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• Auction House:
  Bonhams Australia
• Sale Name:
  Sherman | 100
• Sale Date:
  11 May 2022 ~ 5pm (AEST)
• Lot #:
  35
• Lot Description:
  Mike Parr
  (born 1945)
  Various Non-Entities "Hatred in the Sky", 1997
  Bronze (6)
  varying lengths: 81.0 to 86.0cm (31 7/8 x 33 7/8in).
• Provenance:
  The Gene & Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney
• Exhibited:
  CUT YOUR THROAT AN INCH AT A TIME: A Survey of the Works of Mike Parr 1970-2005, Newcastle Region Gallery, Newcastle, 1 October - 20 November 2005
• Notes:
  The artist in conversation with Carrie Lumby 2001 CL: What is the relationship between the actual temporal performance and its documentation? MP: Performance artists take risks with identity, mental health etc., for the sake of contents that are essentially pre-symbolic, though the paradox in my case is that I have always maintained that 'performance art enables me to think'. I'm acknowledging then that performance art breaks something up. The problem of the representational in the form of ghettos like theatre, video art, etc, is that the forms determine the content. Of course, this formalist accusation is strenuously denied by experimenters in those mediums, but the reality of performance art always deconstructs their position. Nothing gleeful about this, but the essential differance of performance art is asserted as a consequence. The breaking up of performance art is both cathartic (in that the problem of its form is simultaneously a problem of content) and political because it en-distances and 'criticises' the representational (exposes to view the realisation that all representations is a form of illusionism and alienation). This sounds like heaving going! I can only burble it off like a credo because I've spent years hacking my way through the performance wilderness. Much more intense and overgrown now that performance art has such an established name! Documentation. Good question! Immensely problematic in every respect because straight off one could plausibly argue that the photograph or the videotape standing in for the transgressive, reincarnates its panic as a kind of fixed account. In a way that's true, but the intensity and disturbance of that truth has produced all my work in other media. For example, I began drawings as way of interrogating the documentary photograph. In other words drawing was my way of thinking about documentation as freezing. The implications of this very simple procedure have produced all the miasmas of the self-portrait project such as printmaking, installation, sculpture. The range of this work is a way of thinking about point of view as the producer of privileged representations and the way in which such re-representations turns the image into a kind of theatre here to indicate that the extensions of the S.P.P are an example of performance art enabling me to think! It is a process that parodies the self-expressive intentions of the artist. You can see why I set fire to my foot! But documentation is not just a refied production for museum consumption. It's haunted by the reality of the event which is producing it. The chicken and egg question revolves very simply and the very interesting thing is that performance documentation and film does look very different from 'art photography' or 'art film'. The photograph of the Vietcong officer being executed by a south Vietnamese general, has never lost its shock of the real, because the photographic means in this instance can't displace the reality of the event. The chicken and egg questions of the post modern become completely trivial! This photograph alone completely shortsout the cajolery of Judy Annear's photographic categories. Similarly, the same incoherent urgency of performance documentation is not being addressed by our museums as salience in relation to the established forms. Performance art has always been contained via this downplaying of intention and meaning documentation can preserve this intentionally and does so in the corrosive sense that the performance artist intends. Ultimately this is the problem of curatorship and criticism, which are always preeningly over-privileged forms in a provincial culture. CL: How does performance relate to the rest of your practice? MP: Performance art is my way of breaking up the stability of my art. My art in terms of my 'talents' are technical procedures. I make prints in order to annihilate the category of printmaking... to annihilate its over-defended technical self-reflexivity and the 'mental' condition of connoisseurship that technique as determining value gives rise to. Again very programmatic! The actual connections has to do with recognising and affirming all kinds of 'mistakes'. Not a meaning I often say to myself, but a mistake! Problems of recognition and co-existence with extended ambiguity that only the devastating failures and abjections of performance art can prepare one for. All my work after performance art is built on task performance, mess, incoherence of all kinds. That is why I so enjoyed the elephant painting at the MCA, because it transvalues abstract expressionism completely! Nothing remains except the indignations of a provincial culture! Performance art is my means for doing that all aspect of my work and it is a process that makes my work fundamentally dialogic in relation to itself (the performance crisis is visible in all my work.) CL: How do you see the audience's role? Are they perhaps collectors themselves? MP: The audience are perhaps collectors themselves, but I don't really allow them any role at all. That's why I have never changed charged admission to any of my performances. The audience can leave anytime they want but they are not to be allow the luxury of substituting moral indignation for the ruthless facticity of the work. They can't demand their money back as the conventional measure of 'bad theatre'. If I decide to cut my throat an inch at a time, then they run the risk of not being able to declare that they were only members of the audience! CL: What difficulties (if any) do you see with private/public collectors collecting the documentation of work that is essentially ephemeral? MP: I have no problem with public or private collectors. Documentation is extraordinarily interesting visually because it is produced by the 'machine' of performance. It is truly like elephant painting, if we think of the elephant as simply a machine... a kind of unknowable otherness that can only be known speciously, anthropomorphically... that is set in motion like an artist... that gives us art that can only be accepted or rejected not meaningfully re-configured (to edit the work is to destroy the elephant as producer). Performance art as such is a kind of elephant in relation to documentation as art. There is something deeply anonymous about documentation because the pre-symbolic of performance art takes over the camera.
• Estimate:
  A$40,000 - 60,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.