut down the voices and actions of the protesting people seeking asylum. I read this as an active refusal to engage with protesters as politically active and as having a voice, whilst simultaneously attempting to redefine their actions within the dominant nationalist framework. Ruddock’s words framed people seeking asylum and living in Immigration Detention Centres as being culturally ‘alien’ and ‘offensive’ to the sensibilities of the ‘Australian’ people. He was actively reinforcing their excluded status as ‘non-Australian’ and non-citizen and discounting their political agency and political voice. Ruddock’s commentary also attempted to delegitimise the voice of the asylum seeker and ensure the official government narrative of protest within Immigration Detention Centres was maintained.

Ruddock’s statement worked to construct people seeking asylum and living inside Immigration Detention Centres as culturally unable to be part of the notion of ‘Australia’ and thus outside the consensus. Asylum seekers were deemed by him as ‘non-speaking’ within the consensus and thus invisible. As such, any attempt to speak and to be heard was shut down by his ‘official’ voice, which sought to frame them as outside of the nation and the polis. His claim that their behaviour would not influence government decision-making reveals that by acting outside what is deemed acceptable behaviour within the Australian consensus, their voices (and actions) would be silenced and ignored. However, the efforts of the government were challenged. Moments of people seeking asylum speaking and being heard became more prevalent in public discourse over the course of the period of unrest.

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Image subject to copyright

Fig. 14 Ringleader may be forced to disarm: protest death fear (2002)

Here I have framed Ruddock’s official voice as part of a communication strategy to construct a narrative which simultaneously demonises and shuts down the protesters’ voices. However, there was serious concern from doctors, activists and the Australian Human Rights Commission regarding the mental and physical safety of protesting detainees (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 14). Such concern reveals the official voice was not completely successful. Despite the efforts of the Australian government to censor life inside the Immigration Detention Centres, images and stories of detention began to seep out. For example, an image of a detainee in Woomera with lips stitched was published in the Herald- Sun in an article titled ‘Ringleader may be forced to disarm: protest death fear’ (Dunn 2002a) (Fig. 14) The image was taken at the Woomera hospital, where journalists were able to access the detainee without the severe restrictions placed on access to detainees in Woomera IRPC. Similarly, images of protesters behind fences and smuggled letters from children were circulating as leaked information from the Woomera IRPC (Dunn 2002a; Taylor & Debelle 2002). Such examples evidence that ‘unofficial’ information, such as stories and images, was in circulation and allowed the protests to become located within a framework that acknowledged the personhood of asylum seekers. The government rhetoric of criminality began to be challenged. In this context, formal advice from an advisory body

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expressed the need to overhaul Woomera IRPC and to remove detainees from unsafe environments (Immigration Detention Advisory Group 2002). However, Minister Ruddock stood firm in his decision that the government would not negotiate with protesters.

Accompanying the image of the detainee with stitched lips in the Herald-Sun (Fig. 14) was information about the arrest of an ABC News journalist.122 During the height of the protests, journalists were ordered to move away from the Immigration Detention Centre’s gates. After a short standoff, ABC radio journalist Natalie Larkin was arrested and charged with ‘failing to leave Commonwealth land’ (Dunn 2002c). She was awarded bail on the condition she not return to Woomera (Dunn 2002c). Such an action reveals the concern the government had about, firstly, the gathering of ‘unofficial’ information by journalists and, secondly, the knowledge detainees had of the presence of the press and how this would potentially intensify their protest. The journalists threatened government control over the information coming from inside the Immigration Detention Centres and heightened the potential seepage of a non-official narrative. Further, the knowledge by detainees of journalists nearby may have increased the protesters’ fervour, thus lifting the level of protest and heightening the political action inside the Immigration Detention Centres. 123

In order to continue to shut down and discredit the political protest in Woomera IRPC, Ruddock constructed a ‘victim’ status for officials. He was reported as saying, in the Herald- Sun newspaper, that indeed the guards were the ones at risk and that if ‘people have complaints they should make them … they [the detainees] should also stop throwing rocks at detention officers’ (Madigan 2002). Within this statement Ruddock highlights the ‘misbehaviour’ of detainees, attempting to make them out to be ‘savages’, ‘animals’ or ‘uncivilised’ in order to delegitimise any political subjectivity claimed by the protesting asylum seekers. His statement also conceals the fact that the detainees cannot otherwise be

122 During this time news media from various sides of the political spectrum were all critical of the arrest of a journalist and the restrictions placed on the press in access to Woomera IRPC (Hudson 2002).

123 The following years saw the government further restrict the capacity for those such as doctors and workers who have access to Immigration Detention Centres to speak out about the conditions inside. For example, the Federal government attempted to place gag orders on doctors and health workers attending asylum seekers detained in Nauru and Manus in 2015. This was defeated through a High Court challenge by the group Doctors for Refugees and their legal allies (Doherty 2016). This reveals the government’s resolve to keep Australian Immigration Detention Centres heavily censored.

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heard and have been driven to the alleged ‘disruptive behaviours’ by the conditions of their incarceration. Ruddock’s wording serves to obscure the possibility that the detention centres’ administrative systems did not encourage detainees to make complaints that were acted upon or treated as legitimate.124 As such, Ruddock continued to remain ‘steadfast in his refusal to negotiate with protesters’ (Taylor & Debelle 2002). This refusal reaffirms the exclusion of the protesting asylum seekers from the polity and positions them as not having a voice and invisible within the consensus.

7.2 Refusal of Surplus Subjectivity As I have argued throughout this thesis, people seeking asylum and held in mandatory detention exist in a surplus space in relation to the distribution of the sensible and the Australian nation. The government’s active exclusion of asylum seekers from the polis ensures this sense of a surplus existence is concretised conceptually, materially and administratively. This existence as surplus subject to the nation is what has allowed the indefinite incarceration of people seeking asylum in isolated prisons such as Woomera IRPC. With reference to Agamben (1998, 2005) they exist in a state of exception. Thus, their containment and the resulting invisibility of their personhood are simultaneously ‘necessary’ in constructing the national imagination which their exclusion from is integral to. As such, they become surplus subjects. Yet the detainees’ protests from within the space of exclusion speak in relation to their refusal to be surplus.

The protests by many detained asylum seekers serve to reveal their role as the ‘silenced other’. However, their protests also speak in relation to the actuality that they are not being effectively silenced by policies of detention. Regardless of attempts by successive governments to shut down empathy within public discourse through framing people seeking asylum as illegitimate, criminal and inaccessible, stories of the lives behind barbed wire fences have seeped into the national imagination via certain media channels. Stories of children in particular began to seep into news media articles, raising questions about the

124 In fact the official complaint system in Immigration Detention Centres was flawed, with ‘formal mechanisms for complaint largely ineffective’ (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 160). Further, it was reported that ACM made income from disturbances as it could bill the government for costs involved including property damage, thus the conflict of interest between profit and peaceful detention is problematised (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 160).

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ethical position of a government that detains children in the harsh conditions of an immigration prison.125 This is perhaps a part of the story of people seeking asylum that many Australians would have preferred to ignore. Yet once revealed, it began to prompt questions and work to reframe the common understanding of policies of mandatory detention. Headlines such as ‘The children behind barbed wire degrade us all’ (Despoja 2002) create a sense of connection between the reader and the actions of government. Such headlines speak to the complicity of the Australian polis in the actions of its government. They reframe the issue of mandatory detention by detaching it from the government rhetoric of criminality and security and suggesting a more compassionate and people-focused perspective.

As news of the protests by detained asylum seekers was disseminated, the nature of Australia’s treatment of displaced people came into the international spotlight, creating pressure from the international community to address these policies (Briskman, Latham & Goddard 2008, p. 14). Eventually, in 2003 Woomera IRPC was closed down, at which point the Australian government began intercepting people seeking asylum by boat outside of the migration zone and detaining them offshore (Phillips 2015). Whilst the shift to offshore processing I argue was a deliberate tactic to continue the punishment and exclusion of people seeking asylum, the closure of Woomera IRPC speaks to the power the protests had in effecting policy change at the time.126 An important theme that these protests highlighted is the contestation of who has the right to speak and be heard within public discourse. To draw on Rancière, the essential part of any political dispute involves the very

125 Over the first few months of 2002, during and after the Woomera IRPC protests, articles began to emerge in newspapers questioning the detention of children; for example, in The Age ‘The children behind barbed wire degrade us all’ and ‘Woomera: the truth’ which carried the subheader ‘An unthinkable tragedy may be unfolding in the desert’ (Despoja 2002; Immigration Detention Advisory Group 2002). Some newspapers still focused on the illegitimacy of asylum seekers, such as the Herald-Sun, which ran images of children from Woomera IRPC having fun at a local pool alongside an image of destitute children in Afghanistan eating from a bowl on the ground (Dunn 2002b). Regardless, there were news media outlets attempting to present a more human rights focused response to the protests of detainees.

126 Whilst Woomera IRPC was eventually closed due to pressure from protesting detainees as well as both local and international human rights organisations, the mandatory detention of people seeking asylum continued. In 2001, the Howard Government had introduced what came to be known as the ‘Pacific Solution’. This allowed the intercepting of unauthorised boats or ‘irregular maritime arrivals (IMA)’ by the Australian Navy (Phillips 2015). People onboard and seeking asylum were taken to offshore processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island (Phillips 2015). This processing strategy was suspended over 2007–2013, but was restarted and continues at the time of writing.

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‘politicity’ of the dispute itself (2010, p. 35). Thus, contesting of the space of who can speak and be heard within the distribution of the sensible is a critical precursor to the struggle for political recognition. The protests at Woomera IRPC speak to more than just the conditions of immigration detention, they raise the very issue of who has the right to speak and be heard and thus be visible within the consensus of Australia.

Lip-sewing and the fight against bare life The protests at Woomera IRPC in 2002 stand as a specific example of Rancière’s dissensus. Actions by people seeking asylum such as sewing their lips shut, going on hunger strikes and digging graves in which they lay their bodies reveal their struggle and refusal to be reduced to bare life.127 This struggle for a life which is more than mere life becomes central to these moments of resistance (Whyte 2007). These actions reveal a struggle for agency against the quality of bare life imbued within Immigration Detention Centres. They further illuminate a precise moment of resistance against the biopolitical control the nation-state has over the life and body of the asylum seeker. An Iraqi asylum seeker known as Rahem took part in the Woomera IRPC hunger strikes in 2002. He describes his situation in the Guardian newspaper as follows: ‘(s)omeone controls you all the time. But with hunger strike, I control myself’ (Rahem in Schwartz 2003). With reference to this statement by Rahem, the act of taking back physical control over the body through self-starvation was central to his struggle for political agency and a reconstruction of a political identity of the self. Whilst this struggle is in relation to the polis, Rahem’s statement also speaks in relation to the idea that one may protest for the self. Such actions allow the self to feel embodied and alive even when faced with social, political and maybe physical death. I further extend this consideration of struggle for political agency and protest for the self to other people seeking asylum involved in hunger strikes.

My consideration of Rancière’s theory of dissensus and politics locates dissensus specifically in moments where those with no space to speak try to create a platform on which to speak and be heard, and this serves to increase their visibility within the consensus. Thus, through

127 Not all asylum seekers in detention engaged in these protests at this time. Whilst they may have utilised other methods to resist the push towards bare life or indeed not, I am focusing on those detainees whose protests became known to the public and had a specificity of self-harm on the body.

