Politics and Art, a dialogue - David Bromfield / Mike Parr, an invitation to comment.
Following the performance Malevich A Political Arm at Artspace, documented on this site, Mike Parr and David Bromfield engaged in a brief email dialogue about a performance planned for Monash University Gallery Melbourne on Saturday the 15th of June, once more on the theme of the significance of Australia’s concentration camps.
Parr’s work has always had powerful political implications. At the present time his exploration of the roots of Australian impotence and vindictive self righteousness in the body and the crude exercise of the power of society over and through it provides a vital example to our mediocre art scene afflicted as never before with ambition and indifference.
The two letters quoted below will form part of the performance/exhibition on the 15th of June -
Dear David,
Just thought I'd run by some new developments in my thinking about the upcoming MUMA performance.
First thing to visualize is the whole Museum empty.
This "emptiness" of the Museum is the "ground" of the performance.
You'll see immediately that I'm extending the idea of the white wall in the Malevich performance to the Museum as a whole,
I’m going from the planar, which is conceptual, abstract, to the whole space. An empty whole [a hole] which parallels the limbo land in which the refugees have been sealed.
This feeling of emptiness seems very important.
The Immigration Detention Centers Inspection Report is essentially bland, bureaucratic. I think though that it is important to face that squarely. Its about infrastructure, management procedures, security rather than people, I will summarize it as best I can and let the audience decide for themselves.
There will be 80 statements extracted from the report projected on the wall as slides Brisk, matter of fact, deadly in their specification and dividing up a human subject.
You can guess what I'm thinking. The room with the continuous slide-projection, which is separated from the room of the performance, by an empty Museum room, is a kind of "waiting room".
The sort of “waiting” one inevitably does in government offices
Certainly I can imagine the kind of "waiting" done by asylum seekers vegetating in Detention Centers
Trying to digest this report makes me think hard about the actual performance.
Why do we tolerate the Concentration Camps as a community? Essentially it's footie as usual for the great "silent majority".
Is this the Reichian thing? Blankness
Why aren't many more of us becoming hysterical like Juan Davila? Juan at least mixes up sado-masochism in the desert with his usual high octane sexual miasmas.
Even his stratospheric prices are a kind of hysteria.
How to explain the prevailing equanimity of the rest of the community? Have we all been sealed by the leaden pall of the Ruddock effect?
Is this the "our town was next door to concentration camp but for the 6 years of the War we saw nothing" syndrome?
The collective kind of amnesia and absence of affect analyzed by Reich in the Mass Psychology of Fascism as the very fundament of the German Family.
That introjected authority assiduously confirmed and utilized by a totalitarian State?
Would it be more explicable healthier for many of us to exhibit repression as a lurid orgy of desire?
Should these extremes of zombie indifference and wailing abjection in the desert be mixed up in some kind of catharsis? An actual agglutination of bodies and desires that Concentration Camps in the desert are meant to quarantine us from?
“Hygiene" is in some the political essence of the problem.
I am now wondering about my performance.
Is the sewing of my mouth just too obvious? Has the sewing of the mouth just come to symbolise the peculiar difference of the refugees?
Shouldn't this stigmata become more distorted?
Why stop at the mouth? Why not extend to the nose, eyes and ears? Why not continue until the whole face is dragged into a new conception? A whole new configuration? An anti-face?
This is how I'm thinking now. The whole thing is becoming more ambiguous, extreme?
Maybe it is better that art should be bad for society, because in this context nothing good can come from illustration?
Send some thoughts
Mike
In an earlier communication Bromfield had referred to the bankrupt politics of 80’s and 90’s art
I call this the mechanism of scandal I first noted it in the prevalent pseudo feminism of the eighties but has spread through the universities as a means to silence and discipline, so that their massive career investment in deconstruction etc etc etc can never be shaken. Instead critique aimed at praxis is precipitated into a dumb resentment with no positive outcome/action possible beyond personal ambition.
Outside the universities Hanson provides the best example of the mechanism at work. Remember Phillip Adams boosting his self the easy way using her, along with the perpetually conveniently scandalized art world, all the while failing to point out that Howard was the real problem.
So much for ambitious gatekeepers of the moral order .
