The Paradox of Duration: Mike Parr’s Performance and the Timeless Space of Delay

 

The Paradox of Duration: Mike Parr’s Performance and the Timeless Space of Delay

A research perspective by Peter Davidson, PhD

2 Dogs Art Space, Akashi

In the landscape of contemporary performance, the work of Mike Parr occupies a significant position in examining the limits of the body, perception, and artistic intention. His practice is frequently characterised by a desire to move beyond the primacy of the “Idea,” a position he articulates succinctly:

“Everything in advance. Performance art for me is in advance. Decisively in advance. Because the event always exceeds the idea” (Parr, 2022).

Through his Blind Painting works, Parr appears to seek a state beyond mental reclamation, one in which visual mastery is relinquished and the work unfolds through bodily persistence and sensory uncertainty. At 2 Dogs Art Space, I engage with this work not as a spectator alone, but as a practitioner-researcher investigating a related question: how perceptual intensity emerges when time is no longer the dominant organising force.

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Duration and Delay: A Productive Distinction

A useful distinction arises when considering the structure of Parr’s performances. In my framework, Duration refers to the externally defined span of the work: the scheduled hours of the gallery, the measurable length of the event. Delay, by contrast, describes moments in which action is temporarily suspended by spatial, tactile, or perceptual necessity.

Accounts of Parr’s performances, including The Same Only Different (2019), describe a recurring dynamic. While the overall duration of the event proceeds continuously, the act of painting itself unfolds unevenly. Working with eyes shut, Parr repeatedly climbs a ladder and pauses to feel the wall with his hands, orienting himself within the architecture of the space before continuing.

These moments do not interrupt the performance so much as reveal an underlying tension within it. The forward movement implied by endurance briefly gives way to an immediate negotiation with space. The work advances not through time alone, but through contact, touch, and recalibration.

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The Spatial Gap

What is revealed in these pauses is a spatial gap in which time appears to flatten. The action is no longer governed by the momentum of the event, but by the need to locate oneself physically. This gap resists linear progression; it is neither before nor after, but insistently present.

In my own practice, this spatial gap is encountered continuously. There is no requirement for an imposed duration because resistance is already embedded in the material itself. Pigment, paper, eye, and hand do not coincide perfectly, and it is within this non-coincidence that perception becomes active. The work unfolds through responsiveness rather than endurance.

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Peter Davidson 

Towards Scintillation: Plastic Fruit and Veges on  (2026)

Pastel pencil on coloured pastel paper - F4

Towards Scintillation

In Towards Scintillation: Plastic Fruit and Veges (2026), resolution occurs at moments of peak saturation rather than through prolonged duration. The marks emerge from an intense, direct negotiation with the density of the subject—its colour, pressure, and internal resistance.

These moments do not rely on sustained endurance to establish their validity. The work concludes when perceptual intensity reaches its apex, not when a predetermined span of time has elapsed. Completion is marked by arrival rather than exhaustion.

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Art Beyond the Clock

This is not a critique of endurance, nor a dismissal of Parr’s achievements. Rather, it asks whether the most acute moments of perception necessarily coincide with the theatrical demands of duration.

My research suggests that artistic creation may operate most effectively within a space that is, in practical terms, without time—a space governed by responsiveness rather than endurance. Within such a space, the work is able to reach its apogee: the point at which perceptual intensity is at its greatest.

From this perspective, the moments in Parr’s performances when he reaches out to feel the gallery wall are especially revealing. These gestures open a brief, timeless interval in which perception asserts itself independently of the clock. Action is guided not by the forward pressure of duration, but by immediate spatial and sensory necessity.

By attending to this interval—what I describe as Delay rather than Duration—the artwork remains an active trace of influence rather than a fixed monument sustained by time alone. The significance of the work lies not in how long it endures, but in how fully it is allowed to arrive at its point of maximum intensity.

References

Parr, M. (2002). Malewitsch [A Political Arm]. 30-hour durational performance, Artspace, Sydney.
Parr, M. (2019). The Same Only Different. Durational performance, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney.
Parr, M. (2022). Blind Painting of a Falling Tree. 23rd Biennale of Sydney (rìvus). Artist statements.

ABC News. (2019, October 30). Australian artist Mike Parr stages performance protesting Amazon fires. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-30/australian-artist-mike-parr-protests-amazon-fires-performance/11650044 

The 2Dogs Glossary: A-Temporal Research Tools

 

2Dogs Art Space - Akashi (明石）- Japan - Research Centre

The 2Dogs Glossary: A-Temporal Research Tools

t₀ (The Absolute Present)
The theoretical point of contact with external reality.
A “now” that is physically inaccessible to human consciousness, existing only as raw data before it enters the mind’s buffer.