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self-harm or the act of hunger striking, people seeking asylum create a visual and visceral space to assert a political subjectivity which disrupts the distribution of the sensible. Rahem’s statement regarding his hunger strike, for example, highlights the dynamic where sewing his lips together holds metaphorical and physical significance. Such an action of taking ‘control’ of the self I read as locating the body as a site of protest. The indefinite detention of people seeking asylum and being held at the Woomera IRPC sought to create a quality of state-sanctioned bare life, as per Agamben. In light of this, I argue that closing off the mouth with a needle and thread is both metaphorically and literally taking back control of the body. Actions such as Rahem’s are not a passive acceptance of bare life, nor necessarily a resignation to the movement or flow into the final stages of living. This act of suturing the mouth is a potent and complex political action. It arises not solely from personal desperation, but from a politicisation of the body within the context of a consistent dynamic of resistance by asylum seekers. This action of sewing the lips shut is an act of dissensus and it works to resist the position of ‘silenced and invisible other’ that the detainees of Immigration Detention Centres are relegated to by the Australian government.

With reference to my discussion of the published image of an asylum seeker with his lips sewn shut earlier in this chapter (Fig. 14) I contend that the dissemination of this image acted as a moment of rupture in the perception of the protesting asylum seeker within public discourse. Whilst it is understood that such a rupture may not have created empathy or action in all people in the general population, within Rancière’s framework it served to disrupt the distribution of the sensible. The publishing of the image interrupted the dominant narrative which located the asylum seeker as a silent and bare life body who was passively locked away in the Woomera IRPC. It worked to subvert the understanding that people seeking asylum are deemed not politically qualified nor allotted a space to speak and be heard within the consensus. The act of sewing one’s lips shut and the act of refusing to eat or to speak are acts of assertion of political subjectivity. They seek to reveal, on the exterior of the body, a refusal to internalise the lack of visibility and a speaking space allotted to the detained subject. This, in turn, acts as a call for that very space to speak and the space of visibility which is denied to people seeking asylum within the consensus.

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Hunger striking and lip sewing act as disruptions in the normative perception within public discourse of the asylum seeker as resigned to their predicament. The act of specifically sewing shut the lips, as a symbolic action on the body, speaks in relation to the physicality of the lived experience of immigration detention. Whilst these are political acts of resistance, they are both literal and metaphorical acts which subvert the embodiment of bare life. The visual element of the asylum seeker lying in a dug grave or with lips sewn shut speaks to the concept of life on the threshold of death, which is bare life in Agamben’s terms. However, such actions speak to the political struggle of detainees to resist the quality of bare life and sovereign control.128 The embodied protest of asylum seekers allows the protester to feel a sense of self and personal agency, whilst simultaneously working to create political recognition with the state which maintains biopolitical control over their lives. 129

Asylum seekers in Australian Immigration Detention Centres, including the Woomera IRPC, have fought against accepting the quality of bare life and the negation of their personhood. In response, the state has refused to act on the demands of the protests and instead attempted to re-establish biopolitical control over detainees. For example, people seeking asylum who became ill from hunger strikes were subjected to intravenous feeding in order to keep them alive (Bailey 2009, p. 188; Briskman, Goddard & Latham 2008, pp. 170–71). Such state-controlled force-feeding serves to reinsert the body and life back into the biopolitical mainframe, thus being reabsorbed into a sovereign relation. Therefore, it was the state that ensured protesters were not allowed to die whilst simultaneously ensuring they were not allowed to ‘live’ a politically qualified life with access to the polis. The

128 I note that Jenny Edkins and Vèronique Pin-Fat address the idea of refugees ‘taking on’ bare life through embodied protest (2005). Their contention is that when asylum seekers who are detained in conditions that create bare life sew their lips in protest, they are ‘taking on of the very form of life that sovereign power seeks to impose’ (Edkins & Pin-Fat 2005, p. 3). They specifically consider the act of sewing the lips shut assumes ‘bare life such that it is transformed into form-of-life’ (Edkins & Pin-Fat 2005, p. 16). However, as I have discussed in Chapter Four form-of-life for Agamben suggests a life where the political and biological are fused and no longer defined in a citizen–state–sovereign relation. With reference to Whyte (2007), form-of-life tends towards the ‘terrain of death’, thus becoming form-of-life, which is bare life pushed to its absolute, is inevitably challenged by human mortality. Edkins and Pin-Fat’s argument suggests a lack of agency and implies a level of resignation by asylum seekers, which is a position I do not subscribe to.

129 Contra Agamben’s form-of-life and embracing of bare life as a path to a new form of politics, the politics emerging out of the actions at Woomera IRPC were based on ‘transcendence of bare life, not its celebration’ (Owens 2009, p. 578). I agree with Owen’s assertion that such demonstrations reveal people’s desire to be granted rights whilst still denying the effort of the sovereign state to destroy their capacity to have ‘rights’ (Owens 2009, p. 578).

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government’s response of force-feeding recognises the limit point of bare life as the threshold of life and death. Thus, the threshold of life and death is the space inhabited in the state of exception and holding detainees at this point is paramount within the schema of Immigration Detention Centres. Whilst death would have caused a potentially disastrous international incident for the government at the time, death would indeed free the bare life subject from any relation to the sovereign power.130

In 2001 ABC TV’s Four Corners reported the story of Shayan Badraie in an episode titled ‘The Inside Story’. Shayan was a six-year-old boy detained at Woomera IRPC with his parents who was later moved to Villawood Immigration Detention Centre in New South Wales. (‘The Inside Story’ 2001) After witnessing violence from guards towards detainees, numerous acts of self-harm and a bloody attempted suicide by a detainee, the child refused food and water and became mute (‘The Inside Story’ 2001). His parents were not engaged in hunger striking and consistently tried to feed him. According to his parents, he was only hospitalised when death was imminent. They claim to have been told: ‘the child can survive for five days, meaning that only when he’s about to totally collapse will they take him to hospital’ (‘The Inside Story’ 2001). It was reported that once hospitalised, Shayan was tube-fed and hydrated and this resulted in his health improving. At this point he began to regain his speech. However, as soon as Shayan returned to an Immigration Detention Centre, he deteriorated again back towards the threshold of life and death. He was then returned to the hospital. This was reported as a recurring cycle for Shayan and his family. The frustration felt by the family was expressed by his father who, in response to his son’s predicament, asked: ‘Are we animals? We are human’ (‘The Inside Story’ 2001).131

130 On Nauru and Manus Islands, where Australian-managed offshore immigration processing centres are located, there have been numerous cases of attempted suicide and self-immolation (SBS 2019). These have resulted in death such as in the case of a 23-year-old Iranian asylum seeker known as Omid (Anderson 2016). Whilst these acts speak in relation to protest and claims for recognition, the situation is one where the desperation of asylum seekers is dire. Detained with absolutely no promise of release or assistance from the Australian government, these men may well be looking for the ultimate release from the torturous conditions of their lives.

131The case of Shayan stands as an example of the cruelty evident in Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Shayan was placed in foster care for four months whilst the rest of his family remained detained. The foster family reported symptoms of trauma in the child and eventually the Minister agreed to grant his stepmother and baby sister bridging visas, whilst keeping his father detained. The entire family were eventually given refugee status and TPVs in August 2002, almost two years after Shayan’s mental health began to visibly

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During this period, Shayan represented the quality of state-enforced bare life. The state would reinstate his relation to the sovereign ban by medically feeding him with tubes, yet never remove the cause of his precarious existence, which was living in detention. It kept Shayan in a state of exception and living a bare life as he sat on the threshold of life and death. Whilst I believe the child’s actions of refusing food and not speaking were ‘political’ in their refusal to live in the condition of immigration detention, I am not suggesting that they were a direct part of the organised political acts of the other detainees at the time outlined above. When considered within Rancière’s framework, however, Shayan engaged in dissensus regardless of intention. His refusal to speak or eat food clearly disrupted the normative perception of what may be considered a basic human drive to stay alive at all costs. Shayan in his refusal to eat or speak indeed refused to accept his designated position within the consensus as a passive child at the mercy of, in this case, the Australian government. It is through this active refusal that I locate his actions as dissensus and consider his body a site of political resistance.132

Political organisation within ‘the camp’ Dissensus as enacted through Shayan’s refusal of food and speech is not contingent on intentionality. However, dissensus is at times active and deliberate within the Australian Immigration Detention Centres by detainees who are engaged in constant acts of defiance against their incarceration. As I discussed in Chapter Two, dissensus is not contingent on a major upheaval and is evident in the active fight by asylum seekers against the control of their daily life. Richard Bailey’s (2009) article ‘Up against the wall: bare life and resistance in Australian immigration detention’ focuses on interviews he conducted with former asylum seeker detainees in Australia. The asylum seekers he spoke with referred to persistent political organisation within the camp. His article evidences that rather than seeking to take on bare life as symbolic protest, detainees rejected their bare life conditions in order to take

deteriorate (Manne & Corlett 2004, p. 26). Whilst it is not a focus of this thesis, the case of Shayan also speaks to issues of gender and children within the immigration detention schema.

132 I acknowledge that children in detention on Nauru in 2018 also raised international concern with regards to hunger striking. Reported by the ABC, children on Nauru were suffering from ‘resignation syndrome’ where they ‘become unresponsive and stop talking, eating, drinking, and going to the toilet’ (Randall 2018). Refusal to eat is considered a significant withdrawal from social engagement by children, signalling a withdrawal from their life (Randall 2018).

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control of and have agency over their lives and their politics (Bailey 2009, p. 113). Similar to my own position, Bailey does not reject Agamben’s theory of bare life and acknowledges that he develops a unique and powerful vision of biopolitics, especially in relation to immigration detention. Further, contra Agamben Bailey argues that the camp has at times proven to be a site of solidarity and freedom in the face of the biopolitical (2009, pp. 113, 118). In line with my own argument, he claims that it is ‘precisely this state of bare life that detainees seem so desperate to avoid’ (Bailey 2009, p. 115) and through his contact with ex- detainees, Bailey considers collective resistance to be ‘characteristic of life in the camp’ (2009, p. 116).133 Thus, whilst the state may push the detained people seeking asylum towards a quality of bare life, through collective action the detainees seek ways to resist the complete biopolitical control of their lives.

The accepted space within the consensus for people seeking asylum is the camp. People seeking asylum in Australia are relegated as surplus and thus the camp becomes a surplus space. My discussion here reveals that any staging or representation of the quality of bare life by asylum seekers, through acts such as lip-sewing or hunger striking, stands as a protest against bare life. Any visual or visceral embodiment of the quality of bare life, such as lying in a self-dug grave, is an act to demand political recognition and some form of reinstatement within the social order. However, in doing so they demonstrate the violence of the sovereign ban in relation to their bodies and lives.

