Mike Parr 17 March – 1 April 2006 SHERMAN GALLERIES End of Nature 1, 1998, video still, courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney Victim of Success ike Parr’s slide work, 150 Programs & Investigations, 1971–72, includes themselves classic examples of the power of the video medium. Some works, Mthe statement: ‘If it’s socially impotent then it’s not art.’ Thirty years on, this such as The End of Nature, 18 February 1998, a performance on the Baltic Sea, once profoundly radical declaration might find a place in a public art statement or Forms of Independence, 1999, were performed with complete cognizance by the most conservative provincial council in Australia, since almost all art is of the video camera and anticipation of a filmic viewer. Both have a hypnotic now seemingly motivated by some instrumental or social purpose. But social quality that can only result from the unremitting, inescapable framing of the purpose and social potency are two different things. Parr has not succumbed to performer in the context of a contingent sequence: in the first case, the the current trend for artists to add value to social experience by playing the disturbing image of Parr in long wig and flimsy white bridal gown walking polite role of intuitive outsider. After thirty-five years of art practice, Mike Parr is across the frozen water towards the receding camera; and in the second a towering figure in the Australian art scene yet he is still one of the few artists example, attempting to tie his shoelaces with one hand. Often the echo of willing to do the dirty work of dismantling attempts at political or social control. home video production is evoked as Parr attempted to domesticate rather than His recent performance work, Sitting Member, staged in Newcastle, New aestheticise the record of the performance. South Wales on 3 October 2005, follows a series of most disturbing and Certainly, it is possible to see an entirely different sensibility, if not sensitivity, gruelling events in which Parr obliterated the maxim that art and politics do not in Parr’s use of the medium of film, as demonstrated in the 16mm film, Family mix. For Sitting Member, Parr sat for eight hours enclosed in a large wooden Under Water, 1978–81, where a series of fragmentary, distorted portraits box positioned in the middle of a massive, abandoned railway workshop that seamlessly glide together in a fluid sequence. This work is from a period in the reverberated with the booming sound of recorded Parliamentary debates on late 1970s when Parr began his Self Portrait Project and took particular interest the Federal Government’s Industrial Relations reforms. Since the stump of his in editorial control over the filmmaking process. Not unrelated was his renewed left arm protruded through a hole in the box as an obscene appendage, the pun interest in drawing. Cloacal Corridor (O vio Prote / O vio Proto / O vio Loto / in the title is obvious, but this event collapsed one myth propagated by the new O Thété) Self Portrait as a Pair or Self Portrait as a Pun, is a seminal work from conservatives – that workers without collective power will be free agents – with 1983, first exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in conjunction an even more powerful fiction, first proposed by Karl Marx in 1847 – that artists with a film showing. The four large drawings take Antonin Artaud’s chaotic are the only free spirits operating outside the slavery of wage labour.1 writings and drawings as a point of departure. Reading in a sequence from left In 1970, when Parr set his agenda to close the gap between art and lived to right, Parr’s gridded self-portrait head is squeezed, skewed and squashed as experience, the avant-garde art scene was dominated by rarefied varieties of if by the force of a lumpy peristalsis as it moves through the passage of formal abstraction. Art for art’s sake was such an entrenched philosophy that discarded graphic fragments and gestures. there was often no distinction made between means and ends in art Any aficionado of 1980s expressionist figuration might locate this work in production. The painted surface was the terrain of painting and the essence of that decade, although its timeless impact results from the astringent critique of film or video was sought in the nature of the filmic process rather than through the stylistic options of the period. The parody that motivated so much 1980s art narrative or symbolic form. Parr’s 1971 work, Pushing a camera over a hill, is here turned inside out, as the Cartesian grid confronts the self-deprecating perfectly evokes the period. It was originally shown at Inhibodress Gallery in option of the comic totem or the bold gesture and obsessive mark. This series Sydney in what was the first exhibition of video art in Australia. In his review of of drawings encapsulates the histrionics involved in fabricating