Mike Parr: the Self Portrait Project - Tapa blanda

Product Description: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.