I once mentioned to a multiculti conference that there was no cultural exchange possible with people who believed in stoning women to death for adultery and pointed out that they did it with a dumper truck load of rocks these days – so much quicker - they nearly lynched me – only a racist could be so indelicate!
Scandal of course collapses all difference - the recent homophobic business with the judge was a failed attempt in that direction. Omnivalent scandal helps us tolerate concentration camps, just as it did for the Germans who said –“If only the Fuhrer knew!” .
His reply to Parr begins with these themes
Dear Mike
Here are a few thoughts, not in your order.
It seems to me that the first problem for the MUMA performance is to slow down the audience so that they forget/fail to be scandalised either by the camps or by your performance/installation as representation.
This can be achieved by literal slowness – the extracts from the report or by fascination - the promotion of the “can’t take your eyes away” effect.
Then the mechanism of scandal can be broken up by events as they occur.
You are right on the money with idea of a waiting room but not just as a version of the detention camp experience but as way to truth for the audience.
All such rooms project the psyche and culture of those who set them up so the waiting room will also be a space of retrojection, reinstallment.
The cynical bureaucratic staging of the eternal return as an act of submission by all parties.
Vide Reich. You can see how this will get you to sadism etc as drivers of Australian self hatred masquerading as gratified desire.
Practical suggestions include
Delay - have a demanding period of blackness between each text (just long enough to irritate) or occasionally follow one on another very quickly
Silence .
Disorientation Project the texts on different walls at random so the viewer is reduced to fair degree of uncertainty but the text remains relentless demanding irresistible.
You could use real time images of the actual performance.
An iconic trigger may be needed to precipitate the viewer into a sense of ‘individual humanity’ –specific histories desire etc as against the report.
Crisis of Representation
The major issue in the performance appears to be about representation (mere pictures) as opposed to revelation/epiphany in relation to the body as politics in performance.
We both know that is no good simply becoming a glorified stand in for a camp inmate. That is representation tout court and it has always been antagonistic to art. The more efficient it becomes the more antagonistic it is.
That is the problem with lip sewing - it becomes/decays into a mere representation/ reproduction of the situation very quickly
So yes its obvious and that makes it very difficult to bring off. Easy for the viewer to lapse into pre programmed scandal.
Branding is different in that respect – it is a first hand event primarily located in its own social space, then and only then as associative eg cattle, nazi tattoos etc.
I like the idea of floating off the lip sewing into some kind of rigid death mask of infinite size – a psychic version of your “whole hole”. everything motionless the horror of the face freezes the universe - because of its role as a container of absolute absence.
If this is to be physical performance then your face head might be stretched and staked out/ clamped immobile in some kind of perspective on wall or floor, corresponding to the restraints used, say, for dissection. I don’t think this is a long term proposition - may be an hour at most.
Otherwise a progressive digital decay of your face could be managed via video link to your physical performance I remember in Loin du Vietnam Godard simply filmed US General Westmoreland’s speaking face on a tv monitor on a carrier at sea as the screen broke up into pixels.
Another route would be a full wall mirror behind you that implicated the audience in the action or, similar but cheaper, project a large real time image of the audience over the performance as it happens.
For some reason I am also thinking of the pinhole camera obscura room a la Vermeer but the audience is in the darkened camera room and you as performer are outside – they see the event upside down passed through a pinhole.
Stigmata are involuntary, a kind of social hysteria projected on the individual body - but how to make your physical life in death mask involuntary ? to make it a social action? to project the stigma on the viewer?
These are all questions of ‘fascination’
Can you make the Melbourne audience aware of their unconscious assent, in relation to Detention Centers?
None of this deals with Davila and sado – jouissance.
He is a very good painter but far too often he stages his imagery to a pointless excess.
Davila’s art often seems to be a pure symptom in itself.
Another way of saying this might be that Davila lacks any sense of the tragic but his art appears to require a tragic vision to make it work.
Good luck
David B
Attention
Mr 8 Ball invites contributions to a special 8 Ball survey on the current relation of art and politics, From July 30 2002 all legal images and words we understand will be on site.
( !! that’s if you lot can be bothered to think for once !! )