Mike Parr
Blameless
August 2006
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne

In a converted factory in a non-descript laneway is one of Melbourne's best-kept secrets - an artist-run initiative with a down-to-earth feel, called Bus. It was established in 2001 as an offshoot of a design firm that still shares the building. It has one medium and two small rooms on the ground floor for exhibitions, including one dedicated to sound art. There are also seven studios in the floors above, forming a kind of stable of artists.

Artists who have shown at Bus have usually been those with an experimental practice relevant to the latest contemporary art trends. This has included rising names, such as Cate Consadine, Nick Mangan, Nat & Ali, Arlo Mountford, and Tony Garifalakis. Bus has actively promoted a number of artists through group exhibitions touring Victoria, Tasmania, and even Japan, and has also released a series of CDs featuring various sound performers. It is an ideal venue for emerging artists seeking recognition from their peers and some wider critical attention, rather than simply a venue for selling work to the public.

At the same time, Bus is a flexible space, willing to show work with a popular appeal and with more commercial intentions. The latest show by graffiti-inspired artist Reka is a case in point. His carefully drawn designs in bold black ink are energetic and funky, referencing tribal symbols, tattoos, and tagging. The Bus website says Reka has developed "his own Melbourne street style." Yet the work draws heavily from Aztec and Viking imagery, unlike the diversity of Melbourne's ethnic mix. Its 'street-cred' on the other hand is commodified by tasteful framing, despite some designs on the wall that are no more than window dressing. Still an artist has to eat, and Reka had sold a number of these attractive works at a reasonable $400 each.

A fifteen minute walk from Bus brings us to Flinders Lane, the gallery hub of the city. This is the cultural Wall Street of Melbourne, where reputations block out the sun, and absurd amounts of money change hands. If you love painting there is plenty on offer from venues such as Tolarno, Gallery 101, and Arc One/Span. For work with a more conceptual flavour there is the Anna Schwartz Gallery. After 22 years this business has developed close relationships with public art institutions in Australia, and other influential galleries overseas. As a result it is able to promote its stable of artists in an almost relentless fashion, building both critical reputations and market value. The gallery's minimal white interior is a kind of futuristic decontamination chamber, in which all external references of time and place are eradicated. It forms a perfectly blank canvas where culture and commerce can meet and merge. Some people find this intimidating, yet such reshaping of social space has been a widespread effect of corporate globalisation since the 1980s.

Of the more than 40 artists in the Anna Schwartz stable, Mike Parr has perhaps the longest and strongest critical reputation, and his work now sells for five and six figure sums. A pioneering installation and performance artist in the 70s, he was part of the first artist run space in Australia, the Inhibodress Co-operative Gallery in Sydney. Since the 80s he has mainly used traditional techniques such as etching and sculpture, in a conceptually driven expressionist mode.

His latest show at Anna Schwartz, titled Blameless, tackles the phenomenon of racism with a strange mixture of bluntness and ambiguity. On the right hand gallery wall a long row of misshapen heads cast in aluminium are mounted on enormous pikes. All the elements are painted with enamel paint as white as the gallery space itself, and the bottom of each pole is moulded to join seamlessly with the wall. No Theory Please We're White Supremacists is the name of this work. The absurdity of the lumpy heads combined with the title is almost Pythonesque, but equally urgent and crushing as a political statement.

The anonymity and generic uniformity of the heads made them seem quite at home in the white cube of the gallery. The concept of 'sameness' was developed in a further two video works off in the left hand corner. In one, a series of 80 words were shown - starting with the synonym for "synonymous", then the synonym of the synonym, and so on. The other video used the same series of words, but with each letter translated into a numeral for its position in the alphabet. For Parr these sequences are "defining identity into a kind of nothingness", while the uniform whiteness of each racist head "sanctifies its monstrosity" (exhibition catalogue). It is quite clear that the expressionist ugliness of each head is whitewashed and purified. But these are in fact quasi-self portraits, which complicates the meaning of the work. If the artist is implicating himself in the mindset of racism, is he also incorporating the gallery space itself? The integration of the sculpture into the white cube is almost too perfect to be unintentional. If 'white supremacy' is a synonym for sameness and loss of identity, then the very aesthetic of this gallery space is perhaps also highlighted in an unflattering way. If the context of a piece is part of its meaning, then Mike Parr's installation Blameless is not a straightforward work by any means, but conceals contradictory layers beneath its whitewashed surface.

Jason Beale 2006