25 – 27 November 2011

Upon continuing conversations with Mike Parr after the “restaging” of his performance Pure Water Into Polluted Water (1971 & 2010) for Campbelltown Arts Centre, I asked if he would be interested in presenting an exhibition at Society and more specifically enquired about his collaborations with John Nixon. It was a timely topic as a recent incident involving a rat, Parr’s wife and a painting gifted by Nixon to Parr for the manhole in his studio roof, had brought their collaborative practice to new attention.

The correspondence between the artists presented here, detail Parr’s idea for an ad hoc addition to their collaborative oeuvre. The idea involved Nixon’s painting and the surrounding ceiling, including his wife’s addition of copper panelling to ward off the rat, being gifted to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). The letters form a portrait of both artists - reminiscent of their earlier collaborative self-portraits in which their respective iconography was worked onto one picture plane - but separated from these by a parting of ways through Nixon’s rejection of the idea as a collaborative gesture in favour of the work being repaired and given its own autonomy as a Nixon painting.

In place of this collaborative work a filmed performance, which features Parr reading their correspondence while the camera muses on Nixon’s work in-situ, noting the wear that the painting has sustained. Within Parr’s oeuvre and his concern for duration, Left Overs (for John Nixon) (2011) considers the duration of the art object in terms of both its lived experience and its afterlives – meaning how it operates both within and beyond the intent of the artist, including in the associative realm of the sign. Through such Parr reflects on the art object and ideas of “ahistoricism” attributed to formal abstraction within time, where it openly engenders meaning.

Transcript of interview conducted in person at Mike Parr’s studio 15/12/2011

Susan Gibb: When did you and John’s collaboration begin?

Mike Parr: The exact beginning date and first collaborative work between John and I is an interesting question, if only because my memory has become a little porous in recent years. I think that the first work was The Wedge [Nixon/Parr], an installation at Roslyn Oxley’s first space in MacDonald Street, Paddington in 1989. Though in a way one could think of the article I wrote for Art Monthly in 1987 as the first “collaboration”. It was a reply to a really nasty attack on John’s work in the first issue of the magazine by John McDonald. The idea of an article as a collaborative work stretches it a bit perhaps, but in thinking deeply about John’s work as the basis for answering McDonald, it became evident how we might collaborate. I think we may have done as many as 15 or more collaborative pieces over 12 or more years. I could work out a full list by going through my diaries I think, but John may well have a list also. Also Anna [Schwartz]. Left Overs (for John Nixon) is a collaboration, but a strange one, because John’s refusal of my suggestion has produced the work. It marks the end of a working relationship in a way that reminds me of its beginnings in the article. The same anxious indeterminacy of association. 

SG: You said from this defence of John’s work that you saw the way that you could collaborate. I am interested in what exactly that may have been considering both of your practices at the time.

MP: The actual form of our practices is very different. But we come from a similar background of ideas. John was actually very interested in a more expanded practice when he began. He was always a painter, but he also did other things. His paintings were often presented, as sort of installation. I think it was 1983, he just stacked his paintings in a room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of one of the Perspectas. I found that very interesting. What I found really interesting was when John was - in inverted commas - “storing” his paintings. When I went to Art Projects he had a room adjacent to the room where he put on peoples’ work. This was the early 1980s. He had a room where he used to store his paintings. He had a very special way of storing things. He would always impose a sort of taxonomy. So things would be grouped. I felt that the storage of the work was actually the work. I don’t mean that facetiously. I thought that it was the clearest and most extensive way to see how he saw his work, by seeing him store it. So that had a major impact on me and that sort of led me to start to talk to him about taxonomy and how you organise things. When we started to do joint works, we would often get a piece of paper out and I would do an elementary sketch, or it might just be a notation, then he would come up with his notation. And it was not like we tried to translate one work into the other. It was just like they were stored together. So when we installed them we just put A there and B there. There wasn’t any discussion about why the two works worked. It was just an agreement about autonomy. So John respected the situation to the degree where he was prepared to allow me to park my work along side his work. The parking of the two works together was the work. There was no doubt that that was the psychology of the situation.

SG: That sort of extends to the performances where you would perform alongside the monochromes. Though there is a self-portrait where you work on the same plane.

MP: Yes there is. There is a self-portrait etching I did where John put a cross on top of it. He drew on to the plate or on to another plate and put it on top of this. That is another form of the parking thing. For John, the self-portrait was a thing. And that suited me very well as I thought at one level it was a sort of thing too. I saw it as a territory. And I do see the Self-Portrait Project like that. I see it as producing these zones that can be traversed in certain kinds of ways. So what interested me about a work like that was that John saw that exactly, and just thought your x amount of self portraits… see John has got these categories of red ones, green ones, blue ones, the self-portrait was like one of those categories, like you do those things. He just looked at them as sort of statements of fact that took that shape. Self-portrait was like the way he talked about monochromes. I found that a real relief emotionally and psychologically. That someone could regard and respond to a work with lots of respect, no disrespect at all. No content in that sense. It was just like your Maserati and my Holden or vice versa, let’s park them together.