Abas Amini: lip-sewing as activism The camp stands as a surplus space and detainees protest against their incarceration, creating acts of dissensus. I now consider the actions of Abas Amini. Amini is an example of a community-based asylum seeker who refused the designated position of invisible, passive and voiceless refugee through embodied protest. Refugee and activist Amini is known to have spent most of his life living as an outspoken political poet in Iran. There he was tortured repeatedly for his political views, which led him to flee and seek asylum in the UK (BBC News 2003a). In 2003 Amini had his lips and eyes sewn shut to protest an attempt by Britain’s Home Office to appeal his refugee status, granted earlier that year. After the

133 Bailey does not engage with Rancière in this article.

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appeal was dropped, Amini continued his political action for eleven days as a self- proclaimed act of solidarity with other people in the process of seeking asylum (Soguk 2006, p. 388).

Amini’s actions stand as an interesting counterpoint to my previous discussion regarding asylum seekers who were held in Woomera IRPC and who similarly sewed their lips in protest. Amini was not in a detention centre in the UK; he was living in the community as a recognised ‘genuine’ refugee.134 Living in the community as a refugee, asylum seeker or displaced person does not exclude one from experiencing the dynamic of inclusive exclusion from the biopolitical management of life and thus being located in a surplus space.135 However, as a refugee living in the community Amini occupies a different configuration of the biopolitical in comparison to people seeking asylum being held in Woomera IRPC. Living in the British community at the time of his protest meant Amini was able to access resources. This access allowed him to ‘stage’ his protest to some extent and focus on the political efficacy of his action, whilst gaining assistance from sympathetic community members. Amini was not located within the harsh physical conditions of isolated detention and, unlike the prison fences that surrounded detainees at Woomera IRPC, was not locked away and rarely seen through the barbed-wire fences which visually define the exclusion of incarceration. As discussed in Chapter Six, razor-wire fences act as signification of a clear definition of the space containing those who cannot speak and be heard and as such have no visibility within the consensus. Thus, Amani’s position was not ‘concretised’ by the structures that the Woomera IRPC detainees faced.136

134 The UK did not have a mandatory detention policy at this time, but asylum seekers could be detained for a fast-track processing procedure or if found not to be a ‘genuine’ refugee (Global Detention Project 2019).

135 As a brief example of community detention, I look to the Australian TPV. This visa offers asylum seekers who are not detained three years of protection. Upon cessation of this time they must reapply for asylum with the risk of being returned to their place of origin. Asylum seekers have limited work rights on a TPV and limited access to health care, they cannot travel, cannot apply for family reunion and have very limited access to financial and accommodation support (Asylum Seeker Resource Centre 2019). These conditions create a specific ‘class’ of people in the community who are vulnerable and more precarious than many citizens. Whilst not literally detained in a prison, their lives are heavily restricted on a daily basis and they cannot move through the community with the rights of others. 136 I also note here that Amini is claiming asylum in a country other than Australia; thus the dynamics and policies which manage his refugee status differ.

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Image subject to copyright

Fig. 15 Abas Amini (2003)

Amini’s act of sewing his lips and eyes is an intervention within the distribution of the sensible, especially as the image was circulated within the media and public discourse (Fig. 15). His action sought to insert a political, self-determined and visible subjectivity within a space where the refugee is rendered invisible. By sewing his lips and using only his body to ‘speak’ in protest, Amini’s ‘voice’ became politically potent through his literal inability to speak. Without the visual boundaries of spatial isolation, Amini’s body came to occupy a site of politics and dissent within the community. The stitches over his mouth, eyes and ears acted as a visual referent for the violence of incarceration he had experienced in the past and others were experiencing during the time of his political action. The stitches became a visual reference to the closing in or shutting down of a voice that cannot speak and be heard, and of eyes that cannot see or be seen. I look to the threads as becoming like the bars of a prison fence embedded in the face of Amini.

Nevak Soguk (2006, p. 389) writes that when Amini’s stitches were removed, the scene was ‘a product of a knowledgeable political act with reverberations in the broader context as it was a recording of a singular redemptive event’. As the stitches were removed by a nurse, Amini held a press conference and his poem was read out by a person in attendance:

I sewed my lips so that others could speak I sewed my eyes so others could see I sewed my ears so others could hear I sewed my mouth to give others a voice (Soguk 2006, p. 389).

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The staging of the removal of the stitches as a press conference and the reading of his poem attest to Amini’s conscious resolve to make his protest known within the broader polis. Further, after the removal of his stitches he spoke of his desire to continue to fight for displaced and stateless people. As quoted on the BBC News at the press conference arranged for the removal of his stitches, he stated: ‘(g)etting rid of the stitches to open my mouth is not a sign of surrender. I want to stay alive to continue the struggle’ (BBC News 2003b). Amini’s response, coupled with the fact that he continued his protest in spite of his own refugee status being approved, reveals that his action was to address ongoing political concerns pertaining to others. His staging of the removal of the stitches as a press conference, or news event, supports my contention that Amini’s actions were political within Rancière’s definition of dissensus. The event served to create a space for him to speak and be heard within the consensus.

Whilst the poem mentioned above is words written and spoken, the stitched thread is also a mode of writing on the body. The stitching of Amini’s lips, when considered writing, resonates with the words of his poem and creates a visceral and visual metaphor for their meaning. The stitching moves beyond self-harm to become a symbolic action externalising the sense of silencing that those without a place in the consensus live with. Amini’s action is an attempt to create a visual reference to the state-sanctioned and state-administrated violence which produces the invisibility of his and other refugee bodies and voices. Sugok (2006, p. 392) claims Amini’s was a ‘survival act’, echoing the conditions of the space of violence from which displaced people must speak as they try to be heard. Further, this perceived self-harm was not self-mutilation per se, but an action which emerged from and points back to the violence inflicted upon the asylum seeker or refugee body when their agency is taken away. By enacting such radical acts which alter the disposition of the body, the refugee can claim agency within the violent spatial arrangement of political and governmental space. Thus, when Amini, or other refugees and asylum seekers, sew their lips or eyes, they make visible the violence that is already being routinely and administratively performed on their bodies and lives. As such, by enacting this form of protest the body becomes a site of politics and, further, a site of dissensus. Such attempts to visually challenge the perception of the refugee body as non-speaking, non-political and invisible, by

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externalising this on the body, create moments of disruption within the consensus as those who cannot be heard try to speak through their own bodies.

Amini was not in detention during his political action and, unlike the people seeking asylum in Woomera IRPC, was not subject to the type of legislated censorship they faced. In Chapter Five I discussed the government-imposed conditions of censorship detained asylum seekers in Australian Immigration Detention Centres were living with. In contrast to this heavily administrated omission of images in Australia, images of Amini were actively circulated through the news media (BBC News 2003a, 2003b; Branigan 2003). This action was integral to his political intent, which brought into relief the invisibility of displaced or stateless people. His actions encouraged political visibility as the image of his sewn face within the media was set to disrupt the visual landscape of public discourse.

The metaphorical element of Amini having his lips and eyes sewn was documented in its literalness, as he allowed a photographer to take and use his image. Phil Collins was the photographer who took staged photos of Amini and these have circulated as key images representing the lip-sewing enacted by refugees.137 The deployment and publication of the images provided a specific space for interruption of the public policy debates and strategies of Western democratic governments (Kear 2008, p. 17). Through their disruptive action within the polis, the images of Amini sought to draw attention to the political relation of the refugee body to the violence of the policies governing his life. The images, and naming of Amini as the subject of them, gave a sense of a ‘life’ being lived to the refugee as subject. Indeed, the images stand as an example of an aesthetic rupture within the distribution of the sensible, and thus dissensus. The images left circulating in the public media space continue to ensure that his body remains a documented site of visible resistance by refugees.138

137 There was a call for a collaborative approach to the photographic process and for Amini to be a subject, not object, of the image (Kear 2008, p. 19). However, Collins has become linked to and indeed holds copyright over the image titled Abbas Amini (2003). This image has been exhibited in galleries as well as distributed in news media outlets. Regardless of Collins intention for collaboration he benefits within the art world from Amini’s political action. 138 The search ‘lip sewing refugee’ in Google summons these pictures of Amini as the top hit. I performed this search on 21 March 2018 at 2.48 pm. On this day you could buy the image of Amini for between A$200 and A$650 on Getty images (www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/iranian-refugee-abbas-amini-prior-to- having-his-stitches-news-photo/828707748). Whilst this is not the focus of my discussion and the specifics of

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My discussion of Amini’s actions argues that he represents a suffering that is his own and, through this, becomes a ‘life’ that exists in contestation with the notion of the refugee as a passive entity within the consensus. Amini engages in what Soguk (2006, p. 391) calls a ‘survival act’ which echoes the struggle displaced people face as they try to speak out and resist becoming invisible in a mass of government bureaucracy and ‘red tape’. Following on from Soguk, I think that the extensive administrative procedures, or red tape, are inextricably linked to the mechanisms of government and citizenship which contribute significantly to the invisibility of displaced people. Any attempt to speak or be heard, or to become visible, is not only a ‘survival act’ but an act of dissensus; it challenges the status quo of a silencing bureaucracy.

Through such protest, it is then possible to attempt to develop a politics of equality which is autonomous from the generally understood categories of citizenship, sovereignty, the nation and the state. With this premise, Amini and people seeking asylum, protesting both from within the space designated as the camp and from within the community from which they are administratively excluded, are fighting against the inequalities between those qualified citizens of a particular state and those deemed non-citizens. Their actions are a fight for equality as they seek visibility in a space which deems them invisible. This need not be predicated on citizenship per se, but perhaps on a mode of recognition which values the personhood and life of people who are living as stateless.

Summary Situations of rightlessness or invisibility, such as those described above, are an integral part of the configuration of equality within the consensus (Rancière 2010, p. 68). Lines and borders being drawn, both figurative and literal, as in the case of Immigration Detention Centres, ensures that those who have rights and have a voice are visible, and this visibility is also contingent on those who are deemed invisible and those excluded. Thus, these conceptual and material lines and borders become the sites where politics exists. As discussed, when those detained actively push the boundaries of their containment and the

ownership etc are missing here, it raises issues in relation to commercialisation of both Amini’s and others’ political actions and suffering.

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condition of invisibility, they challenge the consensus. This challenge places inequality in dispute and reveals the boundaries of equality as contingent.

By taking ‘control’ of their bodies via physical protest, the assumption within the distribution of the sensible that the asylum seeker or refugee is invisible and designated to exist as surplus is disputed and disrupted. These assertions of agency over one’s body and life reveal that the contesting of the space of who can speak and be heard within the distribution of the sensible is a critical precursor to the struggle for political recognition and visibility within the polis.

This chapter has addressed that the protests at Woomera IRPC speak to more than just the conditions of immigration detention. They raise the very issue of who has the right to speak and be heard within the consensus within an Australian context. Australia as a nation-state performs its sovereignty on the bodies and lives of people seeking asylum, especially those who arrive by boat, by excluding them from the social body. I have discussed here that the location of asylum seeker as surplus is integral to the understanding of Australian national identity. Asylum seekers are framed as surplus in relation to the polis and this is operative within the discourse of Australian nationhood. When asylum seekers protest, from both within and outside of immigration detention, they refuse this space of surplus subject and situate the body as a site of resistance. Thus, the asylum seekers and refugees I have addressed in this chapter use self-harm and other practices as a form of protest to actively seek ‘some form’ of political recognition. The performance art of Parr was made in response to this activism by asylum seekers. Parr worked outside of Immigration Detention Centres and I will now speak to the capacity of his work to engage in activism and the possibility of this to similarly be located within Rancière’s framework of dissensus.

