Mike Parr: What I thought about down there

IN his own words, performance artist Mike Parr discusses the meaning and purpose of his work Underneath The Bitumen The Artist and some of the issues it raised.

MIKE Parr began yesterday’s forum with an 11-minute statement that addressed the meaning and purpose of Underneath The Bitumen The Artist and some of the issues it raised. This is an edited transcript:

“Greg (Lehman) said in an interview that the most ironic part of this artwork is that I want to expose something by hiding it from view. I think that’s a pretty astute comment on how so much colonial history has been written. I think it’s more like an anti-memorial, but he was spot-on.

“But there’s a logical point here too.

“I first came up with this piece in 2011. [At first] I wanted to be buried under the bitumen in Nuremberg, and I wanted the piece to be transmitted only through the media and social media. I wanted it to be a complete absence in relation to the immediate German history of the second World War — the violence that Nazi terror imposed on so many people, and the destruction of the Jewish community.

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A large crowd turned out to watch Mike Parr be buried under Macquarie St. Picture: DARK MOFO

“In the first instance, I conceived this work, in its radical absence, as addressing a sort of universal. So if I was to have done it in Buenos Aires in Argentina, or Santiago in Chile, it would have inevitably referred to the ‘disappeared’ — the people who were flown out in military cargo planes and dumped at 15,000ft out of the hold, never to be seen again.

“And if I did it today in el-Sisi’s Egypt, which is constantly ‘disappearing’ its opposition, I’d have to ask permission. But I’d be asking permission of the military, and they wouldn’t give me permission.

“I wanted this work to be universal, in the same way — presumptively, arrogantly I suppose — as Picasso’s Guernica, which has become a universal declaration of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity. But imagine if Picasso had revealed that this was Basque Guernica, because Guernica is in Basque lands — it would have been immediately reduced to their cause and their issues.

“If it had been directly associated with Basque nationalism it would have been attacked, and it wouldn’t speak to a universal condition and problem. It would have been reduced to a very specific one. In the box in the last three days, I thought about my own position very hard. I thought about it very hard in relation to reading The Fatal Shore. The British have never been called to account for their imperialism in the antipodes.

GALLERY: DARK MOFO 2018

Mike Parr in his underground chamber. Picture: DARK MOFO

“Transportation was a monstrosity — it was slave labour. What happened at Macquarie Harbour and at Port Arthur was pure torture. These men were subjected to the most extraordinary punishments. They weren’t punishments, they were perversions at the will of their commanders.

“Terrible pain has been wrought on the collective descendants and the ancestors of Tasmanians. Terrible violence has been done across the spectrum. Terrible, unforgivable violence was done to the Aboriginal people. All of that I acknowledge.

“I realised buried under the ground that inevitably [this work] must be about the most acute issues concerning Tasmanian people now — the plight of Aboriginal descendants, who still fight hard for recognition, some sort of recompensation and help, after a long history of radical negation.”