An Australian Accent

Mike Parr
born 1945 in Sydney, Australia
lives and works in Sydney 

Imants Tillers
born 1950 in Sydney, Australia
lives and works in Cooma, Australia

Ken Unsworth
born 1931 in Bendigo, Australia
lives and works in Sydney, Australia

Mike Parr
Mike Parr has built a special place for himself in Australian art history. In 1970, he helped organise Inhibodress, the first artist-run space in the country; through the 1980s, he helped internationalise Australian art; while his own work has deepened the history of self-contemplative art (begun around 1629 with Rembrandt). Widely known as a performance artist, Parr’s videos, drawings, photographs and other works play out obsessive themes: the illusion of control by the language of art (photography, the alphabet, the perspective corridor, the editing machine, the self as a container of likeness) and the real threat of collapse in that control. The overall effect is this contest between hallucinatory omnipotence and the uncontrollability of reality; a body of work that underlines the fact that, as an experience, art puts power and powerlessness together like nothing else.

See also Mike Parr, Sherman Galleries.

Imants Tillers
In many ways Imants Tillers is less a painter of paintings, than a diagnostician of the image. With other artists of his generation such as Peter Tyndall, John Nixon, Lindy Lee, Robert Macpherson, Dale Frank, Janet Burchill and John Young, he could be said to belong to a school of ‘conceptual painting’ or deconstructive painting. His aesthetic literacy, and his sensitivity to art-historical context, is formidable. A child of immigrant Latvian parents who met in a displaced person’s camp, Tillers grew up in Australia, but has been haunted by unthinkably complex causal lines, and how they intersect, in life and art. How chancy it is to be born in Australia, rather than Latvia or America, for example.

With his numbered canvas boards, grids and stacks, Tillers’ works come under a rule-governed generative system that proposes an infinite series. This is an ambitious project reconciling life and art, which the artist called One painting, then the Book of power. It is like a parallel universe, or philosophical fiction, recalling Mallarme’s concept of The Book (‘All the world exists to be enclosed in a book’), or Jorge Luis Borges’ idea of The Library.

See also Imants Tillers, Sherman Galleries.

Ken Unsworth
Ken Unsworth started as a painter but began making sculpture when he was working at Bathurst Teachers College in 1966. His oeuvre spans four decades in about seven different practices that have evolved simultaneously: site-specific land-based art, performance (with his own body used as a component in the presentation), motorised relief works, work with river stones (his Suspended stone circle II in the Art Gallery of NSW is one of Australia’s most popular public works), large bitumen drawings, maquettes, and room-sized installations.

Unsworth’s art is founded in the magic and mystery of hidden forces. No label –surrealist, expressionist, symbolist – quite accounts for its recurring emotional power. There are affinities with Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz and Louise Bourgeois. Often bitterly funny, his work mixes light and dark in ways that keep us off-balance.

See also Ken Unsworth, Boutwell Draper Gallery.

Read more about the Australian Accent 1984 Kaldor project.