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Chapter Eight: Close the Concentration Camps: Art as Dissensus

[T]he artist must work in two directions at once, inwards, in terms of memory and personal experience and outwards towards new empathetic forms and knowledge of the world (Parr in Storer 2003, p. 29).

Introduction In Chapter Seven I discussed the notion of the camp and the failure, although near success in some cases, of this space to produce bare life. This failure is evident in the embodied protests of people seeking asylum and I frame their action as dissensus within a Rancièrian framework. In this chapter, my focus is to critically locate the performance art of Parr in relation to the political situation of people who are deemed invisible and voiceless within the polity. Specifically, I draw on his performance art piece Close the concentration camps. In this work Parr’s body became a site of contestation in relation to the physical and administrative exclusion of asylum seekers from the Australian polis. Close the concentration camps was the first in a series of works in which Parr presented his own body as a living, visual and performative referent to the protests inside Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Like the protestors discussed in Chapter Seven, Parr sewed his lips shut in an act of what he called ‘solidarity’ with asylum seekers (2008).

8.1 Politics and Parr’s Performance Art The protests by people seeking asylum and refugees, as discussed, occurred from the position of those who are excluded from the polis and as such deemed surplus. Contrary to this, Parr does not occupy the position of surplus figure nor exists in a surplus space within the social order. Within an Australian context Parr is a ‘politically qualified’ citizen, a prominent artist and a member of the polis. As such, he engages with the surplus space of asylum seekers who do not share his political qualification. The positioning of his performance art as political within this context becomes contingent on the protests of asylum seekers in detention.

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Close the concentration camps Close the concentration camps was a six-hour performance art event enacted at Monash Museum of Art, Melbourne, on 15 June 2002. In this piece, Parr’s face was sewn up. Thread was stitched through his skin, connecting his lips, ears and eyebrows (Fig. 18). Further, Parr branded the word ‘ALIEN’ on his right leg, where his trousers were torn (Fig. 19). Parr had fasted for 30 hours prior to the event. He sat slumped in a chair, in this stitched and branded condition, dressed in a nondescript man’s suit with the words ‘CLOSE THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS’ in large black letters above him on the gallery wall (Fig. 16). Letters exchanged between Parr and art scholar David Bromfield regarding the work’s form and politics were exhibited in an adjacent room (Parr 2008). In another part of the gallery, Parr projected text he had selected from the 2000 Immigration Detention Centre inspection report titled Not the Hilton (Fig. 12); Parr had summarised the text into 80 individual statements which alternated as video projections on the wall. His intention was to ‘let the audience decide for themselves’ how they felt about the text (Parr 2008).

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 16 Close the concentration camps (2002)

Image subject to copyright

Fig. 17 Close the concentration camps (2002)

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Image subject to copyright Image subject to copyright

Fig. 18 Close the concentration camps (2002) Fig. 19 Close the concentration camps (2002)

When discussing his production of Close the concentration camps Parr stated during an interview that there was a need to ‘invoke the visual or visceral in addressing such trauma because the official response is all about containment, minimization’ (Storer 2003, p. 39). Thus, Parr’s traumatised physical condition was designed to act as a metaphor for the brutality of government policies of exclusion and as a site for the embodiment of bare life. He presented an exhausted, white, male body whose lips, eyes and ears were sewn and, as such, attempted to act as a conduit to reveal trauma that was not his own. This location of ‘the trauma of others’ onto his body created a ‘visual and visceral’ reference to the suffering of asylum seekers. Given the visibility of asylum seekers was being negated by the official government narrative circulating within public discourse, in Close the concentration camps Parr presents himself and reveals his own inclusion and, by extension, the spectators’ assumed inclusion in the social and political life of Australia.

Tension and anxiety in the live Spectatorial distancing is a performance strategy Parr used in Close the concentration camps as well as much of his earlier performance art. This tactic speaks to the underlying element of complicity, which is a key concern of this thesis and Parr’s work. To illuminate this concept, I discuss Parr’s use of distance and anxiety whilst considering Abramović’s work in Chapter Three. Both performance artists approach the relationship with their spectator in

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different ways, yet both challenge the normative conventions of spectatorship by calling on the element of complicity. Much of Abramović’s work aims to interrupt the comfort, or position, of the spectator as voyeur and this tactic is also prevalent in Parr’s work. The audience and the presence of her body were crucial aspects of Abramović’s work. In one of her key early works performed in Naples, Rhythm O, she stood naked in the studio (Fig. 2). As outlined previously, spectators were invited to select from objects on a table near her and engage directly with her body as they wished. The objects included wine, a rose, a scalpel, a feather, nails, a gun loaded with one bullet and other things. She stood for six hours whilst the audience used these objects on her body, at times inflicting harm towards her. In an accepted historical account recorded by Thomas McEvilley, who was in attendance, McEvilley claims that the gun was held to her head and another audience member pulled it away (Ward 2012, p. 120). McEvilley also reports that someone slashed her neck and sucked her blood, and that there was a notable feeling of aggression in the room (Ward 2012, p. 120).

In Rhythm O such an offering to engage with the artist’s body as both object and subject suggests a surrendering of her agency to some degree. This call to the spectator to become an active part of the performance action is a central aspect of the work. Their decisions within this space tangibly affect the performance. Abramović works to break down the notion of distanced spectator or the objective viewer. To quote Butler (2006, p. 26) ‘the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and violence’. Abramović positioned her body to allow others to act on her. In a scenario such as this, the spectator who chooses to idly sit by and watch others take action against her body is situated in a challenging position. As such, the work calls on their moral position with regards to taking action or being complicit via passivity. Complicity is a crucial element in the politics of performance art as it challenges the spectator’s assumed position of inaction.

In Parr’s work he seeks to distance the spectator from his body. Unlike Abramović, who invites close bodily proximity, Parr sets up the space in a way which excludes the spectator from the performance space and locates them as a voyeur. In the case of Close the concentration camps where the floor around him had a tape boundary, this distance speaks in relation to the distance constructed and maintained by government policies which detain

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asylum seekers outside of the polis; this is a theme throughout Parr’s oeuvre. He speaks of the importance of creating an anxiety within the spectator through his engagement with strategies of restraint. He does this within the structure of the performance in order to reduce the possibility of the audience interrupting his work (Parr 2013). In his performance Light a candle. Hold your finger in the flame for as long as possible Parr literally held his finger over a candle for as long as he could with a live audience watching. Parr says he felt, or recognised, the desire of the spectators to surge forward whilst he was performing, possibly to render assistance or possibly to get closer, but either way holding the audience at bay became in his words an ‘imperative’ or an ‘operative parameter’ of his work (Parr 2013). As such, Parr claims to have developed a method to ‘do things eruptively in front of an audience, maximize a state of anxiety, a reciprocal anxiety but hold the tension so people can’t intervene and prevent the thing from happening’ (Parr 2013).

Abramović in Rhythm O, on the other hand, needed to rely on other people to physically restrain the audience to put an end to any violence that was being enacted up on her. In her work Abramović allows a kind of loss of physical agency by relying on others to end violence acted upon her. Unlike Abramović, Parr maintains his physical agency by maintaining control over the potential of violence towards his body. Whilst in both cases the harm is ‘real’ and experienced on the live body, the agency of the artist to self-protect from interventions is varied. What I find interesting here is the contrast: Parr controls interaction with the audience whilst Abramović is open to it; Parr prefers to avoid direct engagement with the audience whilst Abramović aims for such engagement. As such, Parr is concerned about the ‘outcome’ of his work aesthetically whilst Abramović shows an openness to the aesthetics being dependent on the spectator. However, both performance artists create a sense of the intersubjective relation discussed in Chapter Three. In their works, the actions of the artist and the spectator are dependent on each other and the live performance art that results then becomes the work. Further, both artists play with the complicity of the audience with regards to what happens to the artist as the live work takes place.

8.2 Nationalism, Geopolitics and Disruption Asylum seekers who enact self-harm as direct protest occupy a different ‘space’ to Parr’s self-harm as political art. Parr has not been detained nor forced to live within a state of

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exception. He claims to be standing in ‘solidarity’ with asylum seekers by creating art which ‘mirrored the political desperation of their actions’ (Parr 2008). Whilst this comment positions Parr as empathetic, as a citizen of Australia he is simultaneously bound up in the state-sanctioned suffering of asylum seekers. In order to create a performance artwork that can be read as simultaneously political, Parr needed to disrupt the dominant narrative surrounding the treatment of asylum seekers, from within a self-reflective practice.

Disrupting nationalist rhetoric The narrative central to the Australian national understanding of asylum seekers, especially those who attempt to arrive by boat, positions them as ‘other’ and a national security threat. As such, people seeking asylum are framed by policy and rhetoric as requiring mandatory detention and as undeserving of anything more than a bare life. As discussed earlier, this key narrative is not only part of the understanding of how asylum seekers are to be treated, but also contributes to the iteration of Australian nationhood as a lived concept. The exclusion of some affirms the political inclusion of others and, thus, the understanding of ‘nation’ rests on the premise that those excluded are integral to constructing who and what ‘Australian nationals’ are and can be.

In Close the concentration camps and other performance art works which followed, including Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian) (2003), Parr attempted to disrupt the accepted narrative of the Australian nation. Through ascribing elements of everyday nationalism to these performance art pieces, he displaced symbols and signifiers from their usual position within the consensus. The phrase ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi’ in the title Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian), for example, points to the common chant expressing patriotic zeal at sporting matches, as discussed earlier. In this work, Parr placed a small Australian flag on a stick in the stump that is his left arm. I consider his somewhat absurd placement of the flag served to disrupt the ‘proper’ placement and usage of an element of everyday nationalism. It made an absurd reference to such small flags being attached to the roof of a car, for example. Usual signs of patriotism and allegiance to the nation which are symbolised by the national flag within the social sphere became problematised by his use of the flag in this way. Such elements of everyday nationalism are part of a specific iteration of the nation. Here, Parr drew on the use of a small ‘mass-

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produced’ flag which is relevant in a contemporary Australian setting. It served to specifically disrupt the dominant narratives circulating within public discourse with regards to how nationalism is enacted by ‘Australians’.

In Close the concentration camps Parr’s white, male body was displaced from its usual position. His performance actions of self-harm located his body outside of the dominant narratives of nationalism and masculinity. Parr presented himself within this work as a slumped man in a dark-coloured suit with his face sewn by thread and the word ‘ALIEN’ branded on his leg. Whilst I acknowledge that Parr was bound to the discourses of art, which I speak to later in this chapter, the impression he presented was one of a distressed, injured and resigned man. His body language of slumped shoulders and dropped head, his lack of speech and his refusal to make eye contact presented a man who was injured and defeated. Whilst I am of the opinion that his privilege as a white male could not be erased from this performance, his use of the body in this way speaks to a narrative of alienation, defeat, but also complicity in relation to his white, male, Australian identity.

