Mike Parr is an Australian performance artist with a spoiled arm; one of the most accurate bodily interlocutors from the antipodes. I like what he produced, especially the fact that he was producing strong body performances during the seventies, began drawing in the eighties and then returned again to body based performances in recent times. I think there is space for body work. He tests his own physical limits: living in gallery for ten days with only water, nailing himself to a wall for 30 hours and broadcasting it over the internet, stitching his face together. And taking 100 breaths through paper self portraits and suffering the resulting oxygen deprivation; “i was wondering if i could just sort of breathe them onto my face”. I like all of this a lot. But isn’t it a bit crass and vulgar for the 10′s? Not that the nineties have all the rights to self destruction, but there is something surprisingly dated about waste, including the waste involved in damaging yourself. Maybe this is part of the tension that makes the work interesting. I am now thinking of Parrs’ small mutilated left arm. He was born with that arm, it holds sway as an attention seeking physicality, staking prime psychic locations and drafting unique schema for him to view the world through; how could his work not involve physical damage? Accuracy, even false accuracy, is more important than timeliness. Mike Parr will participate in the 3rd Moscow Biennale taking place this year. Video of Mike Parr explaining his show at the Sydney Biennale, video of another man called Mike Parr explaining something and video of another man called Mike Parr kicking a football.