SG: In the article you wrote in Art Monthly in defence of John, you said that in his art he creates this dialect between art and non-art. You were talking about the potential you saw in this, particularly in relation to the language of Suprematism. I am interested in the tension that you were creating between this earlier historical mode and what you saw in John’s practice. How did you see John’s work moving out from this?

MP: I think I remarked that he sort of sanctified. The pope does this [sign of the cross]. It can be imposed on a multitude. The sign of the cross becomes a way of sort of bringing into focus, sort of sanctifying a tremendous confusion of people meeting below the papal palace in Rome. They’re all crowded and swarming and the sign of the cross sort of sanctifies this. It is a fantastic figure/ground tension. I was very interested in that. I felt that John utilised Suprematism in that way. Malevich I feel there is this sort of congruence, in Malevich, between the figure and the ground, because it was still thought of as painting. But John at his most interesting it seems to me had disconnected those two things. That’s when I got interested in the paintings all stacked, the taxonomy. I felt that the paintings themselves had become an object. Then you could have x number of paintings. Then you had a problem with taxonomy, which is a bit like the papal balcony and the multitude. So there is this multitude, which he organises. He then seemed to do that with all sorts of things. In paintings themselves, he would sometimes use wheat, dropped all over the painting. Then the painting would be painted so you would have the monochrome and this other, incommensurate layer. The disorder of the real taken as one class of thing, wheat or rice for arguments sake. He would take wheat and impose a sort of order on it. I thought this was really interesting as I thought it revealed a certain latency in Suprematism. As I would argue that Suprematism is like a patch over the vanishing point. You have got this deep space. Deep space is many things. It is a metaphor and it also kind of hums with the psychology of trauma, history, memory, right and wrongdoing and so on. When you put a patch over the vanishing point, when you electrocute, short-circuit deep space, everything is in the foreground. And that is the Supremacists picture. It is a kind of amnesia. It is a kind of repression. It could be authoritarian. It could be beatific. It could also be like electric shock therapy, it could be radical forgetting and starting again. So it could be a kind of new potential space. And that’s the sense that Malevich was also thinking about it, as a new potential space, because his was going to be the tabula rasa that made possible the new society, der neue Mensch, and all the red utopianism. It was like a starting again situation. John in a way was performing all of this, though kind of not performing this as he wasn’t using that kind of language, but the diversity in John’s work was really a performance of these possibilities and that’s what I responded to.

SG: The other main question I had was in relationship to the idea of duration in relationship to your practice, to history and the specifics of the historical moment, as well as ultimately in relation to Left Overs (for John Nixon), your correspondence with John - your potential different positions on this and to the art object over time?

MP: I adopted a facetious tone in writing the letter to him in the first place, and that may have been the problem. The idea I was putting to him may have been blocked by the tone of the letter. I was negotiating a very difficult proposition here, because I have been left as the curator of this painting. The way that the painting is situated as a lid over the manhole meant that it was inevitably going to be moved as the roof leaked etc etc, fantasies such as the problem with the rat. Inevitably it did get damaged. It is damaged. To me the damage is one of the most interesting aspects of this particular work because it is a temporal dimension. That is what I was trying to talk about. I thought, “How do I introduce directly this problem of the temporal?” because John doesn’t think about the temporality in that kind of way. Everything is stopped with the monochrome. The joint works with me actually did introduce the temporal dimension, but in a way that remained the unavowed dimension of the work. So this work in a way bears all of this damage. I wanted to foreground this and I wanted to be positive about it. So I told this story, which is a true story, and I put the emphasis of Tess’ anxiety about the rat, the copper, the whole thing, and mentioned that the painting was damaged as it was in the manhole in the ceiling. But I think it was too much for him and what he thought was that I was being disrespectful. That I had revealed that the painting was less than perfect and he couldn’t see that was a positive. He thought it was a negative. So he just stopped. His letter came back, in which he said he would come up and repaint it. That’s an extraordinarily interesting thing isn’t it? That his response was, that I will simply repaint this and then if you want to donate this to the MCA we will donate the painting to the MCA. I will repossess this painting through repainting it, you can then donate this to the MCA, but you wont be part of this,as presumably they don’t want your roof as well. But I was proposing that I cut the roof out. Can you see it is like a comedy of errors? Then I thought I would perform the comedy of errors. That’s the basis for the video. But I am still not being disrespectful of the work. It is very interesting, Anna Schwartz left a lovely telephone message on my phone after seeing the show. She said she found this to be a very moving work, funny, touching and sad. I thought that exactly summarises the dilemma of the work. I think that is how a lot of people received it. So at that level the work is completely authentic. In point of fact it is built on a sort of potential in John’s work but a disallowed potential. What the work really talks about is the limits to our collaboration. So that is why I called it Left Overs. It is sort of an end of an era but I don’t know, now that I have all the documentation I will write him a letter. I am hoping that it can become the basis for a new kind of expanded possibility.

