Mike Parr and Adam Geczy The Mass Psychology of Fascism AGNSW : Anthony Bond

Parr In 1969 I began writing concrete poetry that by the end of the 1970�s became the first �black box� of �Word Situations�. I think it had something to do with this failure of poetry. I had this real problem with poetry, I developed a real aversion to my own lyricism and I wanted to combat it in some way and I had this idea about facts. They come up in the first notebooks of 1971. I had this idea that single words were like facts, they were like things - and I wanted to turn the words into things. I actually think my first performances were some sort of bizarre attack on language. My first performances began as statements for things. Some of them came out of my poetry. Pieces like: Feed pages from Arnold�s Sohab and Rustum to a goat. I tore pages from a long poem and fed them to a goat, and the goat ate the pages and I photographed that.

Tony You were photographing performances from the start?

Parr Yes, I�ve got photographs of that piece. That was the end of 1970. So I did pieces like that at the beginning of 1971 in February or March and I showed �Word Situations� at Inhibodress.

Tony And how did you move from the text to the body as the focus of the work.

Parr I did pieces like �The Surface is Only Skin Deep�. I wrote that sentence and proceeded to overtype as exactly as I could until I�d actually typed through the sheet. I did versions of that, and then there was another version which is in David�s book where I over typed a whole field of that so the skin broke away and then I began to talk about the body, and there was an occasion where I accidentally cut my fingers - this was later and I talked about blood and the ink and so on. So I was thinking in these ways by the end of the 1960�s early 1970 and the performance arose naturally out of these end point statements.

Tony That�s very interesting the origin in poetry and the idea of instructions for the body is very important I think.

Parr Well I mean the branding iron with .... I mean branding the word artist is a clear avatar of the �Surface is only Skin Deep�, so you can easily see the succession of thoughts.

Tony I would like you to talk about the idea of body limits and the way this relates to facts as you talked about them just now. It seems to me that in the performances at that time there was a real tendency to find the material, physical, real world limits for the work in your body and later in working with an audience finding their limits. I assume that these are concrete realist strategies.

Parr And in my case I think they reflect a sort of trauma that was induced by the process of writing. I used to write poems and then I would start this business of polishing them and it became totally obsessional, substitution of words, reorganising syntax, punctuation in particular. I think the obsessiveness of this traumatised me in some way. I think writing the poetry prematurely put me in a situation that was too open. It was like Artaud�s dilemma where he writes this incredible series of volumes all about the impossibility of being able to write. The fact that his thought leaks away and escapes him so that becomes the prevailing subject matter of an enormous encyclopedic series of fragments. I think I had the same kind of problem, that I was totally traumatised by the movement of language and I wanted to arrest it in the most concrete way. The single words, the concrete poetry helped for a while. But it led inexorably in a way to the performance of statements, where in fact the limits of a language proposition were found in my capacities to endure a prescriptive sort of performance piece.

The earliest pieces were done in 1971 with Peter Kennedy. They were still quite poetic, based on this notion of the �self-circle�. One which I never performed would have been like a Saint Vitrus dance. I would be sitting in the bush on a very windy day, I would attach strings to all the parts of my body, which would in turn be attached to the trees in the environment and as the wind blew I would be turned into a kind of Marionette, and I would be jerked up and down by the ferocity of nature. These simple sort of transmissions were much more like poetry but by the end of 1971 I found myself doing things like �Hold Your Breath for as Long as Possible�, and �Hold your finger in a candle flame�.

Tony But holding your breath or holding your finger in a flame are about your control whereas the tree piece would have been about abandonment.

Parr Yes, and it�s probably interesting that one was never performed. Also in the context of being an artist, it began to dawn on me that these limits raised the problem of negotiation in a really acute way. I�ll never forget my experience of the piece where Peter Kennedy bit into my shoulder. I remember you asking me the other day whether I had been aware of Acconci�s biting action at the time. I recall now that we probably would have known that because I had a copy of the Avalanche Magazine with all of his pieces in it and I was interested in the way in which he would propose an action and then he would speculate about its meaning. And he would speculate about it in this rather impersonal way, which interested me.

I think that my �arm-biting� on the other hand was quite different. What I was interested in was precipitating an absolutely concrete situation with the audience, where in a sense, the issue of content was immediately re-inscribed in terms of interaction. You might say that the performance was the audiences response.