During the time Parr made Close the concentration camps politicians such as Phillip Ruddock were labelling protesting asylum seekers as outside of what was considered ‘Australian’ in their actions of lip-sewing and hunger striking.139 As discussed in Chapter Six, such rhetoric was an operative tactic which served to exclude and render invisible people seeking asylum from the national imagination. Parr chose to align himself visually and politically with the protesting asylum seekers. His performance art, which he claims was an act of solidarity with the political activism of detained asylum seekers (Parr 2008), further spoke in relation to his own sense of alienation from the dominant narrative of the Australian nation. The word ‘ALIEN’ branded on his leg thus took on a dual meaning as it referenced both the ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘illegal alien’ in relation to his own sense of alienation. His performance art became an act of resistance as he attempted to locate his work and his body in contestation with the dominant narrative of Australian public discourse. Thus, the resulting narratives that Parr produced via Close the concentration camps became a

139 For example, Ruddock is quoted as saying ‘(l)ip-sewing is a practice unknown to our culture … and it’s something that offends the sensibilities of Australians’ (BBC News 2002).

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performed rejection of the notion of ‘not like us’, ‘alien’, and the rhetoric that surrounded people seeking asylum during this period as something ‘other’ than Australian. By branding his own leg, Parr marks himself with the pain of ‘alien’. Close the concentration camps brought into relief the issue of cruelty that was being enacted on the bodies and lives of people seeking asylum. This work further revealed that a sense of security within the hegemony of the Australian nation was contingent on the exclusion, and invisibility of, this group of people.

Geopolitics on the skin In Close the concentration camps Parr created his body as a site of political contestation. This was not achieved simply by ‘mirroring’ the lip-sewing actions of protesting asylum seekers detained in Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Parr did not simply sew his lips in an act of blanket replication of the asylum seekers. In Parr’s case, the threads began as sewn from his lips, then were sewn to his eyes and to his ears. This created a crisscross of thread across his face which pulled the skin and allowed blood to seep from the suture wounds (Fig. 18). His mouth, eyes and ears were all shut, suggesting the impossibility of speaking, hearing or seeing. Parr was shutting his face in and shutting his face down with lines. These lines became like the lines of the fences which obscured the faces and bodies of asylum seekers from the polity as the Immigration Detention Centres sought to shut them in and shut them down. This literal sewing and ‘tying up’ of Parr’s face with thread became a visual referent to the containment of the face, identity and lives of the people seeking asylum in detention. Further, the threads on his face became like state or land borders, or a map, as if he had territorialised his face as marked territory. The threads as borders on his face were stained with the blood which had seeped from his wounds. Such blood acted as a metaphor for the damage caused to people seeking asylum who are cut off from the Australia polis.

These threads across Parr’s lips, ears, eyes and face serve to represent his own ‘tied up’ position within the consensus. As a member of the consensus, Parr benefits from certain elements of the nationalist narrative. Regardless of his political intentions, in art or in life for that matter, I read an element of ‘my hands are tied’ or a feeling of being ‘stitched up’ and complicit within the complex narrative of national identity which is being played out on

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people seeking asylum. Within the social order, one may be caught in a feeling of helplessness and experience discomfort in one’s inability to effect change or render genuine assistance to those who ask. Parr’s work draws on this dynamic as he places his injured body in the gallery with tape on the floor, marking his territory as distinct from the spectator (Fig. 16). As discussed, Parr does not allow the spectator to interact with him during his performance art. As a strategy, this generates a sense of anxiety within the performance space. Through the use of this tactic, Close the concentration camps speaks to the inability of the spectator to render assistance to Parr and creates a restrictive dynamic between him and the onlooker. Similarly, the legal, social and physical isolation of asylum seekers detained in Immigration Detention Centres restricts most Australian citizens from being able to engage with them in a meaningful way.

Whilst the threads on Parr’s face suggest a sense of the spectator being ‘stitched up’ and unable to offer ‘assistance’, they also speak to his own complicity in the bureaucratic cruelty asylum seekers face. This sense of complicity can be extended to include those other members of the Australian polis who do not support policies of mandatory detention. Parr’s presentation of his body as a slumped and pathetic man in a suit acts as a signal to the uselessness felt in relation to his inability to enact change within a system of cruelty (Fig. 16). This self-representation performs his own sense of uselessness and passivity. However, it further speaks to the passivity of other Australian people. Through this performance art piece, Parr raises issues of complicity in relation to both himself and those other politically qualified members of the community who do not support the cruelty of mandatory detention of people seeking asylum yet feel unable to enact change.

Close the concentration camps turns a geopolitical issue into an aesthetic matter. This is based on my contention that the threads sewn across Parr’s face speak to territories and borders when coupled with his engagement with symbols of nationalism in this work. Rancière discusses the act of taking something which is considered geopolitical, such as the issue of displaced people, and transforming it into an aesthetic matter as a mode of interrogation. For Rancière, this is a space where the political can exist in art (2010, p. 150). Rancière discusses this idea with reference to the film De l’autre côté (From the other side), by Chantal Akerman, which focuses on the fence along the US–Mexico border. Themes of

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Parr’s work resonate with the dynamic of Akerman’s film as read by Rancière. For Rancière, it is Akerman’s focus on filming the fence itself, ‘both as a material object and as an object of discourse’, which gives the film its potential to disrupt or displace the usual debate around immigration (2010, p. 150). This debate, he argues, is usually framed around the human and dramatic element of immigration with a focus on the distress of those involved (Rancière 2010, p. 150). Akerman does interview people for this film and Rancière does not discount the human element as important. However, his interest in Akerman’s work lies in the specificity of taking an artefact of a geopolitical situation (a border fence) and exploring its meaning within an aesthetic frame.140

Similarly, in Close the concentration camps Parr addresses the Immigration Detention Centre as a geopolitical space. His works speaks to the politics of the interior of the Immigration Detention Centre by bringing the symbols of embodied protest out of a space of censorship and placing them on his own body. This becomes an act of locating his own body as a site of contestation, especially in the context that the bodies of people seeking asylum are censored and made invisible within the polis. Further, issues of territory and displacement become aesthetically represented on Parr’s body. His threaded face references the imprisoning and bordering practices of the Immigration Detention Centres.

Parr’s face as territorialised, and in its capacity to act as a reference to the geopolitical space of the Immigration Detention Centre or camp, is further evidenced by his inclusion of text excerpts from the Not the Hilton report (Fig. 12). These excerpts were displayed in the gallery. As discussed in Chapter Six, Not the Hilton utilises biopolitical language to focus on administrative and physical matters pertaining to the management of Australian Immigration Detention Centres. However, it specifically excludes the lived experiences of detainees living inside the centres through its terms of reference. Parr (2008) utilises these excerpts as a mode to express how such reports are ‘deadly in their specification and

140 This example brings to mind the film by Phillip Noyce, Rabbit-proof fence (2002). This film, set in Australia in 1931, focuses on the escape of a young Indigenous girl named Molly and her two ‘sister-cousins’ from a mission where they have been forcibly removed from their families by white Australian government officials. The fence, designed to keep rabbits off fertile farmland, is used by Molly to find her way her home to family and ‘country’. Like Akerman, Noyce transforms a boundary-making object by imbuing it with geopolitics and in this case escape from violent colonial practices. Tina Chanter provides an analysis of this film through a Rancièrian framework in her book Art, politics and Rancière: broken perceptions (2018).

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dividing up of the human subject’ through the use of ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘bland’ language. His displacement of this text from its intended context, such as Immigration Detention Centre management, government agencies and Parliament, and into his performance artwork serves to further illuminate the geopolitics of asylum seeker policy as one of bureaucratic cruelty and exclusion. Parr juxtaposes the bland and bureaucratic nature of this report with his bleeding, injured and defeated body, bringing together the issues of biopolitics and the bodies they are acted on.

Parr’s act of dividing up his face using needle and thread speaks to the notion of the person seeking asylum who becomes divided by non-recognition within the bureaucratic landscape. Whilst Parr’s body is not an asylum seeker body, it acts as a point of reference to the bodies and lives of people detained within Immigration Detention Centres and rendered invisible. He also acts as a referent to politically qualified Australian citizens who seem locked in their inertia. The territorialised act of sewing thread across Parr’s sewn face and the multiple references to the isolation of the Immigration Detention Centres in Close the concentration camps are an attempt to materialise a sense of the geopolitical within the aesthetic realm in a corporeal sense.

8.3 Persistent Disturbance Parody or solidarity It is the consistent disturbance within the social order that disrupts the distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2010). These actions can be subtle manipulations which disrupt perception, seeking to trigger new ways of thinking and being over time. Parr’s work during this period attracted criticism. His own acts of self-harm ran the risk of being accused of mimicking a situation that was not his own and he was called out on this publicly. The Age newspaper, for example, presented a somewhat ‘neutral’ report detailing his work. The headline of the article was ‘Flinch art’, yet the subheading reads: ‘Is it sensational exploitation or legitimate protest art?’ (Heinrich 2002). Such a subheading was aimed at questioning his intentions and the validity of ‘using’ the suffering of others in his art. However, perhaps more notable and outspoken in his position was journalist John Macdonald, who made a case against Parr’s performance work in the Sydney Morning Herald. He stated, ‘Parr’s self-inflicted ordeal … comes across as a sickly parody of the

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genuine ordeals endured by political prisoners and other victims of oppressive regimes’ (Bruce & Macdonald 2001). Macdonald’s position attempts to shut down Parr’s work by labelling it as a ‘sickly parody’. This intention resonates with Ruddock’s own attempts within his media statements to shut down the voices of the detained asylum seeker protests, as discussed in Chapter Seven.

Both Ruddock and Macdonald were attempting to shut down those whom they considered to be speaking outside of their allotted space within the consensus. In the case of Ruddock, the asylum seekers he was speaking about were considered to have no right to speak and thus no political voice, whilst in MacDonald’s statement there is an inference that art is not a space for ‘genuine’ political conversations to take place. Macdonald refused to recognise Parr’s right to speak in relation to asylum seekers from the space of art and as such his quote simultaneously, regardless of his intention here, renders people seeking asylum invisible. He claims that Parr was parodying ‘the genuine ordeals endured by political prisoners and other victims of oppressive regimes’ (Bruce & Macdonald 2001). Yet he makes no reference to people seeking asylum held in Australian Immigration Detention Centres, the very people Close the concentration camps was made in relation to.

Macdonald’s statement has a subtext which serves to further consolidate the invisibility of people seeking asylum in Australia. His active exclusion of people seeking asylum in Australia, when he refers to ‘political prisoners and other victims of oppressive regimes’, suggests that he does not align them with people experiencing ‘genuine ordeals’ of suffering (Bruce & Macdonald 2001). Indeed, his words negate their experience as legitimate or ‘genuine’ suffering. Thus, Macdonald’s refusal to acknowledge Parr’s performance art as legitimate in relation to the suffering of asylum seekers implicates him as one who does not consider their treatment cruel nor their experience of incarceration as necessarily genuine suffering.

