Mike Parr's Self Portraits: Unma(s)king the Self

by Graham Coulter-Smith and Jane Magon

The obsession with self-portraiture evident in Parr should not be reduced to trite notions of narcissism or self-expression. Something more significant is happening here, Parr is embarked upon a search for something which can never be found, a self which is inherently lost. Our being, Being in general, is lost - that's why we are so obsessed with finding it. The human irony is that we are strongly motivated by a quest for identity, but our very mode of seeking prevents us from ever finding it. We seek ourselves via self-representation, but the very act of re-presentation is the antithesis of that self-presence we hunger for. Each act of self-representation is a disappointment because it can only ever produce a trace, a burnt out replica of that self presence we desire.

Before he embarked upon his self-portraits Parr was a performance artist which indicates a concern for self-presence. In performance, at least, one ought to be able to see the real Parr, the living presence of the artist. But even his performances became enmeshed in traces, in the form of photo-documentation. The living reality of presence be-came implicated in the "deathliness" of the trace, the remnant.

Parr began his charcoal self-portraits as an attempt to breath life into such deathly photographic traces. According to conventional aesthetics, the traditional medium of charcoal should preserve the presence of the artist in the sense that it leaves a physical trace of the artist's gestures. For Parr the charcoal medium seemed to promise a transfusion of life. But there is a distinct equivocation involved in this attempted transfusion, in that the charcoal medium, itself, consists of dead, burnt out, organic matter.

The burnt out nature of charcoal underlines the condition of the trace as remnant as much as the mechanical nature of the photograph. And we must go on to add the memory trace to these examples because the separation of trace from the ideal of living presence is something that reaches into the very nature of our consciousness. The physical traces of artistic production make allusion to the phenomenological impossibility of attaining self-presence in consciousness. Consciousness is incapable of attaining self-presence because it is locked into time and memory and the labyrinthine proliferation of mental traces. It can never stop this flux in order to be present to itself because the flux, the process, actually constitutes consciousness.¹

Perhaps we can come to terms with the impossibility of attaining self-presence if we observe, with Derrida, that the notion that we must attain a stable, coherent sense of identity epitomised by the presence of self to itself is a historical, and essentially theological, construct.² It represents the hubris of Western Humanism which believed that the ego or cogito could emulate the omniscience and omnipresence of the mind of God. This major tenet of Western culture constructs a false image of selfhood which, in our present day society of simulation, has degenerated into the hyperreality of the plastic self; and the falseness of this plastic identity is most evident in the way in which modern culture separates mind from body, subjugating the body by channelling its libidinal flows into the rationalised grid of capitalist exchange.

Parr's self-portraits display this alienated condition by the use of a face with little trace of the body, a disembodied decapitated self, a castrated self in the sense of being cut off from the free flow of desire. As Freud realised, castration is the price we pay for society and social identity. Parr further emphasises social conditioning by the use of a grid inscribed onto the disembodied face. The face becomes two-dimensionalised, the corporeality of the body is reduced to the functionalised co-ordinates of a map.

In his early self-portrait series Braalagg Hoick ("The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality" or Perspective as Vanishing Point) of 1983-84 Parr placed this map-face on the left of a huge sheet of paper using the right had section to portray a heterogeneous state of confusion, a morass of automatic drawing which is diametrically opposed to the super-ordered portrayal of the face. The right hand section of these works seems to represent the libidinal forces of that body which has been excised from the left hand section. One might also speak here of the two sides of the human brain: the left being the site of language and reason, and the right being the site of the contradictory and eccentric forces of creativity.

The two-dimensional map-face on the left always seems to be affected by the forces on the right; it is blown around, curled, folded, creating anamorphic contortions of the social mask. The paper thin mask often seems in danger of being torn apart by the storm which boils on the other side. When the forces of the body struggle against the constraints of the mask Parr's face wriggles and writhes within its anamorphic grid, and the grid is stretched to breaking pint. The question arises as to what happens when the grid breaks?

The experience is described by Deleuze and Guattari in terms of an Artaudian notion of the "body without organs." Artaud was tormented by the fear that his body was on the verge of breaking, leaking away, being crushed or burning up, and in the hands of Deleuze and Guattari Artaud's experience of the dissolving body becomes a metaphor for the condition of ego-death. When the grid stretches to breaking point, the ego cracks and the social self dies. The ego dissolves into the body without organs in an ultimate cathartic gesture wherein the body rejects all of the mechanisms which inscribe and channel its energies; mechanisms regarded, metaphorically, as organs;

The death model appears when the body without organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no teeth - to the point of self-mutilation, to the point of suicide³

This is the suicide of self; notice how the organs described are those of the face, the ego, the major mechanism controlling the body. This suicidal expulsion of the mechanisms which inscribe the body leaves an undifferentiated flux of libidinal intensities which constitutes the body without organs.