Tony There�s another question that one raises which obviously is a choice that you�ve made, there are all kinds of ordinary rational reasons for making it, but it occurs to me that it is interesting when you start working with Peter Kennedy that, it may never have occurred to you that there is a �biter� and a �bit�. Was it always clear to you that it was going to be your body that was the site of any actions?

Parr Yes, it was actually. ( Parr seemed surprised by this question)

Tony That was never even a question for you?

Parr Yes, it follows the solipsism of my impulses at that time. I was using Peter in a way to define my body in an interactive situation, there�s this crucial relationship with Peter Kennedy - then the relationship with the audience, so I�m presenting a two person interaction in the most sort of sado-masochistic and regressive sense. There�s the biter and the bitten and the sense of a relationship based on a kind of primitive devouring. It�s very close to being eaten. It�s very strange when I think about it. Peter and I only had a relationship as long as in fact we were doing these kinds of performances.

Tony You had seen Acconci in Avalanche so you were aware of some of those actions. Was that how you began to be aware of what was happening in Europe?

Parr The other source of being aware of what was happening in Britain was Tim Johnson�s trip to London and the British Isles generally in 1970. He met people like Ian Breakwell and John Hilliard.
He then went on to New York and came back with some of Sol Le Witt�s instructions for works. Sol Le Witt had done some early performance pieces that came out of minimalism. One I can remember very well and we debated whether to perform it at Inhibodress in the �Activities� show. The instruction was to fire a shotgun at the gallery wall. I found that a very interesting idea. In our first serious show at Inhibodress (1971) we performed instruction pieces by artists like Medalla, Breakwell, Hilliard, Sol Le Witt and Richard Long.

Tony When did you first get to Europe?

Parr I went to central Europe in early 1973.

Tony Who did you meet there?

Parr On that trip we went to Poland. I saw a lot of a man called Klaus Groh who lived up in Oldenberg. He ran the International Artists Co-operation. He was the key influence for a lot of the �mail art�, it hadn�t become �mail art� then, there was something called the Eternal Network that was being put together. He had many hundreds maybe thousands of artists� names and addresses from all around the world

Tony Was this network political coming at the end of the 1960s, or was it just about communication between artists?

Parr It was just about communication but I think the notion of communication was seen as a kind of political entity and of course there was the �iron curtain�, the division between East and West, and this network facilitated a dialogue. Through this network I met Arnulf Rainer in 1973, I went to his studio on Mariahilfstrasse and we spent an hour or so together. He was really interested in my mailing lists but he did tell me that Nitsch was doing something out at the Castle that July and I can remember writing to Donald Brooke about my subsequent visit to Schloss Nitsch.

Tony Were you already familiar with the direction that the Vienna artists were taking in 1973?

Parr I had no knowledge of Weiner Aktionismus in 1973 it wasn�t until later it was a result really of working with Albe Toms he had filmed and photographed them and he knew Kurt Krems the film maker. I can remember Rainer trying to talk about what was happening in Austria and I remember asking him about Schwarzkogler and quite unfairly really he was completely derisive, he said to me �Schwarzkogler was simply a little student of Hermann Nitsch� and he said �the man was inherently unstable and he jumped out a window� and it was he who told me all about Robert Hughes getting it all wrong and publicising it in the English speaking world that Schwarzkogler had died by shaving off his penis.

Tony Tell me about your response to the Nitsch performance, it must have been a curious experience given that you were not familiar with the context for his work at the time.

Parr Having witnessed a full on Nitsch performance, it�s got ludicrous elements to it.

Tony Did you find that the audience was half embarrassed going through with it or were people throwing themselves into it with great gusto?

Parr No, there was a definite divide between Nitsch and his cohorts doing the thing, and the audience. People were very cringing.

Tony So the people participating in the actions are not the audience.

Parr No, they�re not. He has his entourage of people and they do these things together.

Tony I thought for instance that the people treading grapes must have been from the audience since there are so many of them.

Parr Well he�s done things ostensibly with the village, that village down below. They do these things anyway, they tread grapes, and wine is produced and there�s a festival and Nitsch somehow or other slots in. When I saw him it was in Vienna with a Viennese audience, it was a very different proposition because there has always been a kind of hostility there, even though Vienna has been a committed audience for the avant-garde.

Tony How did you come to make your own series of actions in Switzerland in 1972?

Parr We sent out material on Idea Demonstrations through the Eternal Network and had a very interesting response including invitations to participate in events. It was through this network that we met a man called Henri Barbier and Yanos Urban and his wife who invited us into exhibitions at Gallery Impact in Lausanne. In 1972 we had numbers of exhibitions and one of them was at Gallery Impact.