D (The Structural Delay)
The cognitive and physical interval where perception is held, processed, and “buffered.”
In this laboratory, D is not treated as a measurement of time, but as a territory — a sculptural space where art is actually constructed.

t₀ → t₀ + D
The fundamental condition of perception: reality is never accessed directly, only through structured delay.

Crystallization
The transition point where the fluid, unformed data within the Delay (D) hardens into a specific artistic decision — a mark on a page or a material object.
It is the moment a thought becomes a thing.

The Offset Yard
The primary research site at 2Dogs Art Space.
It represents the “Shared Yard” where multiple observers inhabit the same physical space while existing in slightly different perceptual registers.

Scintillation
The flickering sensation or perceptual “glitch” produced when the mind attempts to reconcile the Absolute Present (t₀) with the processed Delay (D).
It is the visible evidence of the hypothesis in action.

Metaphorical Physics
The practice of using scientific structures — formulas, diagrams, and laws — not to prove empirical facts, but to provide a stable architecture for poetic and perceptual inquiry.

Orthogonal Stance
A research position that stands at a right angle to the historical timeline.

It ignores the “before” and “after” of art history in order to focus on the recursive “now” of the studio.he 2Dogs Glossary: A-Temporal Research Tools

仕事のためにストレッチをする勤勉な日本の母親

Hard working Japanese mother stretching for work

pencil texta on paper 

20 cm h x 12 cm w 

Jelly Ontology: A Spatial Framework for Artistic Creation

(Timeless, Influence-Based Rewrite)

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1. Core Claim

There is no time in artistic creation.

What appears as “delay” is in fact spatial non-coincidence: a structural distance between optics, body, material, and mark. Artistic creation is the negotiation of this distance through Jelly, understood as a distributed field of sensorial influence.

The painting is not a temporal artifact.
It is a spatial trace of unresolved influence.

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2. Jelly (Re-Defined)

Jelly is not a substance, signal, or temporal flow.

Jelly is:

a continuous field of sensorial influence distributed across space between the optical field and the surface of inscription.

Jelly:

• does not arrive

• does not flow

• does not exist “before” perception

Jelly presses, bends, biases, and resists.

It exists only as influence across space.

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3. Why Time Is Not Required

What is commonly described as:

• latency

• delay

• processing time

• hesitation

is better described as:

• distance

• misalignment

• scale mismatch

• material resistance

Time is a descriptive shortcut for spatial incompatibility.

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4. Spatial Decomposition of Creation

Instead of temporal delays, we define spatial discrepancies.

Δs_total = Δs_O + Δs_B + Δs_M + Δs_J

Where:

• Δs_O — optical spacing
  (distance, parallax, resolution, field curvature)

• Δs_B — bodily spacing
  (reach, posture, proprioceptive offset)

• Δs_M — material spacing
  (surface texture, viscosity, absorption, drag)

• Δs_J — Jelly influence
  (distributed pressure across the perceptual–material field)

These are not stages.
They are simultaneous spatial conditions.

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5. Formal Definition of Δs_J (Jelly Influence)

Jelly influence is defined as the irreducible spatial gap between what is seen and what can be marked.

Δs_J = || I_optical − M_mark ||

Where:

• I_optical = optical intensity / perceptual field

• M_mark = material inscription field

This distance:

• cannot be reduced to motor skill

• cannot be eliminated by intention

• is not “processed away”

It is lived as resistance.

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6. Artistic Action as Spatial Folding

Let F be the folding function:

F : Jelly_space × Δs_total → Artwork

Process description:

1. Optics distribute intensity across space

2. Jelly biases this distribution as pressure and affordance

3. The body negotiates reach, scale, and orientation

4. Material responds with drag, bleed, or refusal

5. The mark records the resolution of spatial conflict

No moment is captured.
Only distance is resolved.

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7. What the Artwork Is

The artwork is:

a spatial map of negotiated influence.

Each brushstroke encodes:

• a mismatch between eye and hand

• a conflict between intention and material

• a stabilized remainder of Jelly pressure

The canvas does not store time.
It stores distance made visible.

