Art & Identity - Mike Parr and National Identity

During the last decade, Australian artist Mike Parr has developed a series of performance works that critique and challenge Australian national identity. One such performance, Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi (Democratic Torture) was performed over 30 hours at Artspace Sydney, in May 2003. Before a wall displaying textual excerpts from newspaper articles reporting on the Iraq war, Parr sat on a chair and had his lips sewn shut, an Australian flag attached in the manner of a prosthesis from his left arm stump. Parr remained this way for twenty four hours before electrodes were connected to his body, allowing an Internet audience watching a streaming of the performance to administer electric shocks to the artist.

Speaking emphatically of a collective shame, work is a traumatic, almost desperate critique of the Australian involvement in the Iraq War, and examines the impact of language on the nation's psyche. The title incorporates the peculiarly Australian chant of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi". Usually used as an encouraging mantra at sporting events, and associated with national pride, the words take on an aggressive, barbaric tone within the work. In sewing shut his lips and stripping himself of language, Parr embarks on a protest action that has become synonymous with those who have no voice with which to counter oppression. Scheer notes that the work was "a response as much to the media's facile reportage of the politics surrounding the invasion"1 as to the dubious circumstances within which Australia entered the war. Parr's protest then also rallies against the sensationalist headlines, lettered on the wall behind him. Parr shows us the destructive potential of language in informing a national identity.

1. Edward Scheer, Australia's Post Olympic Apocalypse? PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.1 (2008) 42-56