I did a whole series of new performances in Lausanne. It was in Lausanne that I began first to think about video feedback systems. I sited monitors in the audience, performed the works and put the audience in a situation where they could see their own response to works as they were occurring, and I was very interested in somehow transferring the autism of these instruction pieces to the audience, by demonstrating that their role as audience was also autistic. Their equanimity made them as culpable, or it made them as involved as I was. I did a great deal of analysis and talking about that.

Tony And when you came back the performances you did in Central street and in Newtown, continued that process of audience interaction. As I recall it you pushed the audience pretty close to their limits.

Parr I did and I didn�t. I filmed �Rules III� in Newtown, and seeing it again now I find it incredibly decisive, whereas, seeing �Rules II� again really irritated me. Although I think the performance elements are often terrific, I�ve got grave doubts about things like touching and so on - I think they were a bit wanky, there�s this kind of magisterial quality to me, but it was very irritating in �Rules II�. So these were the inherent limitations to that kind of interactive situation with friends - where we all sat around smoking dope, touching one another up.

Tony A lot of that material wanky or otherwise, was in a way predicated on the fact the camera was running, and the fact there was instant feedback. Did that deflect from the �natural� behaviour of the participants? Perhaps we should discuss the question of photo-documentation and film in relation to performance when it is conceived documentation. What have you thought about the authenticity or otherwise of that kind of process?

Parr Just to preface what I will say, seeing �Rules I and II� I became very excited when I saw the sheer primitive concentration of performances like �Tack Line Up the Leg� or the one where Noel Sheridan is cutting into my right arm and smearing the blood onto my face. The primitive revulsion, and pieces like �Rules II� when I�m eating the red bread ferociously and when I vomit red all down my front and they�re trying to find a vein in my arm and they�re cutting into my arm, the camera is crucial to these pieces. It�s crucial in an absolutely fundamental way because it�s a linguistic component if you like. This business of framing takes the place of language. By 1973 the business of filming has moved on, the camera becomes an incredible experience for me and I think what it does is to become the eye of God, and I become absolutely specific in relation to the camera. I begin forcing the camera to look, it�s like an accusation level of the camera. I set the camera up there and it�s like the ideal audience.

Tony To what extent is your documentation determining the form of the
actions? Can we distinguish between the photographic image as a literal record of real events and the simulation of an experience for a viewer in a theatrical sense?

Parr I begin the action, the camera stares at me intently and it records the action, and then the action ends. That piece of film for me remains absolutely congruent with the intention of the action, in fact the intention of the action has everything to do confronting the camera in the most literal way possible. So instead of sitting there simply staring at the camera, I kind of return to my own body and inflict my limits and the limits of the recording situation.

There is also the problem of still photography and it�s one of the things now that is really worrying me, that more and more my performances come to be represented through still photography. That is a debacle because it represents the image in a kind of iconic sense. It doesn�t represent this excruciating dimension of duration, which is essentially my confrontation with the camera, that�s why I�m using the limits of the body, it�s to exacerbate duration to the point where people close their eyes or walk out of the cinema, they can�t look at this stuff.

It�s different with the performances from the 1970�s. The photograph in a sense, it�s like a Catholic trophy or residual, it really disturbs me given the existence of the filmed version, the reality of the film over and against the kind of re-representation that goes on through the photograph.

Tony Talking of residues, photographs, particularly black and white photographs function as a trace or a relic of the event. People like Beuys, and Nitsch have also collected other material residues of performances and installed them as a vitrine, or as a painting in the case of Brus and Nitsch and so on. You have never done this have you?

Parr No, I haven�t done that and it�s a measure of my obsession with the problem of meaning, the relationship between the act and its visibility. You see, I�d experienced some sort of failure in the relationship to the audience. The camera doesn�t create an illusion of the audience, it re-concentrates the audience, in terms of the totality of the eye. So it becomes this enormous gnostic struggle between the real and its representation. To someone that was kind of traumatised by the extensions of the metaphoric, it seems extraordinary that performance art has de-generated in the case of Beuys and so many of the others the �Weiner Aktionismus�, into a kind of poetry, a collation of traces, the importance of the aesthetic become paramount there. This re-writing of a sort of history in terms of a kind of mytho-poetic, I think is really peculiar.