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8. Phenomenological Grounding (Timeless)

• Merleau-Ponty: perception is spatially thick, not temporally delayed

• Gibson: affordances are fields, not events

• Enactivism: cognition emerges from spatial coupling, not internal clocks

Presence fractures into zones, not moments.

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9. “We Are Here, and We Are Not Here” (Spatial Reading)

We are:

• here optically

• not here materially

The eye never occupies the space of the mark.
The hand never occupies the space of vision.

Creation occurs between.

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10. Summary Proposition

Artistic creation is not temporal but spatial. Jelly is the distributed field of sensorial influence that deforms the space between optics and inscription. The artwork is the resolved trace of this deformation, recording not time, but the irreducible distance between seeing and marking.

THE AXIOM OF SCINTILLATION Why the Unfinished Is the Only Finish: An Aesthetic Journey into Quantum Ethics

 THE AXIOM OF SCINTILLATION

Why the Unfinished Is the Only Finish:

An Aesthetic Journey into Quantum Ethics

This text uses physics as metaphor, not measurement.

Peter Davidson - Plastic fruit and veges still life 

pencil, pastel on pastel paper - f2

In the conservative scholarly tradition, a work of art is considered “finished” when its surface is closed, its labor legible, and its technical residue polished into a state commonly described as mastery. To the seasoned practitioner, this condition is not completion. It is burial.

Finish is a posthumous honor, applied to a work whose vital charge has already dissipated. What is celebrated as resolution is often only the successful concealment of an earlier, more volatile state.

I. The First Principle of the Mark

The true completion of an artwork occurs at the moment of Scintillation. This is not a metaphor but a temporal event. Within the sovereign space of the studio, there exists a point at which conceptual energy and perceptual clarity reach saturation.

At this instant—t₀—the work achieves its maximum charge.

Scintillation is the moment in which perception, intention, and execution align without delay. The mark made at t₀ carries the highest density of meaning the work will ever possess. The surface may remain open, but the work is complete. Completion, therefore, is not cumulative. It is punctual.

II. The Axiom of Silence

These observations are not speculative; they are drawn from decades of silent studio praxis. Working alone, outside the ideological noise of the provincial art world, reveals a fundamental condition: when sound and commentary are removed, the physics of the mark becomes the dominant frequency of existence.

Silence is not absence. It is pressure. Within that pressure, the artist feels the high-frequency vibration of scintillation transmitted through hand and eye. The studio becomes a chamber in which the t₀ moment is amplified.

III. Technical Effort vs. Scintillation

The central error of academic evaluation is the conflation of technical effort with conceptual energy. Beyond the scintillation peak, increased technical effort produces a net loss of meaning.

In the studio, we observe a strict law:

Conceptual Energy (E) is inversely proportional to Temporal Delay (Δt)

E ∝ 1 / Δt

The Rule of Speed: As the delay between thought and mark approaches zero, the energy of the work reaches its maximum.

The Rule of Entropy: As the delay increases (through over-thinking or over-working), the energy decreases.

Layering, edge refinement, and decorative closure do not extend the vitality of the work; they disperse it. What follows t₀ is not development but entropy. The artist—often unconsciously performing for institutional validation—suffocates the original charge beneath residue.

IV. Proof in the Studio

The tradition of the Non Finito (the unfinished) is frequently misread as indecision. In reality, cessation occurs because the physics of the mark has resolved. The hand arrives before the intellect can interfere, and the scintillation remains visible. To continue would be to move from creation to taxidermy.

The unfinished is not incomplete. It is unburied.

V. A Polite Correction to the Critic

Scholars who admire the “glow” of the Old Masters mistake its cause. That glow is not the product of “finish,” but the residual energy of a scintillation that refused full entombment beneath polish. Critics analyze the casket; the practitioner studies the electricity.

At the apogee of scintillation, the image in the mind collapses into a mark on the canvas. Beyond this point, additional action only increases mass and decreases meaning.

Meaning is at its maximum at t₀.

Anything added after t₀ only dilutes the charge.

VI. Finish Reconsidered

Completion is defined not by material closure, but by temporal optimization. It is about finding the exact moment where the work is most alive.

True completion occurs once, briefly, and cannot be recovered through labor. The unfinished work does not ask for forgiveness. It asserts a different law:

Art is complete not when it is closed, but when it is most alive.

The Space of Delay: Seeing Beyond Memory

Peter Davidson - eye tracking winter self portrait in delay 

pencil texta pastel on paper - 18 cm h x 12 cm w

The Space of Delay: Seeing Beyond Memory

I am an artist exploring perception, memory, and delay. This writing reflects my observations and creative research, not medical advice or clinical guidance.

