LEFT FIELD

Call­ing on the tenets of Supre­ma­tism and con­tin­u­ing the premise of Paint­ing-out Per­for­mance, 2015, in which sev­er­al large prints were paint­ed red, Mike Parr per­formed LEFT FIELD [for Robert Hunter] at Anna Schwartz Gallery on the 6^th of July 2017.

The title of the per­for­mance invokes var­i­ous­ly; a posi­tion of obscu­ri­ty, an ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ing, a loca­tion on a base­ball pitch, or even an aban­doned site – a field left behind. Such an emp­ty field could be imag­ined as bound­less, one entire enti­ty with­out edge or seam. Embrac­ing the state­ment of Kaz­imir Male­vich that ​“Art… wants to have noth­ing fur­ther to do with the object”, Parr’s min­i­mal­is­tic per­for­mance has ren­dered the gallery void, leav­ing behind only a trace in the form of video doc­u­men­ta­tion. On dis­play for the peri­od of the exhi­bi­tion, this ephemer­al echo rever­ber­ates against the walls, ceil­ing and floor, inten­si­fy­ing its bare­ly per­cep­ti­ble sight and sound. On view in the upstairs gallery is a new work by Mike Parr, COAT­ED TONGUES [for Shaun Glad­well], in which he con­tin­ues his trib­ute to sem­i­nal Aus­tralian artists.

Mike Parr (born 1945) lives and works in Syd­ney. Over the course of his career, Parr has engaged with ideas of endurance and dura­tion, for­mal­ism and the mechan­ics of de-rep­re­sen­ta­tion. His work is imbued with a strong­ly cathar­tic pres­ence that can be read as a forc­ing of lan­guage onto the mate­r­i­al body. Inter­ro­gat­ing for­mal and cul­tur­al ortho­dox­ies, Mike Parr con­flates draw­ing, print, sculp­ture and per­for­mance in his deeply polit­i­cal works. Test­ing the lim­its of his phys­i­cal and men­tal endurance, Parr has cut, brand­ed, stitched, burnt and nailed his body in a decades long exam­i­na­tion of iden­ti­ty and con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal conventions.

Parr rep­re­sent­ed Aus­tralia at the Venice Bien­nale in 1980 and pre­sent­ed the major instal­la­tion The Ghost who Talks at the Palaz­zo Mora in 2015 Venice Bien­nale. In 2016, the Nation­al Gallery of Aus­tralia mount­ed the museum’s largest sur­vey of a con­tem­po­rary Aus­tralian artist, ​‘Mike Parr: For­eign Look­ing’. He has also par­tic­i­pat­ed in Bien­nales around the world with per­for­mance, instal­la­tion and draw­ing works. These include: Havana, Liv­er­pool, Fukui, Venice and Syd­ney. His work is includ­ed in all major Aus­tralian pub­lic col­lec­tions and fea­tures promi­nent­ly in inter­na­tion­al and Aus­tralian pri­vate and cor­po­rate collections.