Portage

Portage of course suggests rapids, rocks, digression and a journey upstream against the flow of waters as they rush towards the great synchronic anonymity of the sea. And yet I do not mean to infer that I am "swimming against the tide" (in the art contextual sense), rather the source is conceived entirely ontogenetically, as mythic, displaced and essentially unrecoverable. Like the search for The Grail, or the gold of Alchemical procedure, it is the journey that is more meaningful than the goal.

These works are again (like those in the PS.1 show) based on self portraiture. The challenge of self portraiture is narcissism. Seeing through one's self simultaneously requires a dissociated objectivity opposed to intensified subjectivity (a contradiction of going in in order to come out). The process is dialectical and yet at every moment it is experienced schismatically. I have a deliberately attempted to exacerbate this process of splitting in the hope of recovering a new sense of the coherence and necessity of the whole. A whole that is integrally psychological and formal. In these new works, the image again, in large part, takes the form of the bifurcated composition.

Three series:

1. LURIDITIES (Mengele & Co. come back for a Heart Transplant) The Rapids.

     1 - 10 (individually titled in a catalogue).

2. The Anamorphii of God (I Self Portraits) Towards the Other Side. 

3. Elegnem sa Essitam (THE GREAT DIVIDE)".

One of the great difficulties of self portraiture is the continuous ambiguity of one's feelings. And yet it is an ambiguity that must be sustained (lived with), since resolution invariably destroys the power of the image. It follows therefore, that a pivotal component of these works is the title, since the title can name the unacceptable, focusing it within consciousness. Many years ago, at the beginning of my work as a performance artist, I undertook a reading of Wilhelm Reich. His book "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" makes plain the ordinariness of the fascistic personality. In a real sense he is Everyman (every one of us). It was this realization, returning after many years, that decided my choice of titles (there was also the frightful distortion of my self image which had become a kind of compulsion). 

In many ways my identification with Mengele, and of Mengele with Matisse, began as a purely iconoclastic device (as a cascade of mirror fragments), but in a deeper sense it has come to extend my earlier identification with Artaud (identification incidentally, conceived as one of the hallmarks of our culture). 

Like Artaud, Mengele is the man "beyond the pale". But unlike Artaud, Mengele can never be rehabilitated. There is no romantic, sentimental content. Artuad was mad (but poetic), Mengele on the other hand, if mad, is mad beyond mad, and therefore not mad (but scientific). It seems that Mengele erodes the categories (like organ transplants or genetic engineering do today). As doctor himself he is in every sense "incurable". As pariah he beggars description. These are crucial characteristics. In these years after the Holocaust the great need is to be able to think (it seems to me that the great impossibility is uncompromised thought). This process of thinking must be a process self discovery. In many ways these titles weren't a question of choice. Once they of had come into my mind they seemed more real than the images.

Why Matisse? Well Matisse who is generally held up as the most tranquil, purely hedonistic of artists was once described by his artist friend Cross as "anxious, madly anxious".

Mike Parr.

May, 1985.