Andy Quilty and the Prisoner
In 2018 headlines around the world screamed, ‘Buried Alive’ after the performance artist Mike Parr buried himself beneath a busy Hobart street for three days.1 Taking a copy of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1986) with him, Parr turned this performance of imprisonment into a nightmare analogy for the violent history of Australia. As Parr was listening to the Hobart traffic, a ‘lifer’ was having an exhibition in Perth. There is no getting out after three days for this artist, who has already spent decades inside jail. If there is an analogy for the Prisoner’s work, it is not with the dead ghosts of Australia’s past but with conditions for living prisoners today.2 His drawings, invariably black and white, describe the life of a confined mind, subject to policies of deprivation day after day, year after year. He usually exhibits in the gallery at Fremantle Prison, frequented by tourists, but in 2018 he showed his work in a very different context. Untitled: The Prisoner and Andy Quilty paired insider and outsider artists, drawings from within and without jail.
After Foucault, it is difficult to think about imprisonment without the concept of freedom, and liberation without incarceration. Prisons were conceived and built alongside the ideals of freedom that swept Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.3 It was as if humans could not conceive of one without the other, freedom without unfreedom, liberty without punishment. As Hughes documents so eloquently in The Fatal Shore, this is also the duplicity upon which Australia was founded. It is difficult to see that much has changed, as elections are won and lost on policies of the detention of asylum seekers... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
The Prisoner, Anti-portrait (10), 2017. Digital print on paper, 20.5 x 23.5 cm. Photograph Pete LeScelle.
The Prisoner, The great divide, 2017. Gel pen on paper, 50 x 70 cm. Photograph Pete LeScelle.
