Art Gallery of New South Wales
Asleep in the tree. Wednesday 16 March – Saturday 19 March 2022 2022
single-channel digital video, black and white, sound
72 hr
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Performer: Mike Parr
Video documentation: Gotaro Uematsu, Heath Franco
Photography: Zan Wimberley
Technical support: Joe, Bethany and Josh Mercieca
Mike Parr is known for durational performances where he tests the limits of the body and the will. His work for rīvus responds to a tree planted outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales during the 5th Biennale of Sydney in 1984. Curator René Block planted the tree on behalf of German artist Joseph Beuys as part of his seminal work 7000 Oaks 1982, a key example of environmentally concerned art that entailed the planting of 7000 trees in Kassel, Germany (later spreading to other cities around the world), each one accompanied by a basalt column. For reasons unclear, the stone outside the Art Gallery was removed four years after it was placed – effectively ‘de-Beuysing’ the tree – and was just recently restituted.
Parr says,
‘Looking at the Moreton Bay fig tree planted at the Art Gallery […], I remembered a work by my Czech friend Petr Štembera. His 1975 piece was called Asleep in the tree (after four days and three nights without sleep). Interestingly, this performance had the same duration as AMERIKA 2006, in which I walked, meditating and fasting for three days and three nights around the Beuys tree as an act of restitution towards the tree and its missing basalt column.’
Parr re-enacted Štembera’s work as a public performance in the Blue Mountains, NSW. The resulting video footage, taken by Gotaro Uematsu and Heath Franco, is shown here.
The Cutaway, Barangaroo
Blind painting of a falling tree, 2022
black paint over plymaterials
6:30 mins
Courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery
Special thanks to the students and staff at UNSW School of Design who assisted with the performance.
Performer: Mike Parr
Technical Support: Glen Thompson, Biennale staff TBC
Video documentation: Gotaro Uematsu, Heath Franco
Photography: Zan Wimberley
Invigilators: Anna Seymour, Evan Ye, Delaney Mirow, Brigitte Podrasky, Othy Willis, Emily Burke, Mai Cao, Kiara Fung, Mathilde Lebouc, Victoria Soo, Jasmin Smith, Amy-Ann Bailey
Australian artist Mike Parr is known for long-durational performances where he tests the limits of the body and the will, and the possibilities of representation in art. For the 23rd Biennale, Parr attempts to paint the image of a tree with his eyes shut. The video footage of the action, taken by Gotaro Uematsu and Heath Franco, also blinded, is shown here alongside the resulting image.
“Everything in advance. Performance art for me is in advance. Decisively in advance. Because the event always exceeds the idea. I see something huge, black, impossibly uncertain. A body as trunk, a trunk as body falling. Falling trees everywhere. In this country, Indonesia, the Amazon, everywhere. Blind painting is unprecedented because it acknowledges the history of art, so art falling too, beyond the trace, beyond the indexical, beyond mental reclamation. Must see the possibility of the unseen in this unseen way!”
–Another work of Parr’s, Asleep in the tree Wednesday 16 March – Saturday 19 March 2022, is shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