The body without organs can be seen as a landscape of libidinal forces, what Deleuze and Guattari would call a "deterritorialised" landscape, a state of nature. And if we speak of the gridded faces on the left of Braalagg Hoick as maps, then it is reasonable to speak of the right hand sections as deterritorialised landscapes, which they resemble in terms of their field-like arrangement and heterogeneity. The map struggles to contain the energies of the libidinal landscape, it turns the landscape into a field of death. The co-ordinate system becomes a net which captures and constrains the living energies of the body/land. Parr himself described his self-portrait faces as a "field of death",⁴ which quotes Artaud's poem "The Human Face", of 1947:

The human face
is an empty power, a
field of death...
But that means
the human face,
such as it is, is still
in quest of itself with
two eyes a nose and a mouth
and the two auricular
cavities
which correspond to the holes
of the sockets like
the four openings
to the sepulchre of
approaching death.
The human face
in effect carries a kind
of perpetual death
with it
from which it's really up to the painter
to save it
by giving back
his own peculiar features⁵

To escape the co-ordinates of social identity the map must dissolve and in so doing the systematised ego is disintegrated into its Other, the undifferentiated libidinal landscape. In his statement of 1986, "The Isolation of Fruit and Vegetables (Half Life)" Parr wrote;

Auto cannibalization (the huge self-portraits equal the huge landscapes... the huge as a loss of self). Therefore, Self as Site... Self and Other as landscape (but an Other which is Self and a self which is Other... an unbreakable unbearable? O continuum).⁶

In the Braalagg Hoick series the map-face is whipped by the forces of the Other and threatened by dissolution into the heterogeneous forces of the body/landscape. This experience forces the ego to realise its pettiness; the experience of ego-death leads to the discovery that there is Being beyond the two-dimensional being of the social mask. Entrance into the realm of the libidinal landscape demands ego-death but it can also mark an entry into an enlarged sense of being, the intensified being which is the Being of the deterritorialised landscape.

In Ablaut Self-Portrait, 1984, the right hand section shows a storm of forces writhing within a two-dimensional perspectival field which is obviously synonymous with the grid which inscribes the face on the left. The grid co-ordinates have been dissolved but the flat field still holds, it seems to be a transitional moment before the constriction of the flat field finally explodes into a vital corporeality. And out of the centre of the field there emerges a mysterious black figure-like shape accompanied by a powerful, passionate, flame red. The fury of this genesis whips the map-face on the other side with a billow of forces which leaps out from the right onto the left.

In his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze tells us that for Nietzsche the body's active forces make it a Self and define the Self as superior and astonishing. He quotes Nietzsche: "A most powerful being, an unknown sage - he is called Self. He inhabits your body, he is your body" and:

This entire phenomenon of the body is, from the intellectual point of view, as superior to our consciousness, to our spirit to our conscious ways of thinking, feeling and willing, as algebra is superior to the multiplication table."⁷

The mysterious black figure emerging out of the tumult of disintegrative forces in Ablaut Self-Portrait seems to be such a Self, a superior Self which can inhabit the whirlwind-swept libidinal landscape without being torn apart.

But this anthropomorphic description of Self is misleading because the Self of the body is less an entity than it is the Being of difference and becoming, what Derrida calls différance - the force which moves the labyrinth of traces. The Being of becoming is always absent because it is the essence of process, the substance of flux, that which lies within the -ing of phenomena. Différance is the wind which blows the enfurled and invaginated tissue of traces which is our veil of consciousness. The Being of the body and the trace is movement, or force itself. This is the Being which disintegrates the identity of presence, this is the liveliness which is paradoxically predicated upon the "deathliness" of the remnant (when life and death are defined in terms of the metaphysics of presence).

The trace is a remnant: but all phenomena are wrapped within a skin of memory traces, whose potency arises out of the movement of their veil by the force of difference and becoming. The trace-remnant is the condition of possibility of activity, or life, in that, via its very insubstantiality, it is free to move, it is freed from the obsidian stasis of presence. As Derrida observes, only re-presentation has the power to shift and change, only via the "deathliness" of the remnant is there the possibility of life.⁸ And the veil of traces is inescapable and impenetrable, in that human consciousness is incapable of grasping the presence which might lie beyond the billowing veil. Consciousness tries hard to claim solid territory between the insubstantiality of the future and the past, but only manages to be engulfed by them, in the form of that ocean of mental traces which actually constitutes the condition of possibility of consciousness.

In the title Ablaut Self Portrait the word "Ablaut" refers to the way in which language works by the exchange or substitution of sounds, e.g. "bat, bet, bit, but"; this is the phenomenon we call "difference", the shifting sand of language which underlies the conventionalised stability of discourse. The shifting infrastructure of difference ensures that all conventionalised, reified, structures of discourse are open to change and transformation. And this includes identity. Difference, or différance, ensures that we never fully realise ourself; ensuring that the vital essence of selfhood becomes one of change and transformation.

