Artist Julie Rrap, 71, reveals why she has decided to perform naked again in her provocative works
Provocateur Julie Rrap says it’s time for her to strip off again. The pioneering feminist stirrer reveals why she’s putting her body on the line at the age of 71.
In a quiet street in Sydney’s inner west, Julie Rrap’s studio and home are concealed behind a no-nonsense industrial facade, in a former workshop once dedicated to manufacturing shellac, a resin used to produce everything from buttons to cake glazes.
Rrap is one of the nation’s leading art provocateurs, and with its fluorescent lighting and fine coating of dust, her studio is, like its previous incarnation, more serious workspace than vogueish design statement: It’s a trove of tripods, computers, bubble wrapped art works, packing crates and objects – such as a plaster human head inside a Perspex cube – that offer intriguing glimpses into the artist’s preoccupations.
On the day Review visits, an unscrolled, wall-sized roll of paper ends with an abstract drawing on the floor. Days before, Rrap was filmed, naked, drawing on her own body with charcoal until she seemingly started to merge with the illustration’s dense black marks.
A wicked laugh escapes the artist as she declares that, at the age of 71, she has taken the bold decision to continue appearing nude in her works, in order to “create a conversation across time with my own naked body”, which was a fundamental part of her performance-art persona when she was younger.
“I decided I’d start doing that again now that I’m in my 70s,’’ she says. “I thought that it’s interesting to have an old body; to return to it now as an older woman, because older women’s bodies in the history of art are firstly depicted as old crones or witches. There is no good news story there about older women, that’s for sure!’’
A highly-respected sculptor, photographer and video and installation artist, Rrap says this cheerfully rather than resentfully. After all, with her firm bone structure, olive skin and trim figure, the Sydney University academic and sister of legendary performance artist Mike Parr may be one of the nation’s most youthful 70-somethings. Dressed simply for this interview in black pants, T-shirt and running shoes, her movements are quick and nimble; her manner irreverent, breezily confessional and fun.
Her white poodle Cirrus – who, as his name suggests, resembles a white cloud – steps with uncanny doggie grace around the evolving art work on the floor as he drops his octopus toy at visitors’ feet.
The artist’s nude video is key to her latest solo exhibition, Drawn Out: 1987/2022, which opened recently at Melbourne’s Arc One Gallery. The film, she explains, is “this playful take on the life model and explores the idea of the nude drawing herself’’. Drawn Out is one of three major shows the veteran artist has this year – she is also planning a solo sculpture show at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 gallery and is a headline artist in the contemporary art extravaganza, the Adelaide Biennial. Featuring other celebrated art stars including Tracey Moffatt and Shaun Gladwell, the Biennial opened last night as part of the Adelaide Festival and is billed as a “wild” and “frenetic” exhibition for our times. After 40-plus years in the art business, Julie Rrap – whose surname is her family name, Parr, spelt backwards – is clearly having a career moment.
In past decades, she used her body to critique the reductive roles assigned to women across art history. Simultaneously an artist and model, feminist and stirrer, she has superimposed images of her naked body on her drawings of classic works by Manet, Degas and Rembrandt. She has photographed her buttocks with a huge horse’s tail between them, and poked fun at stereotypical Hollywood depictions of Raquel Welch and Marilyn Monroe by recreating these stars’ celebrity photographs with a playful twist.
She says that as a novice female artist in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, “I just didn’t know of that many women artists. That has changed a lot now, of course, but during the period when I started, it was kind of impossible not to address that … Being nude was nothing to do with me longing to take my clothes off. It was just me going ‘Oh my God’ … So much art was women without their clothes on, so I was using myself as a sort of instrument to have a conversation about that.’’
Her M.O. clearly involves making gallery visitors laugh at the same time as she provokes them. “I always have a bit of humour in what I do,’’ she says.
It was for 1999’s Porous Bodies – a show partly about human decay and influenced by the death of her father – that she photographed her butt. She laughs uninhibitedly as she says of this unsettling image, called Horse’s Tale: “That’s a funny one. I literally just went and bought a horse’s tail and stuck it in my arse and took a photograph … nothing very difficult about it; there was no photoshopping.’’
The contemporary nude video in the Drawn Out show accompanies large-scale drawings she made in 1987 of works featuring female nudes and held in French galleries. She inserted her active nude self into photos of the drawings, thus “disrupting the history of them’’ and “releasing these women from the paintings by re-performing them”. Those ’87 works have been exhibited in major art museums in London, Japan, Canada and Australia.
She also injected her mischievous sense of humour into her A-R-mour series (2000) in which she imitated a photograph of Welch wearing a fur bikini – in her version, Rrap wore a “bad” kangaroo-skin bikini she made herself, and covered her body in spiky animal hairs.
“It’s all right for a woman to look a bit hairy but not really, really hairy,” she chortles as we chat in the compact, stylish living room that adjoins her studio.
In the same series, she parodied the famous photograph of Monroe’s halter-neck dress blowing up around her thighs. Rrap’s dress was made of glass and she recalls, laughing: “The whole joke of that work with Marilyn Monroe is that the dress is blowing up and you might see her panties. … I sort of went, ‘Okay I’m not teasing, you can see my pants because the dress is glass.’ It was like pushing these iconic stereotypes of women in film.”
Widely known as a feminist art pioneer, Rrap is one of the established stars of this year’s Adelaide Biennial. For this show, she has devised a technologically-complex installation called Write Me. Twenty-six images of her face are laid out across a five-metre sculpture resembling a Qwerty keyboard.