Tony We�ve talked somewhat about Weiner Aktionismus and Beuys and about the theatricality of some of that and I think that what you had to say about that was very important. There are some other artists in the exhibition whose work comes closer to your own position, I�d like to hear what you think about them. Gina Pane for instance �Azione Sentimentale� is very autobiographical and very direct.

Parr They have a direct component but then they�re very catholic too aren�t they? Instead of the thorns going into his brow they�re pushed into other parts of her anatomy. It�s a sort of scarification of the most symbolic kind. You see there�s no religion in my things at all contrary to what people might imagine they see there. My literalites are much more kind of congruent. The tack line which you could compare to the thorns in her arm is really the sort of corrosive form of minimalist measurement. What it really exacerbates is the problem of figure and ground. This tension between the painted surface and the canvas an object.

Tony Gina in that particular case seems to be enacting an extreme ritual of preparation. I wouldn�t have said particularly Catholic, but a preparation for a wedding, for the bride. It�s dysfunctional, just as her own sexual relations in a certain sense in relation to the notion of sacrament of the marriage, is dysfunctional.

Parr Its parodic in a way.

Tony Yes, I would see it more in that light. Then one thinks about the autobiographical comparison.

Parr Yes, it�s interesting, you can make that comparison to my work, and my use of �the bride� now.

Tony I wondered about that.

Parr I take the bride as an ultimately linguistic unit. The kind of congruent form of symbol and meaning, a kind of linguistic unit. I thought this bride� was very interesting, it recurs from Duchamp forward all through the 20th Century, Schwarzkogler and before Schwarzkogler, Klein and others. This recurrence of �the bride� really interested me and the sense in which it is now an archaic institution. It�s kind of manifestly shambolic, it�s a kind of commercial unit. It�s shambolic aspects that interest me, the fact that it has no identity, that its kind of left over.

It�s very interesting with Duchamp, this idea of the bride. It�s an idealisation, there�s a lot of idealisation in the �Large glass�, because it reifies a lot of the classical vocabulary. The business of seeing through and the business of deconstructing is decorous and it has a beautiful poetry of limitations and under facilitation, and it ends with this abortive firing of the toy cannon at the upper domains of the glass. The bride is not penetrated, the holes are drilled after the events, facilitating the cracking later. The cacoon in a sense, it isn�t actually broken by chance. I would like to suggest, the basis for that chance is layed by the drilling of that glass in the vicinity of the nine shots. So chance is already prescribed as part of the glass, what happens is the cacoon breaks, the but the inevitability of the cacoon breaking is layed down as part of the work and it allows Duchamp to escape the consequences at this breaking, since he need only simply point to it, not as the author but simply as the witness. So he goes from being the author of this debacle with his sister to being the best man at the marriage, by being present after the glass is unpacked. Ah he says �it�s shattered�, it�s complete perfection.

Tony Following on from Duchamp�s Large Glass is the idea of the oculist�s witness. It just occurred to me that there are witnesses all over this exhibition. The first example that comes to mind, walking through the exhibition would be Balthus, where the nude figure is nearly always accompanied by a witness. Frieda Khalo has this black monkey watching from the tree, Arthur Boyd has the ram watching from the bushes. Bacon has the watchers on the margins of the Triptych. The witness is an interesting notion and I wonder whether it is an alter ego of the artist in some sense.

Parr I think it is, I think artists set up the scene primarily for their own edification , a sort of voyeurism, blow the public. Yes, it�s very revealing.. In my case the camera becomes my witness in a crucial way. It becomes the double. The show will be filled with all these clandestine witnesses won�t it. Very interesting point you are raising.

Tony We have not discussed Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic who are also more concerned with facts. In Burden�s case I am thinking of things like the �Shot in the Arm� and �The Locker�, in 1972.

Tony Where you conscious of his work ?

Parr Not till later, he had this reputation for being this extreme kind of performance artist. I got to know about him through Petr Stenborough in 1977 when I went to Prague. Burden�s period of performance art was very brief but they were good pieces. How to compare them to mine I�m not sure. I�d like to know where they came from.

Tony They seem to be very straight forward and literal.

Parr They remind me of Neil Evans 1975 �Swallowing the tape worm�, and those reported things of his, coprophilia where he eats his own shit as he�s leaving the art world. It doesn�t last very long, there�s a few events like that in 1976. They were important actions too.

Tony Those works of Burden were direct simple acts, lets go back and look at your �arm chop�, which is quite elaborated as a performance, it has those layers, it has the false arm. Isn�t it a very symbolic work?

