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Melbourne gallery owner Anna Schwartz says she felt performance artist Mike Parr was intentionally ending their 36-year relationship by creating a political artwork in her gallery that made her feel “sick”.
Schwartz, who had represented Parr for decades until last week, has explained the reason she dropped him was because he painted the word “Nazi” next to the word “Israel” in blood-red in a performance at her gallery earlier this month.
Anna Schwartz has spoken about why she dropped artist Mike Parr from her gallery.Credit: Joe Armao
“Mike Parr is the greatest artist this country has ever and perhaps will ever produce,” she said.
“This work started out with slogans on the wall, and they were being painted blind, it was not very coherent. But when it got to the point of the word ‘Nazi’ and the word ‘Israel’ being on the wall together, whatever the intention … the co-appearance of the word Nazi with the word Israel made me sick.”
Parr, 78, received an email the morning after his performance, saying his relationship with the gallery had been terminated.
Speaking on ABC’s Radio National on Monday morning, Schwartz said she felt Parr’s performance piece on December 2 was his intentional ending of their relationship.
She said the artist told her before the show: “‘I don’t want to hurt you Anna’, but he did hurt me, it was an intentional ending of a relationship that was fundamental to me.”
Schwartz said she and her husband Morry, who owns Schwartz Media, both had family directly impacted by and killed in the Holocaust. Those who survived had chosen Australia to move to, to get as far away from the “madness” as possible.
She said for 36 years she had provided a “neutral platform of support” for Parr, but could no longer do that.
“I can’t work with an artist who has chosen to hurt me and insult my culture and the generations who come before me who have been annihilated,” she said.
“I’ve had hundreds of emails of support from a really wide range of people from Jewish people to directors of museums respecting and empathising with what I’ve done,” Schwartz said.
However, she said the work remains in place at her gallery because she believes firmly in the sanctity of the art.
“It is art and I have allowed that art to stay on the walls of the gallery,” she said. The gallery in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane had been overrun with visitors keen to see Parr’s work this past weekend, as well as the four-and-a-half-hour video of the performance.
“I think we had more people in the gallery than we’ve ever had. And most of those people had never been to my gallery before and didn’t even know who Mike Parr was.
“I am not censoring art,” she said. “I do believe in the sanctity and integrity of the artwork as presented by the artist,” she said of Parr’s work.
She also spoke about the three Sydney Theatre Company performers who wore keffiyeh scarves during the opening night performance curtain call of The Seagull.
The difference, she said, was: “They didn’t make an incursion into Chekhov’s work”, whereas “the work in a gallery is sacrosanct.”
Parr doesn’t deny writing individual words but says he never wrote a statement that included the words “Nazi” and Israel”. He said he did the performance blind (by shutting his eyes), and was using the wider context of stories he had read in the London Review of Books.
“I came in blind, and I left blind. I will never see the outcome of any aspect of that performance,” he said.
“Anna has seen those words ‘Nazi’ and ‘Israel’ and authored her own response, that was not my intention.”
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