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My partner Linden, being a professional artist working on trauma, was particularly interested in visiting the opening night of Mike Parr’s exhibition The Tilted Stage. If you’ve ever heard of Mike Parr he’s an internationally recognised artist with thirty or more years experience at shocking his audience and self-mutilating his body. At the minimum you come away disturbed and discontented.

Walking from the night into the second level of four there were about 5 large screens running retrospective films of his earlier installations. One film involved self-mutilating and then sewing himself up, while another had him force feeding until he vomited and vomited and vomited. The building seemed to work in a cycle of these loud vomiting sounds no matter which floor we were on. Another film on that same floor had a much younger Mike Parr placing fish onto the genitals of naked men and women and then he filled their mouths up with something that I’m assuming was blood.

Then we went to the bottom floor where a film was running of Mike Parr building a house of cards style structure from his smaller prints, perhaps about 30cm x 30cm. The tedious construction was all the more difficult as Mike was born with most of his arm missing.

From the bottom floor we moved back up through the floor where we entered to the one above that. The majority of this area was filled with rough heads cast in bronze on top of solid wooden blocks. They were created by standing behind the object and forming the faces which were later cast in bronze. This was probably the most impressive work from my perspective.

Then, on the top level, Mike Parr’s current installation The Tilted Stage where he has his head poking out of a large angled wooden ramp as an exercise in endurance. He went in on Friday, which was the opening, and speculation is that he will be released from the Tilted Stage some time late today, Sunday. Although I’ve got to admit I’m not sure when he ends the installation.

Oddly, the night before on television we were watching Adam Hill talk about the perversion of the English language and particularly the misuse of the word surreal (warning: very funny YouTube video). A policeman pulling you over at 2am is unusual, it’s not surreal. If that policeman was dressed in a tutu and drove a super sized pedal car - that would be surreal. So, after walking down the stairs from The Tilted Stage this guy in front of me who was about 25 said to his friend - That was Surreal… and I almost burst out laughing. No The Tilted Stage isn’t surreal. It’s tedious, enduring and worthy of comment. But not surreal.

So, in short, Mike Parr is about unsettling the viewer. Some things disturbed me and others were simply too far into left field (like fish on naked bodies, or honey poured onto a naked young girl) that I found it hard to see the field for the stones. Most of it I actually got…

If you go and see the installation retrospective you might also follow the directions around the corner to the gallery showing his printed works. I’m very interested in those, we’ll be heading there early this week.

Why is it important to go and see the work of someone like Parr? Because it’s a way of thinking about the world differently. Yes we can all try to make pretty pictures of butterflies and show photos of puppies and whales - but it’s not the end of creativity. Mike Parr’s chaotic prints would be very welcome in our art collection, if only we could afford them. Life is art, art is life. Art provokes a reaction which is often other than the comfortable aesthetic prettiness we’re culturally conditioned to accept. I’d recommend, if you’re local, to go check it out. You might like to take earplugs to overcome the incessantly loud vomit noises.

The following photograph is from Mike’s 2003 installation Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi. The copyright belongs to Mike Parr and the Anna Schwartz Gallery: Sydney and Melbourne.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under art, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.