Macdonald has a history of being highly critical of Parr’s work, especially the performance art aspect of his oeuvre. He claims that Parr is a self-indulgent artist whose acts of self- harming as art set the spectator up in a bind. In relation to Close the concentration camps Macdonald claims that ‘to deny (Parr’s) art is to deny his suffering’ (Bruce & Macdonald

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2001). Macdonald considers this a failure on Parr’s part to create ‘good works of art’. However, this space of tension created by this ‘bind’ of denial is exactly where Parr needs his spectator positioned. Close the concentration camps creates a position of discomfort in relation to the spectator’s complicity and their lack of intervention whilst watching Parr’s pain and suffering. This sense of complicity is part of a referential circuit where the Australian people were, and are, caught in a bind of cruelty inherent in successive government policies that indefinitely detain people seeking asylum.

Interviews and published discussions with Parr indicate that the situation faced by people seeking asylum detained in Immigration Detention Centres is an issue that he feels compelled to address through his performance art. For Parr, to do nothing is not acceptable (2008). Prior to Close the concentration camps he engaged in a letter exchange with Bromfield to discuss elements of the work. These letters were published in Parr’s monograph (2008) and a selection formed part of the installation. The issue of mimicking is raised as a potential problem in these letters. Bromfield reminds Parr that as an artist he should be wary of being a ‘glorified stand in for a camp inmate’ and indeed, as shown, this could be a potential reading by critics of Parr’s work (Parr 2008). Rancière claims that the artists’ work cannot be expected to have precise, intended effects and outcomes are not simply a result of the artist’s intentions (Rancière in Thomas 2015). In this light and regardless of Parr’s published intentions, when his work enters public discourse it is bound to take on a life of its own. In the case of Close the concentration camps and with consideration of his published letters to Bromfield, it is clear that Parr is keen for his art to be disruptive within public discourse. Whilst for Macdonald, and perhaps others, his acts are considered a ‘sickly parody’ of genuine suffering, I consider the acceptance of the censored and thus invisible suffering of people seeking asylum is in itself ‘sickly’. As I have discussed, Close the concentration camps utilised specific elements and artistic tactics which served to disrupt the dominant narrative with regards to asylum seeker policy at the time. The public criticism of his work, such as that by Macdonald, attests to the capacity of his work to interrupt this narrative.

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A space to speak and be heard In light of my discussion so far, artists such as Parr can act as a voice for those deemed invisible or as having no voice within the social order. In the case of asylum seekers protesting within the camp, the physical and administrative borders of the Immigration Detention Centres close off this space as being a place for legitimate politics to take place. As discussed with regards to Ruddock, the asylum seekers’ protests are reframed by the official government voice and the dominant media as being non-legitimate. Perhaps this is based on the tacit understanding within the social order that there is a defined set of conditions within the consensus, including ‘personhood’, for protest.

Rancière refers to demonstrations or protests, in relation to the consensus, as illustrating the challenge of speaking to those who do not acknowledge the possibility of an interlocutory situation (1999, p. 90). Thus, in any kind of political dispute the existence of voices which are recognised as being able to dispute social issues becomes a key tenet. Such a dispute around who can speak is complicated by the framing of protests or demonstrations as modes of communication which are not ‘valid’ when speaking within the consensus.141 Ruddock’s refusal to engage with protesting asylum seekers in the Woomera IRPC by stating ‘we will not negotiate’ (BBC News 2002) is a pertinent example. Firstly, he is stating that the protesters have no space to speak and to be heard and, secondly, that they are attempting to speak from a space which is intentionally designed to shut them down and render them invisible to the polis. His position to ‘not hear’ the demands of asylum seekers is contested by the very protest he refuses to acknowledge as legitimate. Thus, the interior of the Woomera IRPC became a contested space of speech both materially and conceptually. Further, it became a crucial space of the political and politics within Rancière’s framework.

141 I would like to briefly note that, in relation to the recent Extinction Rebellion protests, Peter Dutton, Australian Home Affairs Minister, labelled these protests illegitimate specifically because they take place outside of designated protest spaces. He frames the protesters as part of an anti-establishment group who are not ‘protesting’ but just breaking the law through their actions. In Rancière’s terms, Dutton refuses to acknowledge an interlocutory situation and thus seeks to shut down their voices in the polis. He states this position when interviewed on the ABC News specifically (Dutton 2019).

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As I have argued with reference to Rancière in Chapter Seven, contesting of the space to speak precedes all other political concerns and becomes a central point of politics. (2010) It is this precise concern which is the heart of the protests where asylum seekers sew their lips together, foreclosing the possibility of speech. Similarly, and by extension, this concern about the space to speak becomes central to Parr’s sewn lips and face, especially when coupled with his refusal to verbally engage in or create an interlocutory situation with his spectator during the performance. His performance art becomes a salient example of the act of questioning the conditions of who can speak and be heard in relation to the rights of people seeking asylum.

Locating Parr in Rancière’s aesthetic regime Parr’s work exists within a particular partitioning of the distribution of the sensible, the art world. Within this space, art can make social comment and engage in political dialogue. Parr’s work, then, could indeed have its political potency diluted by its relegated position within the consensus of the art world. The publicity surrounding his work could plausibly affect understanding of the configuration of the sensible and question the divisions within the social order. However, performance art by Parr will always fall back to being ‘art’ and thus risks being designated as ‘spectacle’ or part of the artist’s self-focused oeuvre. Art is political because it can open up new ways of seeing or new propositions within the distribution of the sensible, yet it acknowledges its outcomes are not calculable. (Rancière 2010) This incalculability of effect is what allows it to move through the distribution of the sensible, creating ruptures in perception of what is understood as normal.

Parr claims that through his work Close the concentration camps he aimed to encourage the spectator to ‘reflect’ on the situation of people seeking asylum who were detained (2008). On this basis, Parr is making a claim to the political and the artistic tactics were such that they sought to engage the complicity of the spectator. By placing himself, as a suffering subject, within the gallery, Parr was presenting a suffering which did not arise from his own experience per se. His adoption of the political tactic of lip-sewing simultaneously spoke to the suffering of asylum seekers in detention and to the difficulty of his position as an

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Australian who feels empathy for their plight.142 Parr was presenting an image of himself as an Australian citizen who experiences or perceives something outside of the dominant narrative, yet feels complicit within this narrative. Whilst I stress that Parr’s suffering was not in any way the same as that of the people seeking asylum, he created complex signs on his body such as through the face threading. This allowed Close the concentration camps, as an artwork, to speak in relation to the suffering of others through externalising Parr’s own frustration at being bound to a national political narrative which inflicts cruelty on asylum seekers.

Close the concentration camps is located within Rancière’s aesthetic regime. This opens the space to discuss how Parr’s work attempted to affect the sensible. For Rancière, the ‘aesthetic regime’ has two key qualities: firstly, there is an engendering of equality in both its production and its reception; secondly, it speaks to a reconfiguration of life or perception. It is particularly this idea of the promise of a reconfiguration of life through challenging the configuration of the sensible that I consider pertinent in my reading of Parr’s work. I link his work to the aesthetic regime, given its attempt to affect sensory perception within public discourse specifically via his position within the discourse of art. However, my reading of Parr’s work as embodying the political locates a tension within Rancière’s proposition that art and politics must not coalesce.

Thinking through Rancière, contemporary art as an institution seeks to place itself critically within the aesthetic regime whilst remaining problematically bound to the representative regime. Whilst the aesthetic regime aims to reconfigure our perception of life, the representative regime acts to contain any promise of art impacting on or challenging life. It does so by creating an art world bound by rules and conventions which allow it to occupy a designated partition within the consensus. Thus, a complex tension exists in both art as a discourse and the art world as an institution within the consensus. A key paradox for Rancière is that the fundamental tension of the aesthetic regime lies in art’s capacity to be art only in that it carries the promise of being more than art, and it carries this promise only

142 Whilst I say he has ‘adopted’ the action of lip-sewing, I note in reference to my discussion in Chapter Three, self-harm actions have been an ongoing element of Parr’s performance art practice for over 30 years. Thus, lip- sewing is not an unusual practice for him to engage in.

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to the extent that it distinguishes itself from life (2010, pp. 137–40). The struggle of art within this central paradox is, however, what equally allows art to effect critical interventions into the distribution of the sensible. Crucially, Parr’s Close the concentration camps can be located within the aesthetic regime but not without being bound by this paradox.

The language Parr uses to locate his expression of the trauma of others is the language of the body. Further, he uses the language of performance art as a form and a genre, as discussed in Chapter Three. Such a location presents his work as art which has the capacity to speak to the sensory perception of the spectator or witness. This is why I critically position his work within Rancière’s aesthetic regime. Whilst within the representative regime it may be considered inappropriate or even impossible to represent certain content, such as the suffering of others, as a ‘sickly parody’, this is not the case within Rancière’s aesthetic regime. Within the aesthetic regime, nothing is unpresentable; however, the conditions of visibility or sayability may need carving out within the distribution of the sensible to allow representation (Rancière 2007, p. 114). Carving out is itself an act of dissensus that attempts to locate itself within art as a discourse. My discussion of Macdonald’s critical rejection of Parr’s performance art earlier certainly speaks to this sense of the inappropriate and binds Macdonald’s critique to the representational regime. Macdonald delegitimises Close the concentration camps as a parody on the basis Parr aimed to present the suffering of others. Within the space allotted for art, critic Macdonald refuses work that challenges the dominant perception of what art ‘is’ or should ‘be’, in this instance.

Parr’s work presents the suffering and invisibility of others as political and thus his work becomes what Rancière terms ‘art of the unrepresentable’ (2009, p. 137). That is, his performance art challenges the intelligibility of the visible and the sayable, which is central to its capacity to affect the distribution of the sensible as an act of dissensus. In the context of the protests by detained asylum seekers, they occupy a space of the ‘unrepresentable’ given the government censorship in relation to Australian Immigration Detention Centres. This unrepresentable space becomes precisely the space which Parr’s work is capable of revealing. His presentation of that which the Australian government seeks to contain and render invisible challenges the intended location of the asylum seekers as excluded from the

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polis. Parr attempts to insert the politics of people seeking asylum into public discourse through Close the concentration camps. Further, Parr’s work disrupts the rules of the representative regime of art. It is the aesthetic regime which breaks with the rules of the representative regime, making everything ‘equally representable’ within art (Rancière 2009, pp. 120–21).

Complicity and the challenge of looking In Close the concentration camps the gallery was an installation site which created an ethical challenge for the spectator in the act of looking. Parr included a number of signifiers and referents which ensured the spectator was located within a space of ethical spectatorship. That is, where the spectator was invited to engage in an ethical space when making meaning of the work. In addition to Parr’s face being literally sewn up and the other elements of the installation discussed earlier, there was a large mirror on the wall of the gallery reflecting Parr’s image back into the space. The placement of this large mirror opposite Parr was a significant element in the setup of Close the concentration camps (Fig. 17). It reflected both his and the viewer’s image back into the space.

Such a use of mirroring heightened the complexity of the audience’s interaction with Parr’s body, revealing an element of spectatorial distancing by viewing a reflected image. It served to confront the viewer with the image of themselves in the act of viewing, thus questioning the ability to effectively communicate the suffering of others and indeed the role of ‘visibility’ within this suffering. Whilst Parr was a live body in the space, his image was simultaneously re-created and mediated by the mirror, thus offering multiple perspectives of the one body. He was further seen in relation to the viewer as they saw themselves when viewing him. This placement served to increase the stimulus for the viewer to reflect on their own subjectivity and possible privilege within the Australian polis. The geopolitical relation of Parr’s injured body to the lives and bodies of people seeking asylum who are contained within Immigration Detention Centres was brought to the fore.

