Testing the limits of his physical and mental endurance, Mike Parr has cut, branded, stitched, burned and nailed his body in the pursuit of his art. The blood that covers him during his performances is not always his own—some of his works have involved beheading roosters and stringing their bodies up in rows. Such visceral performances garner him the most attention from art critics and the mainstream media alike, but he has also worked with sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography and video, through all of which he examines his identity and major political and cultural mores of the 20th century, ranging from his disability to Marxism, refugee crises and the structure of language. Although Parr was a good student he abandoned his arts and…show more content… Begun in the early 1980s and collectively titled the Self Portrait Project, Parr’s self-portrait studies first took the form of painstakingly hand-drawn copies of performance photographs. Subsequent drawings acknowledge accidental blurs and smudges, with Parr generating purposeful distortions through the introduction of a mirror (creating reversed portraits) and manipulation of the grid (creating anamorphic portraits). Life after Death (Battery Man) (1988) combines charcoal, pastel and acrylic on paper; it depicts the artist’s face over and over, in varying states of distortion, as though disappearing or disintegrating. Reflecting the instability of the self-portrait, it questions the notion of identity itself as a fixed concept.In the late 1980s Parr began to experiment with printmaking. Lacking formal training, he explored a range of techniques without the constraints of tradition or convention, often employing several approaches simultaneously, sometimes using his body as a tool to abrade and disfigure the paper surface. The lung, 12 untitled self portraits (1991) combines drypoint and aquatint