"Ablaut", as difference can also be compared to Parr's interest in Artaudian glossolalia or speaking in tongues where the disembodied, static, rational structure of language is disintegrated in order to give way to an expression of the pure, autonomous flux of primary forces which motivate the body. And in the Braalagg Hoick series we see this interest in ablaut and glossolalia being translated into the tumultuous application of automatic drawing in the right hand sections of the works.

In his more recent self-portrait drawings Parr foregrounds the inescapability of the trace by making laser copies of charcoal drawings and then destroying the original. The charcoal drawings, with their physical record of the artist's hand, evoke the theological ideal of the artist's presence, but this cannot be said for the laser copies. When Parr destroys the original charcoal drawings he rejects the traditional aesthetics of presence. His use of laser copy could be taken as a pessimistic statement of the loss of self in a society where the reality of presence is betrayed by the mass reproduction of images, but this would be a rather shallow reading. A fuller reading would see Parr's user of laser copy as a journey into the freedom implied by the trace, especially when we realise that, unlike the photocopy, the laser copy opens up the image to electronic manipulation, mutation, and change.

Reading Parr's laser copy images in terms of an optimism of the trace is supported by the fact that he has stopped using the grid, that image of the Cartesian mask, the theological diagram of self as presence. In addition, he now creates his self-portraits from his memory of the earlier self-portraits. In so doing he emphasises and enhances the condition of the trace; he now imbues the charcoal trace with the traces of memory, and his act of destroying the original charcoal drawings amplifies the laser copy's condition as memory trace. As memories the images are freer, free to proliferate and mutate, and in so doing escape the constraints of the metaphysical grid of presence which once inscribed them.

In the 1987 Perspecta Parr juxtaposed his laser copied self-portraits with a black box-room, Babel/Nuremburg (The Photographic Winter) In the Wings of the Oedipal Theatre Part 4, wherein we were invited to imagine our own loss of self via partial sensory deprivation. But in this installation the black box did not simply represent the containment of self in a geometric-rational form; or the nothingness of total darkness: the dark night of the boxed-in soul which precedes spiritual enlightenment. When one's eyes became used to the darkness one began to make out modulated surfaces which seemed to dissolve the boxed-in walls of the room into a kind of landscape or heterogeneous ambience.

Babel/Nuremburg (The Photographic Winter) In the Wings of the Oedipal Theatre Part 4 serves as a physical experience which under lines the message of the laser copies outside: the grid is not all powerful, the heterogeneity of the liberated trace can dissolve the grid. This is a statement of hope, yet one might be perplexed by the fact that Parr's faces are still contorted, they are not at ease with their more liberated condition. But the condition of liberty is not a condition of ease; there is no fabulous rebirth of the ego as superself, as did Nietzsche, but we are, and always will be, only too human and as such any pleasure or hope which the play of traces might provide is often accompanied by a profound perplexity and anxiety.

The torment of containment is supplanted by the anxiety of freedom. Change and transformation may be the essence of a vital experiencing of the world based upon the hope that things can change for the better, but they also carry the threat of accident and death. The Western model of God is a model of eternal life via the stasis of omniscience and omnipresence, but paradoxically this is a model of death. The heterogeneity of the Other, the absent selfhood of the body/landscape, is a model of vital energy and life, but it is also paradoxical in that the heterogeneous play of traces is profoundly dangerous. The free play of traces has no model, no grid of co-ordinates to channel and control it. It is pure happening wherein one can never predict what will happen next upon the basis of what has happened before. This is the condition of the absence of Being as stable presence, the absence of the omniscient grid. As such the play of traces is perilous and anguishing because it never knows where it is going. To paraphrase Derrida, there is not insurance against the risk of the trace.⁹ But the risk can be as exciting as it is anguishing, as fulfilling as it is threatening.

Notes

1. For a fuller discussion of these issues see David Baker and Graham Coulter-Smith, "New Theory: Martin Heidegger and Phenomenology", in Eyeline 1 (May 1987), p. 10
2. See Derrida's essays "Cogito and the History of Madness" in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 31-63; and "Plato's Pharmacy", in Dissemination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 61-172.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 329
4. Mike Parr, "The Satellites of Death", an unpublished lecture given at the Queensland Art Gallery Wednesday 5th November, 1986
5. J. Hirschman, ed., Antonin Artaud Anthology, 2nd ed. (San Francisco : City Lights Books, 1970), pp. 229-230
6. Mike Parr, "The Isolation of Fruit and Vegetables (Half Life)", 1986. Noosa Regional Gallery, 4 Jan - 25 Jan, 1987
7. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosopy (London: The Athlone Press, 1983), p. 42
8. Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 196-231.
9. Jacques Derrida, "Forces and Signification" in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981),
p. 11

From Eyeline #5 Brisbane p. 22