She had a computer constructed for this interactive installation, in which viewers type their thoughts on a keyboard in a separate room. As they type, her face subtly changes expression. The installation also includes “a mashup of quotes” by writers from Arundhati Roy to Emily Bronte about gender or racial freedom.
According to Rrap, this work asks: “Are you controlling somebody else through what you think you have the right to say?” When I suggest it could also be seen as a critique of social media trolls, she responds: “I’m not over-asking what it’s about because you can kind of kill it off.”
Biennial director Sebastian Goldspink describes Rrap as a “provocateur” and “trailblazer” who was ahead of her time as she scrutinised history’s blind spots. Is that how she sees herself? “The term I’ve always applied to myself is that I’m a trickster. I’m sort of being serious but I’m also playing games, in a way, to engage people,” she says. She also thinks of herself as “quite a classical artist”, given how she interrogates the human form.
She is often driven by instinct: “Sometimes I think it’s really fun if you’ve got an idea and it’s strong and you just roll with it and don’t ask yourself too many questions. There’s always a driving intelligence going on.’’ One of her favourite works, O, from the Porous Bodies series, is, she says, a neon sign featuring a woman with “big pink nipples and legs apart … I had an insect zapper right in her crotch”.
This work once hung in Tony Bilson’s Bar One at The Rocks, Sydney, and was a tribute to Duchamp and her father, who sold neon signs and insect zappers from the family farm in Queensland. She jokes that “people would be sitting there (in Bilson’s bar) having a drink … and then you’d hear, ‘zzzz’, and some fly would have flown into the crotch area and the insect zapper. It was hysterical.”
An arts graduate from Queensland University, she is from a singular artistic family. Like her, her brother Mike Parr has made a career out of putting his body at the centre of his art – in 2018, he was entombed under a busy Hobart street for three days without food for the Dark Mofo Festival.
“That was amazing, wasn’t it? Unusual family, our family,” she quips.
Asked whether she feared for the safety of her brother, then 73, with that project, which made headlines around the world, she replies matter-of-factly: “No, he’s tough, he’s a really strong character, Mike. He knows himself, he knows his limits. I think because he was born with one arm you have to confront hard things quite early ... It’s made him an incredibly resourceful person; I hugely respect him as an artist.’’ They are often bracketed together because they both use their bodies in their work, but she says his focus “is so much about a kind of psycho-pathology of the self”, while hers is a commentary on how women have been portrayed in art history.
As for that unusual surname, she adopted it, she says, partly as a mirror image to her famous brother’s name (she worked with him early in her career). It was also about resisting patriarchal tradition: “It was that weird thing as a woman of, ‘Whose name do you have really?’ ’’ She ultimately decided that reversing her surname “would be quite fun’’.
Today, Rrap’s works are held in every major public collection in Australia, and in private collections here and overseas. During the 1980s, she lived and exhibited in western Europe and was represented in four Sydney Biennales between 1986 and 2008. In 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney staged a major retrospective of her work and she was also represented in the National Gallery of Australia’s 2020 tribute to female artists, Know My Name.
Interestingly, she stopped using her naked body for an extended period after the late 1980s. She worried she was becoming typecast as “the girl who pops into (classical) paintings” without her clothes on, after a Sydney Biennale curator remarked she hadn’t yet “hopped into Bonnard’’: “I thought, ‘Right, it’s time to stop doing that’.’’
She changed tack with her Transpositions series, which featured photographs on 100 wood panels of women derived from European portraiture. These subjects look directly at the viewer and such images, she says, beg the question: “Forget about naming the male artist, who are these women?’’
Rrap says this work “sort of freed me … As an artist you’ve got to be wily. As soon as I get typecast, I find a way to move out of that.”
Overstepping (2001) is a striking, signature work in which she photographed her ankle in a high heeled shoe and had it photoshopped until flesh and shoe became one. She won the Hermann’s Art Award for her “high-heeled foot”, which speaks powerfully of women’s constant desire to improve and alter their bodies.
For a 2019 show called Twisted Logic, she had parts of her body, including her breasts and fingers, cast in bronze and exhibited as if they were museum artefacts. She plans to “return to a bit of casting” for her Sydney show later this year.
She is single, childless and was at one point the long-term partner of a gynaecologist who lived next door. She is also co-director of Sydney University’s College of the Arts, and reflects that in the past, female art graduates often didn’t get the breaks their male counterparts did, “but that has completely changed now”. Greater opportunities for women artists have “freshened up the art world”, she reckons.
At 71, how does it feel, exposing her body again to the public gaze in her performance art video? “As you get older … your waist thickens a bit but it’s still the same body. It’s really interesting,” she says. She jokes that she found it more confronting having a saggy forearm cast in silicone for a sculpture show than taking her kit off as a septuagenarian.
She is keen to extend the conversation between her former and present nude selves: “When I was younger, I was trying to use my own body to critique the use of the female nude, which inevitably was a younger woman’s body in all the paintings and sculptures you looked at. I was one of those young bodies then … Now I’m an older woman, you certainly don’t suffer from an excess of images of older women’s bodies, and I thought, ‘Right, from now on I have to go on using myself, as this older woman performing again’.”
The Adelaide Biennial opened at the Art Gallery of South Australia last night. Drawn Out continues at Arc One Gallery, Melbourne, until March 19
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