Mike Parr
BLAME­LESS

.….The sculp­tures are ​“gener­ic” heads but they also car­ry traces of the Self Por­trait Project, because I mod­elled each head by pos­ing a long-time mod­el of mine and by com­bin­ing his por­trait with a mir­ror reflec­tion of my own head, so the con­flat­ed image is real­ly one of my ​“cross-over self portraits”.

The first LCD screen shows a sequence of words which have been ren­dered to DVD. It is one of my dic­tio­nary pieces where the syn­onym for the word ​“syn­ony­mous” is fol­lowed by the syn­onym of the syn­onym… for 80 words. Each word is cen­tred and replaced by the next accord­ing to a fixed metro­nom­ic beat. Remark­ably the final word in this objec­tive dic­tio­nary process is the word ​“dead”. The work is called Blind Obedience.

The sec­ond screen shows the same sequence, but num­bers replace the let­ters of each word [I have sim­ply num­bered the let­ters of the alpha­bet in order and trans­posed them]. This ver­sion is called Silent Major­i­ty. The title of the 14 alu­mini­um sculp­tures is No The­o­ry Please We’re White Supremacists.

Expres­sion­ism, tau­tol­ogy, white­ness are the pre­vail­ing con­cep­tu­al axii of the piece. The ​“gap” between the two sites is fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant and I think of it as a kind of ​“unthought” or provo­ca­tion. The lan­guage and num­ber schemes defin­ing iden­ti­ty into a kind of noth­ing­ness on one hand and on the oth­er, the insub­or­di­na­tion of the racist head and the white­ness that sanc­ti­fies its monstrosity.

- excerpt from let­ter from Mike Parr, June 2006