Kristine Stiles on Mike Parr

Kristine Stiles contributed an essay titled “Switching Off” on the infamous Australian artist Mike Parr, best known for his dangerous performances and his drawings, printmaking, and paintings. Stiles begins by quoting Parr: “I enjoy being someone that I’m not.” She responds: “Who is the someone that you are not?” Parr answers that in drawing “language ceases” and he “switches off.” Stiles identifies this “dissociated state…as a critical coping and survival mechanism for enduring the psychic, physical pain and trauma” that Parr has lived with throughout his life having had his left arm partially amputated as a child. Stiles’s essay ends with Parr’s statement: “Mike Parr is a bit like my car parked across the road. It’s available for me to go places but it’s not me.”