Such complexity created within the act of viewing Parr’s injured body reveals the paradoxical nature of his questioning of his own capacity to speak in relation to the suffering of others. The mirrored viewing space insisted that the spectator be drawn into a

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web of self-interrogation in relation to Parr’s citizen body. This served to bring into relief the trauma and suffering of asylum seekers whose lives are visually and politically excluded from the public sphere. The multiplicity of images of Parr’s wounded body created by the mirroring created a strong referent to the self-harm as protest enacted within the interior of the space of exception: the Australian Immigration Detention Centre. As members of the polis, I question if we can truly imagine the interior space of the Immigration Detention Centre where the suffering of asylum seekers and also their acts of protest are hidden. Parr utilised the mirror as an attempt to reach out to this surplus space of suffering and to call into question the complicity of the spectator in his own suffering, and by extension the suffering of the detained asylum seeker.

This referencing of mirrored trauma and suffering further locates Parr’s work in Rancière’s aesthetic regime, as a multiplicity of spectatorial gazes challenge normative perspectives of looking and spectatorship. Parr juxtaposed a number of elements within the performance that encouraged the spectatorial gaze to remain active and conscious of its positioning as ‘one who looks’ at suffering. For example, he created mirrored reflections, presented his white injured body and had a branding of the word ‘ALIEN’ on his body signalling the exclusion of asylum seekers in a bureaucratic exercise of cruelty. These, and other, elements came together to surround the spectator in a multiplicity of possible viewpoints where the visual, live and installation elements of the work intersected to skew comfortable and normative ways of seeing in the gallery. Through the interaction of multiple artistic and political elements, Parr’s work played with sense and perception, both figuratively and literally. The political elements of the work linked to the collective experience of the social order, thus dislocating both art and politics from their ‘usual’ spaces.

Art, seepage and the distribution of the sensible Rancière acknowledges that art does not exist in and of itself; rather, it is an outcome of a complex set of relationships which exist within a discourse which perceives certain objects, or works, as ‘art’ (Rancière in Thomas 2015). As outlined, Close the concentration camps was presented in a gallery and existed primarily within the discourse of art. Although it did receive attention from some major news chains, it was always contextualised as ‘art.’ In relation to Rancière, when considering the relationship between art and politics one needs

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to examine the ways in which art is thought to be separated from or joined to the larger distribution of the sensible (Tanke 2001, p. 2). Thus, work such as Parr’s, and perhaps contemporary and critical art more broadly, is recognised as belonging to the cultural institution of art and, as such, takes its proper place within the distribution of the sensible as art. Whilst art forms part of the broader social structure, to some extent divergent world views expressed within art risk being contained within its own discourse. As such, not all activities that are categorised as art can sit comfortably inside the boundaries of the art world. That is, they are contained within the art world, yet their seepage into the mainstream may indeed cause controversy. Such seepage and controversy I position as dissensus given its contesting of the boundaries of art and politics.

Close the concentration camps is a work which was located within the boundaries of art discourse. Within a Rancièrian (2010) framework, it adds to the plurality of voices that speak to the democratic nature of aesthetics and politics. For Rancière, art challenges what is sensible, thinkable and possible on the condition that it not surrender its identity as art (Tanke 2011, p. 84). Thus, art can be seen to contain new propositions of democracy and affect the sensible in more subtle ways (Rancière 2010). Whilst Parr’s work did not occupy the space of political activism per se, his act of making clear his political intentions reveals a willingness to allow his work to leave behind its identity as art as it entered public discourse. Parr’s mutability here reveals a restrictiveness in Rancière’s insistence that art must not cross directly over to politics. This insistence runs counter to the possibility for art to act politically within the consensus. I am suggesting here that art moving from ‘being art’ and ‘becoming politics’ within the social sphere is indeed dissensus.

As discussed, Close the concentration camps utilised artistic tactics that aimed to locate the spectator in relation to their own complicity with the government’s treatment of asylum seekers. Such tactics are what enable a potential leakage of politics from Parr’s performance art into public discourse, without negating its identity as art nor its politics. Close the concentration camps became a pathway for the protesting actions of lip-sewing and hunger strikes by detainees to conceptually escape the censored interior space of the camp. Thus, the protests entered public discourse via the space of art and subsequent media coverage, bypassing the official government channels. Parr’s performance art had the capacity to

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speak within the art world to the suffering of asylum seekers; however, it relied on the spectator to continue the conversation outside of the gallery. This continuation is required in order to create those subtle political interventions in the distribution of the sensible that Rancière considers dissensus. In a sense, this is perhaps what activism such as street protests also do; they rely on the continued iteration of the issue within public discourse, by members of the polis, to become more than just a ‘moment’.

In his essay ‘The paradoxes of political art’ Rancière (2010, p. 138) speaks to the existence of the museum, and by extension the art gallery, as active in framing common space and modes of visibility. He considers this to be reliant on the ‘indifferent gaze’.143 This gaze contributes to the capacity of the museum to present objects of beauty or antiquity or art which stimulate debate on current issues within the mainstream (Rancière 2010, p. 139). Thus, for Rancière, art holds political capacities even if located within the institution or museum. This capacity for politics is present even if art remains separate from political activism due to the perception of the gallery or museum as a space for thought or contemplation. Take, for example, the mirror in Close the concentration camps: it did not merely provide a simple reflection of a mimetic image. Parr positioned the mirror to both reflect his image and reveal it to the spectator as juxtapositioned with their own image. Such positioning served to encourage a shift in perception of viewing. The spectator could not look at Parr’s reflection without simultaneously looking at themselves. Their complicity in looking at Parr became linked to their complicity in ‘looking away’ from detained asylum seekers. Their inability to see, given the invisibility of people seeking asylum within the polis, was brought into relief.

Parr claims in regard to Close the concentration camps that he was engaging with politics (2008). Rancière acknowledges the challenges within the concept of dissensus, when fighting against an established order, that exist when the gallery or museum is part of that established order, yet he considers this to be part of the essential struggle (2010, pp. 144– 45). The risk is the possibility of dissensus which fights the established order while

143 The ‘indifferent gaze’ is not the same as the neutral or objective gaze of the formalist tradition. The indifferent gaze refers to that which is open to perceptions in a way that is ‘disconnected from a specific destination’ (Rancière 2010, p. 139).

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simultaneously reaffirming that order, particularly within the current global force of neoliberal capitalism where anything can be co-opted, recirculated and sold. An example of the established order using an image such as lip-sewing occurred during 2002. When detainees in Woomera IRPC stitched their lips together as protest, the fashion magazine Australian Style ran an issue in apparent support. The issue ran an editorial exploring Australia as a multicultural nation and the inspiration local fashion designers garnered from the ‘cultural diversity’ of both immigrants and refugees (Australian Style 2002, p. 8). The focus was the photographic representation of a range of Australian models with their lips ‘stitched’ (Australian Style 2002, p. 8). However, their lips were not stitched (Fig. 20). Special effects makeup of sutures had been applied to the lips of young professional models dressed in Bonds, Adidas, Ken Done and other fashion labels. As Pugliese (2002) suggests in reference to this publication, the models and their ‘sutured lips’ as fashion spoke more to a new trend of ‘refugee chic’ than to the genuine plight of detained asylum seekers.

Image subject to copyright Image subject to copyright

Fig. 20 Australian Style (2002)

In relation to Parr’s work and Rancière’s concept of dissensus, this act of false lip-stitching fashion becomes little more than mimicry for the commercial pursuits of the fashion magazine. Perhaps this is where Macdonald’s ‘sick parody’ analysis of lip-sewing really belongs. Whilst I acknowledge the paradox of Parr’s work in relation to being positioned within the art world, it does not occlude its potential to disrupts the distribution of the sensible. The ‘fake’ lip-sewn models, however, stand as pure mimicry for the sake of a sales

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gimmick or, as Pugliese claims, to create a fashion fetish via the ‘suture-as-fashion- accessory’ and this disavows the physicality of the violence of the ‘original’ act (2002). Australian Style magazine turns the protest of lip-sewing into a fashion commodity and a fetish, thus negating the potency of the original protests within the social order. It remains within the social order, given that any controversy created will possibly sell the clothes and increase the value of the publication. I do not discount the value-adding of Parr’s political performance art to his oeuvre. Political works such as Close the concentration camps bring media attention to the artist and also his other works, many of which are saleable. He benefits as an artist from the work. Indeed, I acknowledge that I too as a researcher benefit within academia from writing about the pain and protest of people seeking asylum. However, as discussed throughout this thesis, I feel we are all complicit and to remain silent is not a preferable action. Making one’s complicity apparent and open for question is perhaps an important element of working with the topic of another’s suffering. This is something Parr’s work does.

Present then, when creating art which challenges the established social order, is the trap of reaffirming that order. Through Close the concentration camps Parr addresses the politics of Australian asylum seeker policy whilst maintaining his position within the order of the art world. He constructs himself as a visual and visceral metaphor whilst bringing the social and political into the sphere of the gallery. He does this on his body, which is located at the centre of the artwork, and specifically challenges the very nature of spectating. In doing so, he highlights the potential lack of direct politics within the order of art. In this vein, the stitching of lips by asylum seekers defies the distribution of the sensible and structures of power, as theirs is a mode of communication that has no place in the consensus and comes from no place in the consensus. Parr, however, is not specifically defying the distribution of the sensible and comes from the art world, which occupies a designated space within the consensus. Whilst he does not directly disrupt the social order or structures of power, his work adds to public discourse in relation to the perception of the suffering and silencing of others within the distribution of the sensible. His performance art reveals art’s capacity to be part of the ongoing reframing of perception and understanding which allows the direct political actions of others, such as protesting asylum seekers, to become part of the

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distribution of the sensible. It works towards opening up an interlocutory situation for those voices that are being excluded.

Summary In relation to Rancière, the distinction between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics is not stable (Chanter 2018, p. 118). This is perhaps why the lip-sewing of protesting asylum seekers and the lip-sewing of Parr make a valuable point of comparison. Both lip-sewing actions affect the distribution of the sensible with a similar ‘form’ or act of signification; however, they do so in differing ways: one as political activism and one as art. Art cannot guarantee political transformation. This positions Parr as bound to engage with a paradoxical political relation within the space of art. However, within the aesthetic regime he creates art as dissensus, as his performance art has the capacity to affect the perception of the sensible via seepage through the porous boundaries of the art world.

If Parr had desired to undertake direct political activism, he would most likely have been assisting the asylum seekers escape, as some activists were doing at the time of his work.144 In contrast to Parr’s performance art, the protesting asylum seekers succeed in politics as dissensus as their actions are directly fighting for a guarantee of political transformation, a voice within the consensus and a tangible change to their own political subjectivity. Both Parr and the protesting asylum seekers engage in dissensus, as politics through art and politics through direct protest, respectively. However, the protesting asylum seekers are bound by a representative failure in their political protests to change the status quo due to censorship, the framing of their political actions as illegitimate and their inherent invisibility within the consensus and the national imagination. Thus, whilst they succeed in dissensus, they have failed to change government policy. Similarly, Parr’s art is bound by its location within the consensus. Whilst his art may have seeped into public discourse and offered a perspective contrary to the dominant narrative, the detention of people seeking asylum continued and it still does. However, as I have discussed, creating and carving out a space to

144 As reported by the BBC News, in Easter 2002 about a dozen asylum seekers escaped from Woomera IRPC. Crowds of protesters were gathered outside as some of the detainees scaled fences topped with razor wire and others broke through holes in the fences (BBC News 2002b). Footage of this is available on YouTube (Strummerkid 2007).

