Foreign Looking: Mike Parr at the NGA

Mike Parr will be remembered for his striking 1970s performances, but he is also an impressive printmaker.

Mike Parr’s Best Man (2006), left; The Sickness Unto Death (2010-15), right

Mike Parr has always been Australia’s most important performance artist, and although the high point of that art form was about 40 years ago, he has persisted in making new performance works. At the same time he has developed another metier as a printmaker and produced some of the most impressive graphic work of recent decades in Australia. The current retrospective is in fact curated by the National Gallery of Australia’s senior curator of prints and drawings, Roger Butler, a hint that these are the works for which he will ultimately be remembered.

Artists are remembered for two reasons: the enduring quality of their work, and the part they may have played in the historical narrative. There are countless examples of artists remembered mainly because they were the first to do a certain thing, especially within a modernist historiography that privileged the criteria of innovation and novelty.

Thus Parr will always be in the history books for his striking performances of the early 1970s, even if these are now memories of another age. On the other hand, in engaging in an art form with a deep history and highly refined technical range such as printmaking, he is setting himself in the tradition of very great artists and making a claim to a more perennial significance.

The exhibition is very carefully staged to present an overall view of Parr and to imply a continuity and unity in his work. Chronological order is avoided, and yet the exhibition is preceded by two sections that remind us explicitly of the chronological dimension. The firs is an archive centre containing boxes of the artist’s papers, together with materials and objects pertaining to various performances.

Around the walls are examples of instructions for the early conceptual/performance pieces, such as “hold your finger in a candle flame for as long as possible” (1972). Printed on red paper and available in copies for visitors to take home is a partly serious, partly tongue-in-cheek rant about destroying the art establishment, whose language parodies texts like the proto-fascist futurist manifesto printed on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909.

Much more interesting than this youthful manifestoid, however, is the huge curving display of work diaries from the artist’s career, extending across some 40 years to the present, and open to allow us to read sample pages. Here the impression is no longer one of anarchism but of method, hard work and relentless professionalism in the pursuit of an artistic career.

Very early, Parr seems to have adopted the habit of making a list at the end of each day of things to be done on the following one. This was, incidentally, a habit recommended by Yukio Mishima too. But while the rest of us probably make our lists in dot-point form, Parr writes his out fully, and most of them start with “I must …” — a detail, with its connotations of rigour and Protestant sense of moral obligation, as telling about his work as anything in the exhibition.

These first entries are made in black pen, and then on the following day the action taken for each point is recorded in red, and if necessary further tasks are carried forward to subsequent days. Since 1992, Parr has also listed “diet” and “exercise” on the top left and right of every page. There are some endearing annotations here, like the day when “diet” is crossed out with the comment, “the fish and chips were delicious”. Less endearing to those concerned are some pointed observations about various art-world individuals, one of whom I saw in the gallery cafe just before reading a very disobliging entry concerning his behaviour.

After this prelude, absorbing in itself, there is a choice of two curtained entrances to the exhibition. On the left you can go into a room with projections of the films. A gallery attendant is on hand to warn visitors that they may find what they see confronting, and it happened to be one of the face-sewing performances when I drew the curtain aside. But even if you choose the main exhibition, the initial space confronts you with a selection of projections.

The point, clearly, is to force us to see the artist’s work as a whole, or perhaps more precisely to make us see the graphic work with the more overtly extreme impressions of the physical performances in mind — for the graphic work pursues in a more subtle manner themes grossly or sensationally evoked in the performances.

The great theme in Parr’s work is pain. Most performance art entailed a test of the artist’s endurance, but Parr’s actions went further. They demanded the performer subject himself to intense physical pain — holding his finger in the flame, pushing tacks into his calf, burning a coil of fuse wire around his calf, and so on. Interestingly, the most famous of all, when he appeared to chop off his left arm, was the only one that involved no pain at all, for Parr was born with only the stump of a left arm and he was wearing a prosthetic one for the occasion; thus this notorious action was really a piece of theatrical artifice rather than true performance art.