SG: With the performance pieces that you did with John work, John’s monochromes were almost theatre sets, or set the tone for the performance…

MP: Yes, well it was very interesting as I did this piece at Old Parliament House where I was the bride figure. John could accept the bride figure, as he just thought, well that was the red ones, green ones, yellow ones, so there is the self-portrait that looks like this and then there is this other where Mike looks like a woman, a bride. And because it was a bride he just assumed it was a white one. So when I said to him I wanted a set on monochromes, he provided those, let me remember, they were just sheets of Masonite but they had been painted black. I said I wanted to perform in relation to the monochrome and that the monochromes were going to be sited in relation to Old Parliament House. So I went down to Old Parliament House and there was sort of this inner room, filled with all of these leather armchairs, where the cabinet used to meet. So Menzies’ chair was pointed out to me and the other cabinet members and so on. So somehow or other I convinced them, amidst all kinds of tensions with Old Parliament House because it is now like a “sacred site.” Andrew Sayer was in a very difficult position as he wanted to say yes to me but even his attendants were concerned about my incursion into Parliament House as it went on for three days. So I sited the monochromes in the leather chairs. At night I would be walking around the lake [Lake Burley Griffin] and so during the day I would sleep. So I would make these sites for myself where I could sleep. So I slept in this room, which had been the room for the cabinet, and all John’s monochromes were like guardians put into the chairs. Then on another occasion I slept and they were all laid in a line heading in the direction of a statue. Then on another occasion they were all on the front steps so people had to walk across them to enter. I used the monochromes to accentuate the formality of Old Parliament House. I sited them, like when they were in the chairs they were like human beings, but they were like really blank human beings. So I kind of politicised the monochromes. I used them to stand-in, to symbolise all of the blank spots within the Parliament House complex and its history. Then the bride was the mobile component, the he/she that agitated all of this. If the monochromes had just been sited on their own people would have just come in and it would have continued the formality of the whole thing. The bride sort of created this disturbance. John I don’t think had a problem with any of this. He agreed to it all but he might have been a bit alarmed when he saw the documentation and realised what was happening. But that was a kind of forerunner to this piece in a way.

SG: That performance was one of the last major collaboration apart from the exhibition at Conny Dietzschold Gallery in Cologne.

MP: Yes that’s right, that exhibition was a Black Box on my part that had a hundred self-portraits in it and included an early video of me breathing the self-portraits onto my face. And John showed monochromes. The video was a performance, but the documentation of a performance. I am just going to digress for a moment. I was in Melbourne early this year and I went into the Ian Potter Centre and went up to the second floor, or wherever it was and walked in, and they had me installed and John installed and other artists of that period, Robert Hunter and so on. They had me installed with a Black Box and a very early video of me performing a hundred breaths and John had a line of monochromes. I walked over and there was this extensive note that talked about John Nixon’s long ongoing self-portrait project. Now he used the self-portrait in the early stages, it was Self-Portrait Non Objective Composition, but it was never a self-portrait project. Now it has turned into a self-portrait project. So he has grouped all of those works now as a self-portrait project. So I thought that is an amazing consequence of our joint works. So that is a kind of left over if you like because he has taken that kind of idea, but has reutilised it as the holding device for his work. That would have something to do with my decision to do this work. We are both carrying on the collaboration in a bizarre de-facto way. So the exhibition in Cologne with Conny Dietzschold Gallery consisted of the hundred breaths, the hundred self-portraits, the Black Box and John’s monochromes. It also included a language piece called Blind Obedience. What I did in this work was I took the word synonymous in the dictionary and looked up the synonym for the word synonymous, and it said equivalent or something like that, then I looked up the synonym for the word equivalent. Then I went through about eighty things, and by the time I got there it had drifted so far that the final word was dead. When you look at all these words you can see how the drift occurred to end with the word dead. This was printed negatively as white on black. So I had the Black Box with a hundred self-portraits, I had the hundred breaths and I had the word synonymous “synonymed” to the final word dead. For me there is a complete reciprocity between John and I, there is a sort of physical reciprocity, but there is a conceptual reciprocity and psychological one. Because John and I never discuss the work, that is kind of something we would never do, so I am not sure how he would seize this information. Do you see the point?

SG: In regards to the collaboration and the use of Nixon/Parr, with the works in Conny Dietzschold Gallery for example, do you author them all as Nixon/Parr or do you retain individual authorship?

MP: No, it is a third artist and the third artist is Nixon/Parr. It is a compound. It reflects the structure of the work itself. Parking. This has been a very important collaboration for me. What is interesting is it is equally important for both of us. We are both, I would suggest, kind of continuing it in de-facto ways. It would be interesting to put it to John like that. I would like to continue it.  But in a way it goes on and sort of continues because of a sort of blind spot, like the monochrome itself. When I say that the monochrome is like a patch over the vanishing point, it is also like a patch over one eye. It is like monocular vision. This collaboration in some ways depends on monocular vision. Not too much can be seen. If we see too much and start discussing it then it stops.  So it depends on a sort of blind spot to drive it forward. 

Left Overs 2011
7 framed prints with Perspex, 83.0 x 59.0 cm
DVD, duration 39:56 minutes

Temporary Bomb Shelter 2011
dimensions variable
enamel on wood

Mike Parr is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney

Images: 
Installation view. Photo: Susannah Wimberley