Pain is one of my measures of intensity and limit states. I became a performance artist to communicate mental states that couldn’t be communicated in any other way. Pain then is my antidote to anxiety. Pain is a full stop while anxiety is indeterminate, erosive. My body art of the early 1970’s was a very harsh imposition on both the audience and myself, but I needed to go to these extremes in order to get control of impulses that were threatening to overwhelm me.

1972. Arrange for a friend to bite into your shoulder. He or she should continue biting for as long as possible or until their mouth is filled with blood.

Not only was this script the product, like all my scripts, of endless re-writings, but by the time I came to do it, it was like a hallucination. I could see the room to an extraordinarily heightened degree. I could see the audience pushed back in front of me, and the white painted plain kitchen chair, and the harsh lighting, and when Peter Kennedy rolled up my sleeve and bit hard into the top of my right arm, I knew immediately that any reaction on my part would rupture the invisible barrier separating me from the audience and that the performance would be over before it had really started. I had this realisation in a flash. I held the audience at bay even while my body was shaking with pain.

The audience explosion came at the end, but it came on my terms, so the outrage and the revulsion didn’t matter, and it was with this performance that performance art was born for me. It was only years later that I realised what the whole thing really meant. That I was willing Kennedy to bite my arm off to impose a radical symmetry on my body and to reveal the stump of my left arm by severing my right arm.

This is what I mean when I say that performance art enables me to think. 'Performance for as long as possible' accentuated all of this and through the 1970’s I came to think of pain as a kind of materiality, as 'a thing in itself', and pain became a defining aesthetic parameter for me, but using pain in this way imposed a kind of unbridgeable gulf between myself and the audience.

I want to say more about this gulf because I’ve come to realise that the audience as such is a kind of abstraction for me and that my extreme performances are a form of necessary aggression—that I am trying to bridge some sort of unbridgeable gap. Doing performances as opposed to thinking them, immediately made that clear, so body art for me was a kind of fission/fusion machine that exacerbated the problem of anxiety by intensifying the feelings of alienation and loss. I was intensifying states of repression and making them explosive, and I was implicating audiences in the most ruthless, totalising way, I was completely unapologetic and messianic about this. This aspect of my work has never really moderated, so I need the hostility of the artworld and in my mind it gradually dawned on me that this resistance was a primitive kind of politics.

I think my body art of the 1970’s was more fundamentally oppositional and political than any of my more ostensibly political work of recent decades, because my spectacle of performance instinctively went to the alienation at the heart of spectacle.

In the late 1960’s I became very interested in the writings of Yukio Mishima, because his violently visualised scenes were filled with an incandescent lyricism that intoxicated me, but it was impossible not to know that his lyricism in extremis was also an aestheticised fascistic politic.

This violent splitting of self in relation to people experienced as “audience” was only possible because of pain doled out as quanta and by a kind of objectification of both self and social, so quite early then, in the 1970’s, quanta of pain became associated in my mind with measurement, which led directly to the works done in Europe in 1973 that parodied both minimalist form and conceptual paradigms of measurement.

Works of mine like Tackline (1973) in which I trained myself to push thumb tacks into my leg very rapidly and at exact intervals. A bizarre figure/ground demonstration according to minimalist/conceptual precedents that used the human body as a kind of amnesiac “ground”; a ground that dispenses with the notion of empathy or identification.

Unnatural pain then can certainly be performed because it condenses the purely natural as a kind of Grand Guignol obscenity. It was also my way to manage anxieties around fascistic character structures by turning new levels of anxiety into ironised 'idea demonstrations'.

Idea Demonstrations, 1972, was the title of a film documenting 25 performances that Peter Kennedy and I produced in the aftermath of my first self-aggression pieces. I’d do a piece and he’d improvise a reaction or vice versa and the camera was used a bit like the ventriloquist and his dummy. We were intending to socialise anti-social art works, but we didn’t get very far and in double quick time our working relationship came to an end.

The 'Wound by Measurement' series came after the Idea Demonstrations film in the context of Rules and Displacement Activities Part 1 – Part 111, 1974 - 1983. They were parodic works because the idea of the social had again become a distant pole. All my performance work is driven by psychic upheaval and intense ambivalence and what resolution occurs, occurs only provisionally. 

