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ADAM GECZY & MIKE PARR
Film Noir/Politique Blanche 19 June to 19 July A collaborative exhibition developed by Sydney-based Adam Geczy, and celebrated performance artist, Mike Parr, featuring work in video, photography and text - all related to forms of performance. Collectively they propose future directions for a 'political' art based in direct engagement with changing technological and cultural contexts. At the heart of the exhibition was a new video work made by Geczy of Parr's "Malevich (a political arm)" performance at Artspace, Sydney, in May 2002 where Parr sat for two days with his arm nailed to the gallery wall. Both artists also presented discrete bodies of work involving their fathers in creative investigations of personal and political history, together with a selection of Parr's photographs from some 1970s performances, either directly involving his father or emerging in part out of aspects of their relationship. REVIEW An installation that re-presented works of Mike Parr's through the collaborative lens of Adam Geczy. It involved the gallery's division into two distinct spaces: in one a film was projected showing Mike Parr with hand nailed to the wall, a 24 hour long performance. The film captured the sense of duration and suffering and presented it as grainy, black and white, silent film-style footage. It was projected at an angle and the cutting was deliberately jumpy. A soundtrack filled the gallery with the noise of an old projector. The other room, the first the viewer entered, held an assemblage of video monitors and their players, a loose aggregation with wiring artfully messy winding about them to plugs in to the gallery wall. Around these walls was hand-written, in Czech, an account of Adam Geczy's father's escape from postwar Budapest. The video monitors showed this writing taking place: a refugee's account, laboriously enscribed. The projected Parr performance in the second room could be read as protest at the illegal and inhumane detention of asylum-seekers in Australia, at a suffering in sympathy with them, as hysterical self-laceration in reaction to powerlessness in the face of the government's will in this matter. Film noir: a 'dark' film of troubled and troubling content; politique blanche: the policy of a White Australia maintained against Middle Eastern and Asian refugees. Other photographic images on the wall of the first room showed similar mutilation and self-wounding done to the body from various times in Parr's career. There was also a selection from Parr's very early performances/performance ideas - each suggestion a displacement of the body's normal functioning and serving to alter one's thinking and awareness of the body, of the self, and of psychic boundaries. These dated from 1971/72. Ken Bolton PUBLICATION Invitation: 1/6th A4 full colour card with image (4 different images). "Bleed Bled Said" 52pp book with essay and interview with artists by Russell Storer, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. 30 b&w and colour images. Published by Power Publications 2003. MEDIA Bruce James, "The Deep End", ABC Radio National, 14 May 2003, with Adam Geczy. Listing "Arts on Monday", The Advertiser, 16 June 2003 David Teh, "Art and Politics Estranged", Broadsheet, Vol 32 No 2, pages 10 & 11. Cath Kenneally interview with Adam Geczy for Adelaide Radio, 21 June 2003 Stephanie Radok "The Politics of Pain" The Adelaide Review, July 2003, page 12 James Strickland dB Magazine, page 43 |
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above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Adam Geczy |