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  • The Infinity Machine: Mike Parr’s Performance Art, 1971–2005
  • Christine Stoddard (bio)
The Infinity Machine: Mike Parr’s Performance Art, 1971–2005. By Edward Scheer. Melbourne: Schwartz City, 2009; 200 pp.; illustrations. $49.95 paper.

In 2005, at the height of legal disputes over the status of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, Australian artist Mike Parr, dressed in a brightly colored orange suit, sat in a gallery connected to a low-voltage electroshock system that was triggered by audience movement. The 30-hour durational work was entitled Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic. At the moment of shock, Parr’s spasm and facial expressions were digitally captured, manipulated, and immediately projected onto the wall of an adjacent room. For an additional 12 hours, these moments of shock and image were repeatedly projected as Parr lay exhausted on the gallery floor, mimicking the “decay into banality” of the circulation of media images and drawing attention to the complicity of the audience as witnesses and instigators of torture (139).

A dialectical structure of shock and delay appears in much of Parr’s work over the last four decades. How such a temporality might speak to experiences of trauma, subjectivity, and the aesthetics and ethics of relation forms the focus of Edward Scheer’s new book, The Infinity Machine. It is a welcome addition to limited, and largely psychoanalytical and art historical, approaches to Parr’s work, such as Graham Coulter-Smith’s analysis of Parr’s decade-long self-portrait project (1994) or David Bromfield’s extensive critical catalogue of his experiments in the conceptual language of the body (1991).

Scheer’s central concern is to trace an “aesthetics of duration” through consideration of temporally inflected concepts such as presence, liminality, disappearance, and suddenness. Organized chronologically into three chapters, the book gives a concise overview of how these abiding concerns play out in Parr’s practice. In this endeavor, Scheer draws on a wide-ranging, but sometimes cursorily read, collection of theories on temporality: Fredric Jameson, [End Page 189] Henri Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, Karl Heinz Bohrer, Pamela M. Lee, and Paul Virilio, among others.

The first chapter, “Framing Presence,” which is also marred by an attempt to bring together two decades of performance, media, and visual art practice under one rubric, is the most disjointed in this regard. However, Scheer’s reading of Cathartic Action: Social Gestus No. 5 (1977) and the Wound by Measurement series (1973), for example, proves to be a useful foundation for subsequent analysis. As dialectical works, they describe “the self critique of presence in which the effect is of a present that oscillates like alternating current, between a forceful violent act that severs time from the quotidian experience of it, and the condensation of the shock effect” (24).

In chapter 2, “The Brides,” Scheer makes sense of a puzzling series of performances that includes such pieces as White Hybrid (Fading) (1996) and Blood Box (1998) in which Parr appears as a surreal bride figure who disappears into landscapes of extended and often difficult duration. Scheer views Parr’s bride as a temporally expansive, spatially unmoored figure of becoming. His analysis of the ways in which the “discourse of becoming, with its rejection of chronological time and the expulsion of the present, recalls the time of abreaction” is a provocative theoretical lens through which to connect the deep psychoanalytic effects of trauma and their phenomenological experience as potentially liminal events (88). It is an approach whose ethical and political dimensions are certainly acknowledged — these works, Scheer argues, are not about personal crisis but about “the compulsorily socialised performance of self, the pervasive and suffocating requirement of all individuals to perform the endless roles of consumer, citizen and subject” (69) — but whose mechanisms are not fully elaborated. I suspect this has something to do with the performances themselves, which appear provocatively queer but largely unsuccessfully interrogate the identificatory force of the bride as normative figure; this despite Parr’s attempts to claim the bride as a sign of hybridity or Scheer’s desire to recuperate its liminality.

The final chapter of The Infinity Machine on “Historical Time” effectively probes the limited...

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