Blind Painting, 2024

Rhetoric.
It’s the autonomy of process and materiality as against composition and “intentioned taste”.
A critical totalisation of difference.
The incurability of my difference as a continuously emerging form-principle.
The ad infinitum of abstract art.
Art authored by its audience.
The bulimic of its consumption.
The solipsism of the end of the image.

If I want to seek refuge within myself and thus come to rest inside myself, I will find that the other is already there and that I am the guest of the other.
–Derrida paraphrasing Levinas.¹

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art, rational
–Theodor Adorno.²

My A/V presentation for the Material Image conference included video of two performances that explicitly supported the Palestinians. The GOING HOME performance was presented at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne on the afternoon of Saturday 2 December 2023. I entered the gallery blind and for four and a half hours I painted blind. As with all my performances I’d written a detailed script. For this particular performance the script was a list of 30 statements strongly influenced by my reading of the London Review of Books and the Guardian Australia. Statements like 'Israel was founded on the forced displacement of the Palestinian people', 'An illegal Israeli settler population of 730,000 on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem', 'In Gaza 2.3 million Palestinians have been trapped for 16 years in the world’s largest open-air prison'. But all the statements I wrote were inflected by my own personal anxiety and doubts about my right to speak to a conflict that I could only read about. Re-reading these 30 statements now I’m aware of my confusion, my naivety and increasing feeling of dread emerging from my awareness that the Israeli assault on Gaza had only just begun and that the consequences of this vengeance war reached beyond the Palestinians to darken the future of the  twenty first century. So, this was also a performance about self-censorship. About what I felt I had to say but what I was also frightened to say and the statements I wrote on the wall went, I now feel, to my confusion, in a stilted, disconnected and absurd way, 'It’s the mandatory silence that is antisemitic'. 'You’re a Nazi, Mike' (yes, I knew I would be accused of that!). 'You cannot dream the unconscious away', Jacqueline Rose. 'What is clear is a decoy'. 'The monochrome is a cover up'. 'The number of dead Palestinians is truly unbearable', Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, and finally, 'The more you say the closer you get to what you don’t mean'.

Robert Campbell who works for Anna Schwartz Gallery read the statements and I scrawled them in darkness and blindness down the 33 meters of the gallery wall, across the great plywood sites that had been fixed into place at intervals against the wall and painted gallery white by Anna Schwartz’s staff to preserve the red monochromes of the final painting out. These three, 3 x 4.8 meter blind paintings, Gotaro’s four and a half hours of video, Zan Wimberley’s blind photography, a small framed text authored by the Mexican/Indian artist James Lana that I’d appropriated, plus four and a half hours of Erik Jensen’s dedicated written witnessing, are the relics that remain of this performance. As the Australian artworld now knows this performance ended my 36-year relationship with Anna Schwartz Gallery. Nearly two years on Gaza has been utterly destroyed, nearly 60,000 Palestinian civilians have died, mostly women and children, and the end is still not in sight.

The second performance done in support of the Palestinians closely followed the one that ended my relationship with Anna Schwartz and her gallery. I was invited to do this performance by Ruth McKenzie, the Director of the 2024 Adelaide Festival and Marina Abramović’s Marina Abramović Institute (MAI). The piece was to be called Portrait of Marina Abramović. Marina Abramović and I have been friends since we first met (with her then collaborator Ulay too) at the 1977 Paris Biennale des Jeunes to which we’d been invited along with many others, as performance artists, by the curator Tommaso Trini. I began the piece by painting two statements: GAZA IS THE WARSAW GHETTO and FREE PALESTINE IS THE NEW HAIL HITLER – Die Welt 15/12/2023. I painted both these sites out one after the other as I moved around the huge "box", painting alternating red and black squares blind on the walls. Supported by my small team, Gotaro Uematsu my cinematographer, Zan Wimberley my photographer, Timothy Vernon Moore and Lauren Brincat my co-performers I painted blind continuously for 12 hours, but the statements written to introduce the piece and declare our support for the Palestinians, faded in the memory of our audience, who experienced a kind of eternal return as a young woman, Rebecca Khoury, beautifully dressed and made up, circled the vast theatre space in which my box-set was located, offering guests a statement on a silver platter: A VISION of the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz.

This twelve hour performance received a long and equivocal review in the Australian newspaper which referred to me as 'Australia’s most extreme performance artist' performing 'with one arm – the only arm he has' and that they 'silently wish he would just stop'.³ They’ve been wishing that for the last 50 years and more.

