"Unassumable Responsibility": Watching Mike Parr

Abstract

This ‘paper’ is a short personal piece of writing—an interior monologue really—about “being there” at Mike Parr’s "Punch Holes in the Body Politic" at Artspace in Sydney. I wrote this initially at the time and have added to it some what for this occasion but my aim was to record my contradictory experience—thoughts, puzzlings—of attending this show, which of course (as it turned out) was based on ethically compromising the spectator if at all possible by almost forcing them to hurt Mike. I had sent students along and had tried to prepare them as far as I could, but I did not know in detail until after my own experience just what it was that Mike Parr had prepared and indeed even then how much of that which was prepared didn't seem to work, at least as intended. This phenomenon in itself offers distinctive spectatorial challenges. Perhaps Mike’s ideal spectator isn’t an ethical one. I have tried in this writing to record my own process of trying to separate the accidental from the essential, the puzzling but maybe significant from the fuck-ups, while trying to be both an ethical and as much as possible the interactive spectator Mike apparently wanted.