Mike Parr’s Israel-Hamas performance may cost him a collector

Melbourne businessman Joe Gersh has been a proud collector of Mike Parr’s self-portraits – but now he’s troubled by what the artist thinks about ‘my people, the Jewish people’.

Businessman and art collector Joe Gersh with some of his collection of self-portraits by Sydney artist Mike Parr. Picture: Alex Coppel

A performance piece about the ­Israel-Gaza conflict may have cost artist Mike Parr one of his most devoted collectors, as Melbourne businessman Joe Gersh says the reference to Nazis and ­Israel in the work is troubling and hurtful and makes him ­“extremely uncomfortable”.

The 4½ -hour performance, in which Parr wrote wall texts responding to the Israel-Gaza conflict, has already caused gallery owner Anna Schwartz to break off her business relationship with the artist, after having represented him for 36 years.

Mr Gersh said he owned large, multi-panel self-portraits by Parr that had pride of place in his home, but he now asked himself whether he could continue to live with them. Mr Gersh, whose mat­ernal grandparents were murdered by the Nazis, said he was disturbed by Parr’s lack of empathy for Jewish people.

“It’s a lack of appreciation of the existential threats that Jewish people feel both in Israel and throughout the world, and an inability to understand that a number of the words that (Parr) used … have been weaponised against the Jewish people,” he said.

“I am extremely uncomfortable with those views.”

The Israel-Gaza conflict has caused deep divisions in the Australian arts community, following a protest at the Sydney Theatre Company where three actors pulled on keffiyeh scarfs during a curtain call at a performance of The Seagull.

Mr Gersh said he had been a keen collector of Parr’s drawings, which he had bought either from Ms Schwartz or from Gene Sherman in Sydney, and he owned a large series comprising 15 self-portraits, a self-portrait that he kept in his home study, and another self-portrait with the title Study in the Breeze of Death, which was at his business office.

A former director of the ABC and a former deputy director of the Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia), Mr Gersh said he was considering whether to sell or deaccession the pictures. He said he was not usually concerned about artists’ political views, but this was intensely personal, given his daily engagement with Parr through the self-portraits. He had met the artist on occasion, but they were not close friends. He did not see the performance on December 2.

“This is different because it is self-portraiture, and I do feel a relationship with him, even though I don’t know him well personally,” Mr Gersh said. “It’s a strangely intimate relationship, and how he feels about me, my people, the Jewish people, affects how I feel about his work. It’s deeply visceral, deeply personal. He’s looking at me now, as we speak.”

Ms Schwartz terminated her long-standing business relationship with Parr after the performance at her Flinders Lane gallery. “The co-appearance of the word Nazi with the word Israel made me sick,” she told ABC Radio Nat­ional. “It was the dealbreaker.”

Parr disputed her recollection of the performance in an interview with the ABC on Tuesday. “I wasn’t trying to provoke Anna,” he said. “What I was trying to do was provoke debate around the whole issue of this crisis.”

Works by Parr are held in major public galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, but Mr Gersh said he did not believe those galleries should remove or change their displays.

He was considering what to do with the works in his own collection. “Given I have versions of himself looking at me at home and in the office, the question is, Can I live with it?” he said. “It’s very difficult for me – a situation where the very existence of the Jewish people is under threat, (and) to live with the work of an artist who doesn’t appear to understand what the issues are from our perspective.”