Mike PARR

Australian 1945–

Mike Parr began making drawings in 1981 after a decade of performance art. Realising that the content of his performances had become largely rhetorical, the artist began drawing ‘to disperse focus and clarity of meaning’.1 He found that drawing threw him back on his own resources in a direct way, and enabled him to keep a level of ambiguity and tenuousness in the work that was important to him. Focusing on his own self-portrait, he began an intensive regime of drawing—from life, photographs and memory—that had at its core an interrogation of the codes and structures of representation.

A series of large charcoal drawings from the early to mid 1980s, of which The arm of the Cyclops, 1986, is one, depicted the self-portrait head through a distorted perspectival grid. Known as anamorphosis, this Renaissance technique was a signifier of rational control and objectivity in earlier times but was used by Parr in a destabilising way to show the ruptures and relativity in systems of representation. The juxtaposition in these drawings of the structured, anamorphic self-portrait with strident, incoherent mark-making and partial imagery brings about a collision of codes that promotes the artist’s purpose. In The arm of the Cyclops, violent charcoal markings partially obscure a delicate drawing of an arm that is truncated below the elbow. This image refers to the artist’s own disability (he was born with a deformed arm), which is further alluded to in the title—in Greek mythology, the Cyclopes were one-eyed giants renowned for their strength.

Parr’s drawings of the 1980s initiated his long-running artistic project, The Self Portrait Project, that remains the central platform of his practice. Parr’s obsessive repetition of the self-portrait image throughout the project has established it as a kind of language through which he interrogates the disparate nature of self, and the relative and unstable systems of representation, both visual and linguistic.

1 Mike Parr, letter to Ted Gott, 14 July 1986, National Gallery of Victoria artist’s file.

Cathy Leahy