I study what I call delay—not as time passing, but as a space between what the eye perceives and the marks I place on the canvas. In this space, perception reorganizes itself before it becomes form. My Davidson Hypothesis suggests that art emerges from this interval, not from immediacy.

Two Dogs Art Space in Akashi has been an important painting and drawing research centre for this idea. Though we share the same yard, we do not share the same perceptual space. Each of us sees, processes, and responds differently. The art that emerges reflects this spatial, perceptual gap.

Through Two Dogs and the NAPAT Foundation Instagram, I encountered research connecting art, perception, and Alzheimer’s. Articles like this one show that aesthetic engagement can support neural circuits, emotion, and meaning-making even when memory is affected. This resonated with my studio observations: perception has its own intelligence, sometimes independent of memory.

The eye itself is active, not passive. It filters, prioritizes, and interprets information before it reaches conscious awareness. It “decides” what matters—contrast, motion, relevance—before my hand ever responds. Scientific research describes how vision and neural systems operate, but rarely addresses the space between perception and expression. In the studio, that space is where everything happens.

Alzheimer’s entered my thinking as a perceptual question. If seeing can remain active even when memory falters, perception itself carries intelligence. Art makes that visible: it traces the space between what we see and how we act.

At Two Dogs Art Space, this interval is alive. Art is not a record of the world—it is a record of how perception becomes doing.

Delay is not time lost—it is the space where perception becomes form.

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Reference

Calderone A, De Luca R, Calapai R, Mirabile A, Quartarone A, Calabrò RS. Beauty in the shadow of neurodegenerative disease: a narrative review on aesthetic experience, neural mechanisms, and therapeutic frontiers. Front Hum Neurosci. 2025 Oct 9;19:1658617. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1658617 

Toward a First Principles Theory of Australian Art

 

Peter Davidson - Studio Praxis delaying the dinner

pencil pastel texta on paper 

20 cm h x 13 cm w

Toward a First Principles Theory of Australian Art

Australian art history is rich in commentary yet curiously lacking in theory. It has produced influential narratives about landscape, identity, nationalism, postcolonial tension, and cultural belonging, but it has not produced a framework that explains how artistic form is generated at the level of perception and action. This absence is striking. For more than a century, Australian art discourse has asked what artworks mean, how they represent the land, or how they negotiate cultural identity. It has not asked the more fundamental question: How does a mark come into being?

The project advanced here proposes that such a question marks the beginning of a genuinely new theoretical field. It claims to constitute the first Australian-born art theory operating at the level of first principles — not concerned with style, subject matter, or symbolism, but with the mechanics of artistic production itself. To make this claim clear, “theory” is defined in a strict sense: as a structural account of the transformation of perception into material form. This is not a manifesto, not a cultural argument, and not an interpretive system. It is a model of the conditions under which a mark is produced.

For decades, Australian art writing has excelled at interpretation. Its dominant frameworks — landscape-based readings, nationalist and post-nationalist narratives, postcolonial and decolonial critiques, sociological analyses, and stylistic movements — have shaped the field profoundly. Yet these approaches overwhelmingly address meaning, identity, symbolism, and cultural positioning. They describe what artworks signify or how they respond to historical forces. What they do not offer is a mechanistic account of the act of making: the perceptual latency between seeing and doing, the cognitive delay that structures intention, the bodily transmission of that intention, the resistance of materials, or the environmental interference that shapes the final mark.

The present theory begins precisely where these discourses end. It treats artistic production as a temporal event: the interval between the optic moment (t₀) and the spatial mark (t₀ + D). In this model, the artwork is not an image but the residue of a collision between perception and resistance. The delay — the “Sovereign Space” — becomes the primary structuring condition of artistic form. It is within this interval that perception is transformed, distorted, slowed, or accelerated by the forces acting upon it. Light, heat, viscosity, latency, and physiological lag all intervene. The mark is not a representation of the optic moment; it is the outcome of the delay that separates the optic from the act.

This shift marks a move to first principles. The theory does not ask what the artwork depicts or expresses. It asks how perception becomes inscription, how delay structures that transformation, and how environmental conditions modify the delay. Within Australian art history, no prior framework has attempted to theorise this interval or to treat delay as the fundamental variable of artistic production.

