Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2016

272 pages, 142 colour illustrations, 30.0 x 23.5 cm, Chronology, Index

ISBN 9780642334633

About

Mike Parr is regarded as one of Australia’s pre-eminent artists with a practice spanning performance, film, painting, sculpture and printmaking. Emerging from a background of conceptual art in the early 1970’s, the probing nature of his word works and psychoanalytic drawings escalated into the provocative performance art for which he is now recognised internationally.

This generously illustrated publication brings together 13 essays by Australian artists, poets, curators and critics reflecting on aspects of Parr’s career. Forming a shifting collection of ideas this volume is an indispensable companion for those seeking to more deeply understand Parr’s insatiably experimental practice.

Table of Contents

  • Director's foreword by Dr Gerard Vaughan
  • Introduction by Elspeth Pitt and Roger Butler
  • Art after the expiry date: Mike Parr's moving images by Edward Scheer
  • Collaboration by Adam Geczy
  • Making a spectacle of himself: Mike Parr's political performances by Julie Ewington
  • Mike Parr: Performance, ontology, revolt by Anne Marsh
  • Performing genealogies: Contemporary Australian performance art after Mike Parr by Helen Hughes
  • Mike Parr: Performing the limits of language by Debra Petrovitch
  • Word situations by Elspeth Pitt
  • Life drawing by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax
  • 'Anxiety and invention': The evolution of Mike Parr's graphic works by Rachel Kent
  • Cutting room: Digesting the archive by Sarah Rice
  • Inhibodress by Sue Cramer
  • '… now wherefore stopp'st thou me?' by Donald Brook
  • Chronology
  • List of works reproduced
  • Acknowledgments
  • Contributors
  • Index

Available from

The National Gallery of Australia Bookshop phone: +61 2 6240 6438, fax: +61 2 6240 6628 or email

Distributed in Australia by New South Wales Books

Distributed in The United States of America by University of Washington Press