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speak and be heard, and ensuring visibility of all subjects, are at the heart of politics and dissensus. This is where the strength of performance art as politics lies.

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Thesis Conclusion: Solidarity and Complicity are Not Mutually Exclusive

Our role is to echo their resistance through our acts in Australia … What we’ve done is to reach out and listen (Galbraith in Zable 2017).

The overarching aim of this thesis has been to explore the status of the political in the relation between the activism of people seeking asylum and the performance art of Mike Parr. From its inception, a central concern of my research has been the use of self-harm on the body as an expression of agency and resistance. My thesis has analysed the politics and aesthetics of self-harm in both protest and performance art, and I have argued that in both instances the body becomes a primary site of contestation. This thesis has critically considered the politics of the asylum seeker debate within Australia using performance art as a medium for analysis.

Moments of rupture and politics within the social order came to be at the heart of my research. Drawing on Rancière (2010), what became clear through my research process is that key to any political dispute is the very politicity of the dispute itself. This critical precursor to the struggle for political recognition I have located as evident in the protests by people seeking asylum and refugees within and outside of the Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Similarly, it became central to my articulation of how politics works in Parr’s performance art, with the politics of his art being contingent on the political activism of asylum seekers.

The concepts of the ungrievable body and bare life, as outlined by Butler and Agamben respectively, I have located as underpinning government policies which exclude asylum seekers from the Australian nation. By bringing together elements of their theoretical positions with those of Rancière, I have firstly articulated the politico-legal factors excluding people seeking asylum from the polis and secondly critically positioned their protests as an active resistance against this exclusion and subsequent state-enforced quality of bare life. This critical framework has formed the premise of my central claim that people seeking asylum in Australia were and are pushed towards a quality of bare life when held in immigration detention, with the qualification that their capacity to express their agency and

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desire for a recognised political subjectivity is not fully negated in this space. Thus, the nation-state and its policies of immigration detention fail in this instance.

This research contributes to the field of art and politics by examining performance art that has been labelled ‘political’ in direct relation to the specific political space it lays claim to. When political art is analysed or discussed in absentia to the issue it claims to speak in solidarity with or relation to, then I question how this can critically increase our understanding of art and society. Indeed, such discussion runs the risk of remaining self- referential within the world of art. Thus, key to my approach has been to make primary to this research the political element and contexts behind Parr’s work. This is to ensure that within this thesis a recognition of the personhood and subjectivity of people seeking asylum has remained central. I have claimed there is always the risk that the political artist is raised and congratulated whilst the political struggle their work is reliant on becomes akin to background noise to the artwork. My thesis resists this dynamic.

The question of how art practice can speak politically within the public sphere has required a critical understanding of the politics of art as an institution. Thus, my research has focused on how performance art can work to create interlocutory situations of the political within public discourse, given that it is embedded within the art world. My approach has resisted the focal point being on the art and the artist, and instead I have turned my attention to constructing a dynamic analytical space which foregrounds the politics behind the art. This is a form of research practice which I intend to develop further. The protests by people seeking asylum and the performance art of Parr have been given equitable spaces of analysis within this thesis. Analysing Parr’s performance art with equitable research time devoted to the politics of the protests by asylum seekers was the most effective manner in which I could respond to the horror of the Australian immigration detention system: a system of cruelty which aims to silence asylum seekers and which as a citizen I feel unwillingly bound to and complicit in. I did not want the politics of people seeking asylum silenced in this thesis.

Various ministers of the Australian government, from multiple sides of politics, have continually tried to shut down the voices of asylum seekers via administrative censorship

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and strategies of media control. These actions are bound to the construction and maintenance of the Australian national identity, which is contingent on the exclusion of the ‘racialised other’. In relation to such government-based censorship, my research has questioned what it means to attempt to speak and be heard within the consensus when one is consistently being rendered invisible. This thesis locates the body as central to these attempts. Self-harm is an act which situates the body as a site of political resistance and contestation. However, it is an act which I believe does more than resonate outward as a mode of speaking to those who refuse to listen. I have explored and evidenced that one may protest against a system of maltreatment, but one may also protest for the self. By this I am speaking in relation to actions that allow the self to feel embodied and as having agency even when faced with social, political and possibly physical death. This space of protest for the self is deeply important when understanding actions of self-harm such as lip- sewing, hunger striking and self-immolation by people seeking asylum. A sensitivity to the deep need to connect with the self and a sense of agency when one is excluded, isolated and pushed to the threshold of life and death has underpinned my analysis of these protests.

Through focusing on the body as a site of protest, my research has considered that through actions which alter the disposition of the body, people seeking asylum claim agency within the violent spatial arrangement of political and governmental space. Attempts to externalise on the body the violence of being silenced exist as a challenge to the perception of the asylum seeker as invisible, non-speaking and non-political. Further, these attempts are moments of disruption and dissensus within Rancière’s framework. As I have discussed per Agamben and Butler, the embodied protests of asylum seekers are a direct action which resists the quality of bare life being imposed on them by practices of governmentality. Sewing the lips shut and hunger strikes are a mode of expressing agency from within the space of exclusion operative within Australian Immigration Detention Centres. Their protests resist the framing of their lives as ungrievable and call for political recognition within the polis.

Whilst Parr was not an asylum seeker and was thus acting from a different space, what this thesis has elucidated is that his performance art was able to act as a visual and visceral

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metaphor for the actions of others. His performance art made a geopolitical reference to the protests of asylum seekers. This referencing reinforces my position that the politics of his art were contingent on the direct activism of others. This perspective may be one which is not pervasive within the art world; however, I believe it is important and requires further interrogation through continued research and practice. Parr’s works were only political on the basis that they resonated with the actions of protesting asylum seekers who seek political recognition of their lives through direct activism.

The element of complicity has come to the fore throughout this research process and I feel bound to those suffering at the hands of the country of which I am a citizen. I turn here to Boochani and his ‘success’ with No friend but the mountains. The words I heard him speak via satellite in 2018 reveal his own consideration of the risk of his work being co-opted by the very system it speaks against. To quote Boochani:

You know right now in my works, sometimes I always try to work beyond the system and I have to protect myself that I don’t become a part of this system, because this system has this power to take control of everything … so I always criticise the system (Boochani 2018b).

After No friend but the mountains won a literary prize, there was a campaign on social media from the Australian public to free Boochani and bring him to Australia. In response Boochani tweeted:

While I truly appreciate the support, I’d like to ask everyone to demand for the freedom of all people incarcerated on Manus & Nauru and put an end to this barbaric policy (Boochani 2019).

Boochani reveals within this tweet that he is fighting for something bigger than himself. He is working against becoming complicit in the suffering of others by refusing an individualised agenda for freedom and remaining part of a collective movement. Here Boochani highlights the difficulty of speaking out in a world where it would seem anything can be co-opted, appropriated, made into a commodity or sold. Whilst this may not necessarily undermine

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activism per se, it is something to be mindful of and speaks to the need to be constantly self-reflective in relation to one’s work.

This position of complicity has become an important element of my thesis and one that I feel needs further research from here on. Parr’s art is not solely about political transformation. We cannot deny his personal investment in his performance art, which positions him as bound to a problematic relation to the space of politics and activism. As a researcher, I occupy a space not dissimilar to Parr’s: white, educated, a citizen of Australia. Neither Parr nor I exist wholly as surplus subjects and we can currently speak within the consensus via the partitions of art and academia. Asylum seekers held in Australian immigration facilities do occupy the space of surplus subjects. Boochani offers a unique position, as at times he shuffled in and out of this surplus space via his publications. Yet his body and other asylum seekers’ bodies and lives remain excluded from the polis indefinitely.

People seeking asylum in Australia continue to face indefinite incarceration or deportation in the name of border security and nationhood. Whilst one may be bound and complicit in government actions, perhaps the protests of asylum seekers, the performance art of Parr and even research such as this stand as a trigger to disrupt our own stasis. Ultimately, it relies on people such as artists, activists, researchers and concerned members of the public to potentialise the porosity of institutions and discourses such as art, and to act as conduits for the politics of those rendered invisible. Our role, then, may be to resist by acting in ways which disrupt the stability of the consensus and reveal it as contingent on the inertia of the polity.

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Original Artworks

Abramović, M 1974, Rhythm 0, performance art, Studio Morra, Naples, Italy.

Beuys, J 1974, Coyote: I like America and America likes me, performance art, Renè Block Gallery, NY.

Brus, G 1970, Endurance test (Zerreißprobe), performance art, Aktionsraum, Munich, Germany.

Export, V 1960, Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and touch cinema), photograph of live performance, Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Export, V 1968–71, Tapp und Tastkino (Tap and touch cinema), street performance, multiple European cities.

Export, V 1972, Women’s art manifesto, printed manifesto, Vienna, Austria.

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Guerrilla Girls 1985, Guerrilla Girls fight back, street poster, Tate Modern, London.

Kaprow, A 1959, 18 happenings in 6 parts, performance art, Reuben Gallery, NY.

Mendieta, A 1974, Untitled (blood and feathers #2), video, Old Man’s Creek, Iowa.

Ono, Y 1965, Cut piece, performance art, Carnegie Hall, NY.

Orr, J 2004, Ash, paintings, drawings and performance, Mass Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.

Orr, J 2004, From the sea, video installation, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria.

Orr, J 2009, Southern cross – to bear and behold, performance art, Mitre Lake, western Victoria.

Parr, M 1971, Word situations, performance art, Inhibodress, Sydney, Australia.

Parr, M 1972, Light a candle. Hold your finger in the flame for as long as possible, performance art, Inhibodress, Sydney, Australia.

Parr, M 1977, Cathartic action: social gestus no. 5 (the ‘armchop’), performance art, Sculpture Centre, Sydney, Australia.

Parr, M 1977, Totem murder 2, performance art, The Performance Room, Sydney, Australia.

Parr, M 1979, Black box: theatre of self correction, performance art, 3rd Biennale of Sydney, Australia.

Parr, M 1989–1990, Language and chaos I, drypoint, electric grinder, plate tone and open bite on 12 sheets, performance art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Parr, M 1998, Blood box, performance art, Artspace, Sydney, Australia.

235

Parr, M 2001, Water from the mouth, performance art, Artspace, Sydney, Australia.

Parr, M 2002, Close the concentration camps, performance art, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia.

Parr, M 2003, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi (UnAustralian), performance art, Artspace, Sydney, Australia.

Parr, M 2015, Asylum, performance art, Willow Court Asylum, Derwent, Tasmania.

Parr, M 2018, Under the bitumen, performance art, Macquarie Street, Hobart, Tasmania.

Pussy Riot, 2012, Punk prayer, protest performance, Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow, Russia.

Quick, M, 2002, Refugee island, street art, Perth, Western Australia.

236