Why this obsessive rehearsal of pain? Is it because of the sense of loss in being born with one arm? Does it arise from an overwhelming compassion before the universal suffering of mankind? Or does it come from the numbness of alienation, the sense of feeling nothing? Coincidentally, a recent study confirmed the observation made long ago by Pascal, that the thing we are least capable of is simply sitting still; it turned out that subjects in a university trial would rather give themselves painful electric shocks than sit in a room and do nothing.

What complicates questions like this is that artists do not simply give voice to their personal experience but act in some sense as a vehicle or medium for articulating, giving voice to and reflecting on the broader experience of those around them. Parr has, of course, like all of us, his own personal sources of suffering, whether in relation to his arm, to the loss of parents, the illness of his wife or the death of his brother; but his performances seem to speak to the moral numbness and superficial distraction of the social media and infotainment age.

The performances of recent years have become more grotesque — in his incarnation as bride and more recently as Matisse’s portrait of his wife in her famous hat (1905) — and more painful, with the horrifying experience of face sewing. All these actions come with complex layers of reference — from Freud to Duchamp to TJ Clark’s essay on the Matisse painting — for they are products of the endlessly recycled, narrow and ultimately rather stale culture of the past century of Western art history.

They are all, however, ultimately predicated on the idea that the artist’s suffering in the course of a performance does some good. But is that true? From a specific perspective, if sewing your lips together is meant to draw attention to the plight of asylum-seekers, it is clearly going to appeal only to people who are already sympathetic to their cause. More generally, asking us to believe that the artist’s ritual suffering will bring some good into the world is analogous to making the same claim for a religious ascetic’s acts of self-mortification.

The works on paper deal with pain and suffering too, but less obviously. One of the finest of Parr’s works is a series of self-portraits — they are almost his exclusive subject — from 1981 to 1996: they range from fine and careful drawings attentive to the specificity of each feature to tense and overdrawn sheets in which features are distorted or even obliterated. Among later drawings one of the most impressive series is a set of two-sided drawing boards used as desk scribble pads and covered with a combination of self-portrait sketches, diary annotations and reflections.

Parr’s prints are executed on a colossal scale, on multiple sheets of paper, employing tools as brutal as an angle-grinder to cut into the copper plate. Again the self-portrait remains at the core of the work, but broader themes appear. One of the most effective sets is a commemoration of his father, with a portrait that seems to merge his own features with those of his father, and a complex, semi-abstract vision of the afterlife that makes one think of a Piranesi prison re-­imagined through dockyard cranes and other machinery.

The enormous last room includes prints as well as a series of tabloid newspapers. Parr clearly deplores their lurid headlines, and it is true that tabloid journalism is designed to provoke indignation in the reader, because indignation sells. But in overprinting these with his own mock banner headlines, sometimes amusing, he ultimately evokes exactly the same kind of anger and indignation as the originals.

It is particularly self-defeating to express disgust at populist politics, however understandable, in slogans like “moron votes”, as obtuse as the thoughtless catchcries of the morons in question. The fact is that disaffection among elements of the masses is feeding the rise of populist leaders who threaten the stability of mature democracies and the contempt, smug pieties and scolding of upper-class intellectuals only make matters worse.

The other works in this last room are prints that have been overpainted, one set in black and another in red. Fortunately prints are multiples, so it is possible to sacrifice a set without losing the work altogether. The overpainting was done, as we see in a pair of videos, in a performance in Liverpool in 2014 for the black one, and at Anna Schwartz Gallery at Carriageworks in Sydney last year for the red one.

Just in case the symbolism of red wasn’t quite clear enough, a rousing rendition of The Internationale was played at the start of the performance. We seem to be back where we started, with the manifestoid printed on red paper: the art object as commodity is obliterated before our eyes. Except of course that in the ever-resilient economy of the art business, the obliterated version now becomes a unique object instead of a multiple, and thus even more valuable.

Not to mention that the whole thing is a spectacle, a highbrow entertainment, an aesthetic experience. And in the new economy in which we now live, just as services can seem more important than goods, experiences are the new commodities. The new face of the old Marxian idea of commodity fetishism — whether in tourism, food and wine or even art — is experience fetishism.

Foreign Looking: Mike Parr

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Until November 6.