My third and final performance in support of the Palestinians comes as Gaza is completely destroyed and nearly 60,000 Palestinian civilians, mainly women and children have died, and complete destitution and abandonment inflicts the starving survivors. I think of Turning a Blind Eye as a requiem in the face of these monstrosities... this crime against humanity.

I did this performance at SYRUP Contemporary in Marrickville at 6pm, 6 September 2025.

The performance itself will end as a three-week installation, the first stage of a two stage exhibition at the gallery; a six weeks long exhibition threaded through with my thoughts and feelings about the tragedy that continues to be inflicted on the Palestinian people and the numbness of the democratic world’s response. The numbness indeed of most of us in the so-called “developed world”.

To set the scene for my performance I will install six big text sheets, greatly enlarged A4’s from my humble black and white printer. These will be two articles: one from Art News reporting the death of a young Palestinian woman, Dina Khaled Zaurub, who had become much loved for her portrait drawings of the bereaved, while the other is reportage on the situation in both Gaza and the West Bank by Selma Dabbagh, a Palestinian writer and lawyer based in the UK, who is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. As she writes in her 23 April 2025 dispatch, 'According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in 36 of the 224 Israeli strikes on residential buildings and tents for the displaced between 18 March and 9 April, the fatalities recorded so far were only women and children. More than 15,000 children in Gaza have been killed since October 2023 and 39,000 have lost either one or both parents. According to UNICEF, Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world'.⁴

The big text sheets will occupy the left wall of the long space while the right wall will be filled with large black and white photographs of negative self-portraits by me. Portraits from the time before I could draw, portraits that are appropriately elemental as representations... that negate the notion of self-portraiture. I will enter this space blind and I will paint clockwise 'towards a black square'. A multitude of black patches at the limit of my reach that will encompass all three walls of the gallery. An action intended/imagined to randomly interrupt and deface much of the text and photographic imagery on the walls. Black squares as symbols of mourning and loss that speak to the suspended state of Palestinian lives and to the choked-off representation that has cost so many journalists their lives.

Gotaro Uematsu and Zan Wimberley will film and photograph continuously as always and their documentation will extend the aftermath of the performance as an installation. Lauren Brincat will work with me directly, as my dedicated co-performer handing up the buckets of black paint to my blind brush.

Following this performance two simple trestle tables will be positioned at the center of the wall of text and covered with the last two years of my reading from the LRB and the Guardian—a great swathe that has kept pace with every stage of this emerging disaster.

Looking at the heap of printouts on my work bench, perhaps more than 300 pieces from a multitude of writers. The audience for this performance installation will be free to sit and read but not take articles away.

I’ve delivered a long synopsis, but I want my readers to understand well what I’m proposing.

........................

I want to end this description of my performances by going to a featured essay in the Sunday Guardian of 6 July 2025. Moustafa Bayoumi’s piece is titled The Destruction of Palestine is Breaking the World. I end Routines of Performance Art with the final paragraphs of his long essay:

No-one knows what will come to replace the international system that is currently collapsing around us, but any political system that prioritises punishing those who protest genocide rather than stopping the killing has clearly exhausted itself.

If there’s a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence. We may have seen a small example of that courage in New York City recently, and I’m not only talking about Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic party nomination for mayor. That same day, two of Brooklyn’s progressive politicians, Alexa Aviles and Shahana Hanif, were running for renomination. Both supported Palestine, both were relentlessly attacked for their positions on Gaza. And both refused to change their views. Pro-Israel donors poured money into their opponents’ campaigns. Yet both handily won their races.

Multiple factors go into winning any political campaign, but any expressed support for Palestine used to be a death knell. Could it be that we’re on the cusp of change? Maybe Palestinian freedom is no longer a liability but is now a real winning position in politics?

Palestine is perhaps the clearest expression today, as Sereen Haddad told me, of how “power feels threatened by the truth”. She continued: “If they are so afraid of a student with a sign or a chalked message or a demand for justice, then we are stronger than they want us to believe”. She better be right. For all our sakes. (Sereen Haddad was that student with a sign. Her diploma is being withheld by Virginia Commonwealth University. She suffered a head trauma from a police beating during the students’ peaceful protest).⁵