Understanding Mike Parr

Mike Parr (born 1945) is an Australian performance artist and printmaker. Parr's works have been exhibited in Australia and internationally, including in Brazil, Cuba, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Parr spent his childhood in rural Queensland. He was born with a mutilated arm, and this has affected his art making practice throughout his career. He commenced an arts/law degree at the University of Queensland in 1965 but dropped out the following year. He is the brother of installation/photography artist, Julie Rrap (formerly Julie Brown-Rrap).He moved to Sydney and, in 1968, enrolled to study painting at the National Art School.
His video/installation works explore physical limits, memory and self identity. These often centre on self-mutilation, extreme physical feats (such as 100 Breaths[1]), challenging the audience. The works are documented photographically and on video.
Parr's print making is a striking contrast, both emotionally and visually to his video/installation work, consisting of beautiful etchings featuring raw and spiky lines. Mike Parr is widely regarded as one of the most gifted living Australian artists and as the most outstanding Australian artist of his generation. His work is imbued with a strongly cathartic presence, a direct result of his personally demanding working processes. Mike Parr has released over one thousand works within the context of his self-imposed ‘Self-Portrait’ series, in a range of media that includes performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, dry point etching and photography. Parr has been fascinated with observation and the possibilities and responses of memory distortions. His "landscape" prints are such depictions - memories of views passed by.
In his self-portrait prints, Parr takes his own image and twists, stretches and defaces it. He seems to treat his prints like his own body. They are scratched and scarred; marked by acts of aggression and violence. In Parr's self-portraits the concept of identity constantly shifts and mutates. His images are tricky and slippery. Just like a face reflected in a mirror, they refuse to stay still.

VOLTE FACE: MIKE PARR
PRINTS and PRE- PRINTS
1970-2005

In this exhibition a selection of key print works by the artist is brought together for the first time in Sydney, the artist’s hometown. Although Parr produced his first prints in 1987, the exhibition contextualizes his printmaking practice through text and instruction pieces from the early 1970s, and presents prelimary drawings or story boards’ alongside printing plates as a way of revealing the processes, mental and physical, through which the prints have evolved.

This exhibition, as its title Volte Face (or “about face”) indicates, focuses on the self portrait as a central- indeed crucial- theme in Parr’s practice over the last thirty five years. Traditionally based upon the physical resemblance of the artist- and typically-, the face reflected back at the artist via mirror, or drawn from memory- the self portrait is here presented as an unstable, ambiguous physic terrain. His works combine a large range of techniques, often within the one image, Parr’s prints actively challenged the orthodoxies of printmaking with its emphasis on style and refined, singular techniques. Its is within the context that Parr had spoken of a “feeling of undifferentiated body in contrast to the idea of self portraiture”, as well as an “impurity of techniques” in relation to his works. Mike who did not study printmaking formally, describe the process as both exploratory and revelatory, and one in which learning takes place alongside creating. He says, “I’ve no allegiance to any particular technique, because the “language” of printmaking is virtually unlimited once one starts mixing techniques”.

Ideas about instability and displacement in relation to individual identity suggest a “portraiture project” comprised of many partial views. Like a vision reflected in a broken mirror, fragmented and dispersed, Parr’s self portrait project presents multiple selves which are fractured and in disarray. Viewing the artist’s prints from 1987 onwards, a chronology can be traced from the earlier, more visually coherent works which the face and sometimes body is present as whole, to the more recent works in which the image breaks apart before the viewer’s gaze, or is overlain with graphic marks. In some works, thick bands of colors are applied across the surface of the prints as a form of literal masking, whilst in others fleeting references- atrunacated arm, a leg or a part of a face- are woven into an incomplete, open- ended image. Parr had reworked some printing plates repeated, accumulating a range of marks upon their surfaces over time and creating multiple images or print suites from them.

Scale is also an important factor for Parr’s prints, which varies from one single sheet works of considerably intimacy to large scale works encompassing multiple sheets, presented in linear or grid formation on the gallery wall. Often pinned on the walls instead of being framed behind glass, there is an immediacy to these works in which the minute, irregular details of wood grain is revealed before the viewers along with the scratches, burrs, furrows of metal plate printing processes. Many of his works exist in “Single state”, rather than larger print editions, and the surface of the image is frequently treated with residues including blood, charcoal, and dirt. This layering upon layering of graphic marks, image fragments, color and organic substances characterize the cumulative nature of printmaking with its build up of marks on the plate, multiple states and auditioning.

