What I thought about down there
PERFORMANCE artist Mike Parr has broken his silence over his subterranean Dark Mofo stunt, revealing exactly what went on while he was buried under Hobart’s busiest road.
Parr spent 72 hours interred inside a 4.5m-long container beneath the middle lane of Macquarie St — attracting praise from art lovers and criticism from sceptics — before emerging on Sunday night.
About 200 people packed the School of Creative Arts’ Dechaineux Lecture Theatre yesterday to hear Parr speak about Underneath The Bitumen The Artist at a public forum also featuring Dark + Dangerous Thoughts director Laura Kroetsch, indigenous writer and researcher Greg Lehman, and curator Jarrod Rawlins.
Parr said he spent much of his stint underground “walking back and forward — five steps forward, five steps back — at increasing speed, for hours at a time”. He also passed the time by writing and drawing in his notebook and reading Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. He didn’t eat, but did manage to get some sleep.
Parr said he “was determined to go the distance” and never worried about his safety “because I was thoroughly mentally prepared and so was Dark Mofo”.
He showed no ill-effects from his performance yesterday, saying he “feels like a 73year-old man should feel if they’re in good health and good spirits”.
The artist has been criticised for failing to acknowledge the crowd that had gathered on Sunday night to watch him emerge. But it seems that was the plan all along, as Parr “had proposed the null of the image” and “didn’t want to reanimate that null by being overtly a performer”.
“I was cold, and I was thinking of getting inside the building and going home and having a small meal,” he explained.
Parr said it had been “increasingly noisy” inside the box, which was fitted with a screen that allowed him to see a fixed view of Macquarie St above.
“By about 10pm Saturday it was deafening in the box,” he said. “And when the semis went over the top, everything was rattling — it’s going to be a fantastic soundtrack.
“Then of course there was all the ferals in the early hours of the morning. It was sort of like playing chicken on a railway bridge — they’d run out between the [red traffic] lights and jump up and down as hard as they could on the top of the box.
“At 2 o’clock in the morning that was quite unnerving — but I thought ‘well, this is better than most art criticism’.”
Parr also had a message for the “perennial” detractors who question the purpose or financial cost of his performances.
“Art always invites that sort of philistine response,” he said.
“When we bought (the Jackson Pollock painting) Blue Poles for $3m everyone jumped up and down and choked … and it’s now worth $380m.”
Under the Bitumen was billed as Parr’s third and final Dark Mofo performance, following 2016’s Asylum at Willow Court in New Norfolk and last year’s Empty Ocean on Bruny Island. But with Parr, you can never really be sure.
“Every performance I do now is my last performance, but I keep doing them,” he said. “I never know what I’m going to do, and I don’t repeat performances. If I repeat performances, they become theatre.”
MIKE Parr began yesterday’s forum with an 11-minute statement that addressed the meaning and purpose of Underneath The Bitumen The Artist and some of the issues it raised. This is an edited transcript:
“Greg (Lehman) said in an interview that the most ironic part of this artwork is that I want to expose something by hiding it from view. I think that’s a pretty astute comment on how so much colonial history has been written. I think it’s more like an anti-memorial, but he was spot-on.
“But there’s a logical point here too.
“I first came up with this piece in 2011. [At first] I wanted to be buried under the bitumen in Nuremberg, and I wanted the piece to be transmitted only through the media and social media. I wanted it to be a complete absence in relation to the immediate German history of the second World War — the violence that Nazi terror imposed on so many people, and the destruction of the Jewish community.
“In the first instance, I conceived this work, in its radical absence, as addressing a sort of universal. So if I was to have done it in Buenos Aires in Argentina, or Santiago in Chile, it would have inevitably referred to the ‘disappeared’ — the people who were flown out in military cargo planes and dumped at 15,000ft out of the hold, never to be seen again.
“And if I did it today in el-Sisi’s Egypt, which is constantly ‘disappearing’ its opposition, I’d have to ask permission. But I’d be asking permission of the military, and they wouldn’t give me permission.
“I wanted this work to be universal, in the same way — presumptively, arrogantly I suppose — as Picasso’s Guernica, which has become a universal declaration of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity. But imagine if Picasso had revealed that this was Basque Guernica, because Guernica is in Basque lands — it would have been immediately reduced to their cause and their issues.
“If it had been directly associated with Basque nationalism it would have been attacked, and it wouldn’t speak to a universal condition and problem. It would have been reduced to a very specific one. In the box in the last three days, I thought about my own position very hard. I thought about it very hard in relation to reading The Fatal Shore. The British have never been called to account for their imperialism in the antipodes.
“Transportation was a monstrosity — it was slave labour. What happened at Macquarie Harbour and at Port Arthur was pure torture. These men were subjected to the most extraordinary punishments. They weren’t punishments, they were perversions at the will of their commanders.
“Terrible pain has been wrought on the collective descendants and the ancestors of Tasmanians. Terrible violence has been done across the spectrum. Terrible, unforgivable violence was done to the Aboriginal people. All of that I acknowledge.
“I realised buried under the ground that inevitably [this work] must be about the most acute issues concerning Tasmanian people now — the plight of Aboriginal descendants, who still fight hard for recognition, some sort of recompensation and help, after a long history of radical negation.”