Mike Parr: Easter Island
The many distorted faces of the man who made Australian art 'contemporary.'
Overview
'Provocative' and 'disturbing' are two adjectives that frequently accompany discussions concerning art maverick, Mike Parr. Tackling the timidity of Australian art, he became an integral element of the burgeoning global fervour surrounding performance and body art during the 1970s. His infamous and confrontational arm chop has come to represent a strong foothold in mapping the rise of contemporary Australian art. Over the decades, Parr’s bold fusion of self-mutilation and theory has made him one of our most fearless and important living artists.
Parr’s art is intrinsically of the physical self and his current exhibition Easter Island is no exception. In addition to his performances, he has always maintained a strong practice in drawings, prints and etchings, in which the self-portrait is ever-present. Easter Island features 96 wall-to-wall 'blown to buggery' self-portraits. With depictions of Parr as both adult and child, this leaves a distinct autobiographical impression. The title of the exhibition evokes the stone megaliths of Easter Island and Jared Diamond's account of the end of this civilization. This sense of ending makes the exhibition feel like a retrospective. And upon closer attention, many of the works are pervaded with subtle markers of Parr's previous works and continuations of his trademark methodologies.
Easter Island is a space-hungry installation perfectly suited to the industrial scale and aesthetic of Anna Schwartz Gallery. In their whopping glossiness, many of these photo-drawings are distorted in their original form. Of the vast montage of faces, some are elaborate in their fleshly detail and wrinkly precision, Parr’s ravaged face crowds the frame. Others appear as preliminary sketches, constructed as a barrage of raw spiky lines, equipped with scrawled statements. In this way, the exhibition strikes as a catalog of artistic processes.
The works in which the face is heavily abstracted and swamped by brushstrokes evoke some of Parr’s earlier performance works. He commonly utilized a technique in which he would sew his own face. In one work, using it as a mock canvas, he built a cubist artwork from the taut lines, simultaneously pushing aesthetic and bodily boundaries and parodying high modernism. Other works were deeply political, such as Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture) – a provocative comment on Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. It comprised of Parr’s mouth wired into a fearful grimace, forcibly silenced and captive in the gallery space. This querying of self and mutilation is present in the harsh lines of Parr’s self-portraits. It could easily be said that the extremity of his performance pieces filters into his drawings by way of these intensely convoluted faces.
Another curious aspect is Parr’s statements, among which are: “shoulder replacement” and “decapitation i.e. head on a plate,” which can be figured as contemplating a deconstruction of the body, both medically and violently. These sorts of micro-poems or condensed ideas were the genesis of Parr’s early performance works, using them as instructional snippets he would act them out in all their stipulated pain and suffering. There are also various manipulations in photographically documenting the drawings that enact a transparency of process. For example, the masking taped borders of canvases are visible. Whilst in another work, the image seems partially magnified, warping the bottom third of Parr's face.
While other artists and intellectuals of his generation, such as Brett Whiteley and Germaine Greer, sought out the avant-garde by immersing themselves in the swingin' sixties of London, Parr cultivated the contemporary on home soil, inducting Australia to the radical idea of art as behaviour. Easter Island is thematically consistent with Parr's rich oeuvre and its investigation of body and self. Nevertheless it retains an incisiveness and brutal honesty that has ongoing value.
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