Referencing to trauma, loss and the artist’s own body abound in these works. “Parr’s identity crisis concerns the compulsorily socialized performance of self, the pervasive and suffocating requirement on all individuals to perform the endless role of consumer, citizen and subject”.” Trauma inflicted upon the body forms a recurring reference in Parr’s art. Trauma, loss and absence figure in Parr’s self portrait project through the disintegration of the image and its sublimation by the printmaking process. Images are distorted using a range of optical devices including mirroring, reversal and anamorphous, and through the unreliability of memory itself with its gaps and exaggerations. Mapped unto a grid and then manipulated, bifurcated and broken down, the drawings and prints within the self portrait project work against the conceptual clarity of the grid as a structuring device to create an accumulation of irregular marks and symbols. Parr states that: “ There is no narrative in my work, only the constant process of displacement of futility. A process of symbolic order that fails. Ostensibly my congenitally unformed left arm provides some form or explanation for my work as a whole, but of course it doesn’t, because I realized long ago that its absence is a kind of hypen; a gap; as well as a kind of connection or mirroring.”

Parr has drawn heavily upon philosophical and psychoanalytic discourses in the evolution of his self portrait project. Suggesting that” psychoanalysis as a body of theory has been intensively interesting to me, because all my work entails archetypes of communication.” He proposes that the failures and inadequacies of representation mirror those of the physical subject itself. A tool for communication, like language, visual representation is here presented in a state of crisis and reinvention- endless replayed, reconstituted, and broken down once again.
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Solo Exhibitions

• 1970 Light Pieces & Painted Constructions, Reid Gallery, Brisbane
• 1972-3 Trans-Art 1: Idea Demonstrations (with Peter Kennedy), Inhibodress
Gallery, Sydney; Veste Sagrada and Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil
• 1973 Performance, Actions, Videosystems, Galerie Impact, Lausanne; Galerie
Media, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
• 1978 Screening of Rules and Displacement Activities Parts I and II,
lectures, Bela Balaczs Studio for Experimental Film, Budapest, Hungary
• 1983 Black Box: The Theatre of Self Correction, Part 2, The Performance
Space, Sydney

Cloacal Corridor (O Vio Prote/O Vio Proto/O Vio Loto/O Thethe) Self Portrait as a Pair or Self Portrait as a Pun, drawing installation; Identification Number 1 (Rib Markings in the Carnarvon Ranges, North-West Queensland), January 1975, photoseries Screenings of Rules and Displacement Activities Parts I, II and III; Performance presentation from George Brecht's WaterYam, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Curator: Barbara Campbell Drawings, Art Projects, Melbourne

• 1984 Towards the Other Side (Self Quotations), three drawing series, Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology Gallery, Melbourne. Curator: John Smithies
• 1985 Portage, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; Fine Art Gallery, University
of Tasmania, Hobart
• 1986 The Parting of the Red Sea, Siegal Contemporary Art Inc., New York
• 1989 Mike Parr, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, June; City Gallery,
Melbourne, July; Milburn + Arté Gallery, Brisbane
• 1990 I think of Dry point in terms of Braille and Excavation, survey of
prints from 1988-1990, The Drill Hall Gallery, National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra
• 1991 Mike Parr, Artist in Residence 1990-1991, Ian Potter Gallery, The
University of Melbourne Museum of Art, Melbourne

3 Installations, City Gallery, Melbourne; Mike Parr, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Survey of Recent Work, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth

• 1992 Alphabet/Haemorrhage, 17 performances, Arthouse, Perth, 3 April; 4
performances, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 6 May; 4 performances,
City Gallery, Melbourne, 13 June; 9 performances, Museum of Contemporary
Art, Sydney, 4 August
• 1993 Mike Parr, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, September

Black Mirror/Pale Fire, Various Routes, Whistle/White, 3 performances, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney

• 1994 Mike Parr, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

Echolalia (the road): Prints from the Self Portrait Project: Mike Parr 1987-1994, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 100 Breaths/100 Songs from (ALPHABET/ HAEMORRHAGE) Black Box of 100 Self Portrait Etchings 5, 1993-1994, performance, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Fathers 11 (The Law of the Image), installation, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide The Bridge, performance, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

• 1995 The Illusion of the End, Sherman Galleries Goodhope and Hargrave,
Sydney

Day Break, performance, Scene Shop at the Cultural Centre of Manila, Manila

• 1996 The Infinity Machine, Sherman Galleries Goodhope, Sydney Anna Schwartz
Gallery, Melbourne

Head on a Plate, New York Studio School, New York The White Hybrid (Fading), performance, Artspace, Cowper Wharf/Artspace, Sydney Unword, performance, University of Western Australia

• 1997 Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
• 1998 Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Michael Milburn Galleries, Brisbane