Parr Yes, because Julie comes out afterwards and attaches the pink arm to the stump, then there�s this long conversation with the audience, but leaving that aside I think the chopping of the arm and then the attaching of the pink prosthesis makes it a very complex action. People have seen that very simplistically, as Mike Parr demonstrating his disability but what I�m really demonstrating are the layer of dependence within the family and I talk about that. There are real complexities in that piece that are quite different from the primitivism of branding myself with the word artist, or pushing the tacks, or re-opening old wounds, or slashing my arms and putting the blood on my face or finger and into eyes.

Tony Abramovic is somebody else who is very interesting in this context. Particularly the relentless nature of those performances. Can you relate your work to what she was doing?

Parr Yes, certainly at the level of task. The idea of task performance, of pursuing an action to an absolute limit and allowing an image to emerge over which you have no control. I really appreciate that aspect of Abramovic�s work. I can remember one of her earliest actions from 1973 where she took psychiatric drugs, something that controls schizophrenic outbursts or catatonia and she induced these extraordinary states. The photographs have this amazing authenticity. You know she�s not acting, she�s going into these kind of spasms. It�s got political dimensions to it too, which are quite exceptional in the context of her work as a whole.

Tony There�s the duration element as well. �Gold found by the Artist�, the piece she performed here in Sydney with Ulay for example, or the work they made at the Art Gallery of Western Australian where Marina sat without moving, her face became ashen, she didn�t move an eyelash all day, the tears slowly tracked down her face.

Parr That aspect is very interesting in their work, it�s strange because there�s this ideological superstructure which is in a way almost at odds with the literality and the essential meaninglessness of so many of their actions. The actions themselves aren�t really set up with any symbolic input, it�s discovered after the event, and translated into this cosmology of concerns that belie the concreteness of what they are doing, but that concreteness is very important and there are only a few performance artists in the 1970�s that were prepared to take task to that extreme. There�s Chris Burden, and I think Acconci to some extent too.

Tony I think Acconci�s autobiographical work is very relevant, �Seedbed� in 1972 for example.

Parr Yes, yes that is the masturbation one. It is very interesting and there�s another extraordinary one that he did for a documentary. He sat in a closet surrounded by dolls clothes, it�s really regressive this piece, dressed his penis in dolls clothes and talked to it like a child. This is an extraordinarily interesting regression. There�s something so authentic about it, it�s really primitive. This sudden idea to dress your penis in dolls clothes and talk to it. To try and teach it baby language. This is one of the interesting things about 70�s type performance art, this fanaticism of the idea and the task is the crucial thing, and I think at its very best, there�s this connection again back to L�Art Brut or psychotic art. It�s got the same qualities you get in really psychotic drawings and paintings. Marina and Ulay seem to access that kind of totally pre-symbolic formation.

Tony Thinking about L�Art Brut, there is a section of the exhibition which moves from Bacon to Dubuffet and Arnulf Rainer which create a sense of urgency about the mark making.

Parr There�s some truth in that potency. Rainer�s �Face Farces� are extraordinary, you can feel this sense of him trying claw back into the photograph. It�s such a primitive urgency of alienation and you get it again of course in the early 80�s with Clemente. The best of the Transavantgarde shared this sense of urgency with 1970s performance art.

Tony Clemente�s work in this show consists of twelve images, one for each month of the year .... each part of the body has this kind of enactment that�s associated with it, which quite often is somewhat obscure and obviously do connect to other kinds of rituals of behaviour and so on.

Parr It�s a tremendous authenticity. What suddenly popped to mind was that I saw an Australian movie the other day called �Angel Baby� and it�s about a schizophrenic girl, very interesting it�s got a tremendous ring of authenticity about it. She falls over at the end, and has an attack, she goes into a kind of terrible disassociated state in a supermarket and she trips over, and she cuts herself badly and her blood starts to pour out and her boyfriend is trying to help her and promptly begins to lick her own blood up like mad because her bodily fluids are running out and she has to re-ingest them as fast as their running out and she starts drinking and licking up her own blood in this frenzied fashion. That �loop� could have been a 70�s performance. You get that in Clemente, that same kind of violently short-circuiting loop back into the body even through the drawing. Marina and Ulay got this you see, and there�s a sense in which Chris Burden gets it too. There�s something extraordinary about that piece, arranging to be shot at. Just shipping to that edge and the bullet going through his arm.