Mike Parr / Australia QLD/NSW b.1945 / Identification no. 1 (Rib markings in the Carnarvon Ranges, North-West Queensland) 1975, printed 1999 / Gelatin silver photograph /Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2000. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / © The artist

Mike Parr
Identification no. 1 (Rib markings in the Carnarvon Ranges, North-West Queensland) 1999

Not Currently on Display

This photographic work, the record of activity spontaneously devised by Parr in outback Queensland, is a telling insight into the interest, shown by many artists in the 1970s, in the idea of integrating themselves and their art into the natural world. Nature and ecology had at this time become a concern of society at large in many countries. In the area of performance art, identification with nature often introduced a ritualistic element (for example the self-immersion in the earth of Jill Orr). A ritualistic element is present in ‘Identification no. 1’, in which Mike Parr used charcoal from a burnt tree to give himself what resembles tribal marking on the chest.

In 1975 Parr travelled from Sydney to Queensland with his brother. They drove out into the Central West of the state, intending to find Aboriginal rock paintings. This work is one of several performed for and with a camera during the excursion. David Bromfield says of ‘Identification no. 1’, “this act of identification with nature challenges the conventional European, Australian view that the bush is hostile. It strikes simultaneously at the antagonistic attitude to the natural in Western thought as a whole, in particular as it is expressed in Freud’s metapsychology where nature is the hostile antithesis of repressive civilisation”.(1) The horizontal lines on Parr’s body invoke the rational geometry of minimalism. In many of his performance works, Parr makes ironic comparisons between rational geometry and the socialization of the irrational self.

The photographer was the artist’s brother Timothy Parr and the artist’s wife Felizitas Parr printed the photographs.

Mike Parr was born in Sydney in 1945. He was raised in Queensland, and from 1965 to 1966 studied arts and law at the University of Queensland. He dropped out of the course and moved to Sydney where, in 1968, he studied painting at the National Art School. In 1970, together with Peter Kennedy, he established Inhibodress, an artist’s co-operative and alternative space for conceptual art, performance art and video.

Parr rapidly attracted attention early in his career as an artist by performing and documenting actions that confronted and unsettled the viewer’s role as a passive bystander. Many of his performances challenged Parr’s physical endurance and safety which would prompt audiences towards a sense of obligation towards the artist as a human being.