Mike Parr

Anthony Bond puts a question to Mike Parr in advance of ‘Foreign Looking’ an exhibition that comprises more than 40 years of performance, film, sculpture and photography at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Parr is an influential multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited widely internationally and at home. Bond is a writer and former director, curatorial and head of international art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Anthony Bond: My understanding of the core character of your work is that there is a great deal of coherence to the values throughout your art even though the medium and specific subjects have been very diverse. Would it be true to say that you have always epitomised the idea of the personal being political and that this is a consequence of wanting to tell the truth about the world we live in?

Has it never been about self-expression except in as much as it reflects your critical experience of the culture we are surrounded by?

Mike Parr: I sense that the confessional aspect of all my work is bizarrely unstable and it is this instability that constitutes the “politics of the personal”. I think we “tell the truth about the world we live in” inadvertently and in a way this is what I’m acknowledging when I say that extreme performance art “enables me to think”. Cutting the body and cutting the canvas both disrupt the idea of a picture, in the same way that radically isolating the avatars of one’s practice (the forms of its reiteration) extend the process of the works dissociation and openness.

I’m very interested in vulnerability as a political form and I’ve come to think that vulnerability explicates the hysterical reiteration. There’s a disastrous mess and discontinuity in my work that’s not meant to be placated.

Lacan’s notion, that it is repetition that produces difference, means that difference has to be situated. That difference figures meaning and that this meaning is linguistic in the same way that “the unconscious is structured like a language”. I treat all of the reiterations and displacements of my mise-en-scène as a proto-linguistic crisis and it is this disruption that constitutes the counterpoint within the show (the gaps and discontinuities are an organising principle in the same way that the appearance of difference is a content).

Moving image performance documentation is the “backbone” (weakened by psychoanalytic osteoporosis) of the whole exhibition and moving image as projection and screen recurs through all the rooms and I’ve selected photographic documentation and photographic works (a clear distinction in this show), drawings, sculpture, text based works and prints to situate and think aspects of performative shock. I’ve stripped the radical plurality of my practice to its core in order to get at the politics of the personal.

In this show it’s sometimes monumental display and sometimes it’s just notation, ironical formalism or pointless episodic seriality. I’ve lined up this variety to de-ideologise the process of reception. ‘Foreign Looking’ which is the title of the show is not a retrospective, but it does include a selection of core works that date back to 1970. The earliest work in the show is Facts about the Room, 1970, which has been given a purpose built room of its own. It is a very austere text-based work. We’ve also built a large ‘pop-up’ space to house my archive of the 1970s, so many more text-based works and conceptual pieces, as well as slide works and performance instructions. Additionally, the long curved wall that introduces the entrance and exit to the main rooms of my show, has been fitted with a series of wall vitrines to display 45 years of my diaries (lots and lots of black and red writing and lots and lots of exertion and equivocation). We’ve also built a theatrette that will show day-long programs of my performance films and the first big exhibition room and entrance to the main galleries is given over to a complex and very extended selection of projections, to create a “montage in space and time”, which will take the audience through a curated gamut of performance videos that reiterate and explore the recurrent themes and obsessions of all my core work (a very different experience to the film program in the theatrette).

Presiding over all of this will be the performance of ‘Jackson Pollock the Female’ on the opening night. I won’t say any more than this because I think it’s enough.