David Bromfield, Identities: A critical study of the work of Mike Parr, 1970–1990
During a recent lecture in Sydney, Mike Parr sat down by a table and picked up a hand painted box tile containing, one presumed, his personal papers. With his one arm outstretched, he held the box at shoulder level. As the minutes passed his arm began to quiver with the strain of supporting this black object. Parr's gesture was silent but potent, leaving this viewer with an image of the artist in tension with the accumulating weight of his own history.
The box turned out to be an archive of the artist's identity, tor it contained one hundred self-portraits on paper. One by one, Parr removed these works and lifted them to his face. He hyperventilated through each sheet, as if he wanted to suck the substance of the image into himself. After each full intake of breath, the portraits would fall away limply. Absorption then decay. Parr repeated the action until the whole tile of images was exhausted.
The performance was simple but rich in metaphor. The black box was like an index of the self. The body inhaled its own taxonomy. Given the primary role of the file of images, the performance supported the view that Parr's long investigation into issues of subjectivity and representation always comes back to the notion of the self-portrait. Such a view is put forward in David Bromfield 's recent monograph, Identities: A Critical Study of the Work of Mike Parr 1970- 1990, published by the University of Western Australia Press.
Bromfield 's book is a detailed account of one of the most compulsive and idiosyncratic practices in Australian art. It traces the labyrinthine paths along which Parr