Female Factory, 7 hour performance, 25.4 Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Blood Box, 24 hour performance, 6.9/7.9, Artspace, Sydney Boubialla Couta, (performance), College of Fine Arts, Sydney The Rest of Time, Sherman Galleries Goodhope, Sydney Mike Parr, Sherman Galleries Hargrave, Sydney Photo-Realism, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

• 1999 Deep Sleep [The Analytical Disabling of Mind and Matter], Nixon/Parr,
72 hour performance, 17.6-20.6, National Portrait Gallery & Lake Burley
Griffin, Canberra

Wrong Face, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Three Collaborations, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney

• 2000 ARCO, International Contemporary Art Fair, Parque Serial Juan Carosl,
Madrid

Shallow Grave, 3 day performance, 7.7-9.7 12th Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

• Selected Group Exhibitions
• 1971 The Situation Now, Contemporary Art Society, Central Street Gallery,
Sydney

John Kaldor Art Project 2: Szeemann: I want to leave a nice welldone child here (20 Australian Artists), Bonython Gallery, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

• 1973 Artists' Books, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Recent Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

• 1977 10th biennale de Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
• 1979 3rd Biennale of Sydney: European Dialogue, Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney
• 1980 XXXIX Biennale di Venezia, Giardini, Venice
• 1981 Australian Perspecta 1981: A biennial survey of contemporary

Australian art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

• 1982 Eureka! Artists from Australia, Institute of Contemporary Art and
Serpentine Gallery, London
• 1983 Presence & Absence: Survey of Contemporary Australian Art, No. 1,
installation, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

Tall Poppies, an exhibition of five pictures, University Art Gallery, University of Melbourne D'un autre continent 'L'Australie, Le réve et le réel', ARC/Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

• 1984-5 An Australian Accent, Three Artists, Mike Parr, Imants Tillers, Ken
Unsworth, P.S.1 (Project Studios One), The Institute of Art and Urban
Resources, Inc., New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Art Gallery
of Western Australia, Perth; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

• 1985 5/5, Fünf Vom Fünften, daadgalerie, Berlin

Australian Perspecta 85,Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

• 1986 Prospect '86, An International Exhibition of Contemporary Art,
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

Origins, Originality & Beyond, The Sixth Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales; Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney

• 1987-9 The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta, Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Frankfurter
Kunstverein, Steirnernes Haus, Frankfurt; Württemburgischer Kunstverein,
Stuttgart
• 1988 1988 Australian Biennale. From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art
c.1940-1988, The Seventh Biennale of Sydney, Art Gallery of New South
Wales; Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Edge to Edge: Australian Contemporary Art to Japan, National Museum of Art, Osaka; Old and New Hara Museums, Tokyo; Nagoya City Museum, Nagoya; Hokkaido Museum, Sapporo

• 1994 Adelaide Installations, the 1994 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art,
Adelaide
• 1995 Antipodean Currents: 10 Contemporary Artists from Australia,
Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York
• 1996 Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia, OXY Gallery, Osaka; Hakone

Open-Air Museum, Tokyo; Dong-Ah Gallery, Seoul, Korea
Spirit & Place: Art in Australia 1861-1996, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

• 1997 Dead Sun, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Curator: Mike Parr; Dead
Sun, performance, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Body, Art Gallery of New South Wales In Place (Out of Time): Contemporary Art in Australia, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

• 1998 Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art, Moderna
Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

Southern Reflections: An Exhibition of Contemporary Australian Art to Northern Europe, Kulturhaus, Stockholm, Sweden; Konathallen Götsberg, Gothenburg, Sweden; Arhus Konstmuseum, Arhus, Denmark; Museum Tamminiementle (City Art Museum), Helsinki; Neues Museum, Bremen, Germany; Staatliche Sammlung für Kunst, Chemnitz, East Germany Telling Tales, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney

• 1999 Southern Reflections: Ten Contemporary Australian Artists, touring
Northern Europe Other Stories: Five Australian Artists, Hokkaido Museum of
Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan

Five Continents and One City. Curator: Gao Minglu, Mexico City Gallery, Mexico The Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool, UK Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, Queens Museum, The Walker Art Centre, Miami Art Centre and other American Museums, 1999/00

• 2000 The 12th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Biennale 2000, Art Gallery of New
South Wales; Museum of Contemporary Art; Artspace and other venues


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Bibliography

David Bromfield, Identities: A Citical Study of The Works Of Mike Parr 1970-1990, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 1991

Graham Coulter-Smith, Mike Parr: The Self Portrait Project, Schwartz City, Melbourne, 1994

Edward Scheer, The Veil of the Liminal; Mike Parr’s Brides; Parkett, Number 62, 2001

Ross Woodrow, Mike Parr’s Problem in Cut your throat an inch at a time: a survey of the works of Mike Parr 1970-2005, Exhibition catalogue, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 2005








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