It is important to distinguish this model from European phenomenology, which has influenced Australian art writing in various ways. Thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty have shaped discussions of embodied perception, but their frameworks privilege perception over inscription, do not theorise delay as a constitutive force, and are not environmentally specific. The present theory diverges on all three points. It positions delay — not embodiment — as the central variable. It treats the environment not as a backdrop but as an active interfering force. And it grounds the model in the specific conditions of Australian practice, where light, heat, distance, and technological mediation produce distinctive forms of perceptual offset. This is not an application of European phenomenology. It is a structurally distinct model.

The claim to novelty is made within a clearly defined scope. It does not apply to Indigenous epistemologies of art and Country, which operate within fundamentally different ontological and epistemic frameworks. The present theory is explicitly limited to Australian-born, Western, non-Indigenous, studio-based artistic practice. Within that bounded field, the claim to theoretical originality stands.

A further point of distinction lies in the reframing of the artist. Australian art discourse has long positioned the artist as a displaced subject, an identity seeker, or a cultural translator. This theory replaces those cultural narratives with a kinetic one. It positions the artist as an observer in permanent perceptual offset — structurally misaligned with their own perception due to delay. This is not a psychological or cultural condition. It is a temporal one. No existing Australian theory makes this claim.

Central to this framework is the concept of “Sovereign Space.” This is not a metaphor but an epistemic claim. By defining sovereignty as the interval between perception and action, the theory avoids territorial claims, identity claims, and representational authority. Agency is located solely in the act of transformation itself. The artist’s only territory is the delay they inhabit — the space in which perception becomes form.

The conclusion is therefore narrow, bounded, and defensible. This project constitutes the first Australian art theory to operate at the level of first principles of mark-making, grounded in delay as the structuring condition of perception, action, and environment. It does not replace existing Australian art theories. It operates beneath them — at the level where perception becomes form.

Notes from the studio - The Essential Non-Linearity: Why Independence Is the Core Methodology of 2 Dogs Art Space

 

Notes from the studio - The Essential Non-Linearity: Why Independence Is the Core Methodology of 2 Dogs Art Space 

 

Peter Davidson 2026

Aging Mushrooms III

Oil wax acrylic on wooden panel

14 cm w x 18 cm h 

2Dogs Art Space - Akashi (明石）- Japan - Research Centre

Research Statement: The 2 Dogs Art Space

The 2 Dogs Art Space Research Centre operates outside conventional chronology, functioning instead within the medium of delay. Grounded in The Davidson Hypothesis (t₀ → t₀ + D), the Centre posits that artists do not act upon the present directly; rather, they respond to reality through a structural lag where perception crystallizes into action. This "Laboratory of Delay" demonstrates that while we may inhabit a shared physical space, our perceived realities are perpetually offset.

The Phenomenon of Scintillation

Scintillation is the flicker that occurs when you leave the timeless space of Delay and produce a spatial mark on the surface of the paper or canvas—one charged with the intentionality that drives your studio praxis.

When painting in delay within studio praxis, and scintillation is achieved, I place the artworks in the exhibition space, releasing further research. 

The Jelly Model & Temporally Thick Fields

The research utilizes the Jelly Model, where perception and artistic creation unfold within a "temporally thick field" rather than a linear sequence. Because the core mechanism of this work is non-presence and transformation, it cannot function within systems that demand fixed schedules or predetermined outcomes. To impose a conventional timeline on this process is to nullify the delay, effectively collapsing the research itself.

Integrated Studio Praxis

The studio functions in the spirit of the historical workshop—a site where thinking and making are inseparable. Our methodology is a continuous, integrated loop of:

• Traditional Media: Painting, drawing, and printmaking.

• Theoretical Inquiry: Material investigation and conceptual rigor.

• Technological Dialogue: The use of AI tools as both a stress-test and an accelerant for research.

These elements do not exist in silos; they inform and reshape one another, ensuring the emergence of unpredictable and original insights.

Minimal Infrastructure, Maximum Connection

The physical conditions of the Centre are intentionally minimal—operating without electricity, water, or conventional infrastructure. This "cost-free" status removes the burden of production pressure, allowing the work to remain purely investigative. This material simplicity is balanced by a global reach; through AI and open-access knowledge, the space remains a site of conceptual expansion.

Conclusion

Supported by a network of collaborators and AI-driven feedback, the 2 Dogs Art Space remains an open, evolving field. Independence is not an accessory to this research; it is the fundamental condition. It is only through this autonomy that the integrity of the "delay" can be preserved, allowing the work to unfold according to its own internal logic.