the fantasy of the exhibition, Daniel Thomas highlighted this work precisely because of its the artist. All the options are present and accounted for: the big secret, the big exploitation of the ‘eyes and ears of a camera’. Watching the DVD version of gesture, the big joke, the big dick, the big mark and the big explosion. Pushing a camera over a hill confirms Daniel Thomas’s assessment: ‘very These drawings also highlight a particular paradox in much of Mike Parr’s disorienting and illuminating it [is] to travel for ten minutes so close to the work. The more he attempts to dismantle the mechanisms by which style, ground and to hear so much noisy grass’.2 processes and formal qualities dictate the value of art, the more his art is valued. This happens to be one of the few surviving examples of Parr’s early video Ross Woodrow works, although it is atypical in the sense that the performer, as camera operator, is out of view. In most of his early work with video, Parr was searching Ross Woodrow is Senior Lecturer in Art Theory at the University of Newcastle, for a synergy between camera and audience for his performance pieces. As he New South Wales. discovered, the static camera acting as an impassive substitute-viewer 1 From Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, quoted in Helen Molesworth (ed.), Work intensified the focus on the recorded performance and created something that Ethic, exhibition catalogue, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, 2003, p. 138. was not quite a surrogate or substitute, but a new work. By eschewing the desire 2 Quoted in David Bromfield, Identities: A Critical Study of the Work of Mike Parr to find the art in video, the filmic records of Parr’s performance works are 1970 –1990, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 1991, p. 21. left top: House of Cards 1, 2004, video still, courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney right top: House of Cards 8, 2004, video still, courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney left below: Family Under Water 1, 1978, video still, courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney right below: Family Under Water 4, 1978, video still, courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 1993–2006 Concentration Camps, performance, 15 June, Monash Museum, Weserburg, Bremen, Germany; Staatliche 1993 100 Breaths/100 Songs from (ALPHABET/ University Museum of Art, Melbourne Sammlung fur Kunst, Chemnitz, East Germany; Telling HAEMORRHAGE) Black Box of 100 Self Portrait Etchings 5, 2003 Aether/Awe, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Tales, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, College of Fine Art, 1993–1994, performance, 25 February, Art Gallery of Film Noir/Politique Blanche, Adam Geczy/Mike Parr, University of NSW, Sydney and Neue Galerie am South Australia, Adelaide. Performer: John Breheney; Performance Space, Sydney; Experimental Art Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria Pinch, performance, 24 June, Victorian College of the Arts, Foundation, Adelaide; Perth Institute of Contemporary 1999 Other Stories: Five Australian Artists, Hokkaido Melbourne; Visiting Australian Artist, performance, Arts (PICA), Perth; and Queensland Contemporary Art Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan (Asialink 4 August, Kunst, Sydney; Mike Parr, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Gallery, Griffith Artworks, QLD; Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, exhibition); Parr Sachs Tillers Young, Orange Regional Sydney; Black Mirror/Pale Fire, Various Routes, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture), 30-hour performance, Gallery, Orange, NSW; Home and away, Auckland Art Whistle/White, 3 performances, 21–23 October, Ivan 2–3 May, Artspace, Sydney Gallery, Auckland, NZ; Five Continents and One City, Dougherty Gallery, College of Fine Art, University of NSW, 2004–05 The Mass Psychology of Fascism: Zip-a-dee- Mexico City Gallery, Mexico; Trace: The Liverpool Biennial Sydney doo-day, Zip-a-dee-ay, Monash University Gallery, of Contemporary Art, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK 1994 Mike Parr, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne; Melbourne, 2 December 2004 – 3 February 2005 1999–2000 Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, Works from the Self Portrait Project, Brisbane City Hall Art 2005 Cut Your Throat an Inch at a Time: A Survey of the Queens Museum, Miami Arts Center, MIT List Visual Arts Gallery and Museum, Brisbane; Echolalia (the road): Prints Work of Mike Parr 1970–2005, Newcastle Region Art Center, MIT, Cambridge, MA from the Self Portrait Project: Mike Parr 1987–1994, Gallery, NSW; Sitting Member, performance, 3 October, 2000 12th Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Fathers 11 The Machine Shop, Newcastle, New South Wales: Wales; Museum of