PETER BURKE: SERIAL PERSONALITIES. SERIAL INTERVENTIONIST

Lily Hibberd
Photofile (issue 75) 2005

Peter Burke makes art that participates in the hottest actions of subversive politics while confronting the dilemma of how art might speak with the masses. You won’t have heard of him because he evades orderly artistic classification by working undercover, employing fabricated personalities and mass media forums to create super-fictions that operate on a public scale. Indeed, if you’ve been in Melbourne lately, you’ve probably come across something Burke is responsible for, pasted on walls, dumped on your doorstep, shoved in your face at Flinders Street Station, or on massive billboards at major intersections and inner suburban train stations. Burke takes art from the gallery and onto the street so that he might commune with ordinary people, and he takes advantage of our reception of mass media forms as a means to confront the crises of the human condition in contemporary society.

Contrary to principles of psychiatry, having more than one personality can be good. Burke has at least five that we know of. Debunking the myth of individual artistic genius, he adopts a pseudonym for each major project he embarks on. These invented characters follow in the footsteps of art hoaxes going back to Marcel Duchamp’s R Mutt – infamous for his urinal, Fountain (1917) – and later celebrated performance art characters, such as Joseph Beuys and the British art duo Gilbert & George. Identity fictions have become ever more popular in recent practice, to the extent that superfictions are the cultural premise for entire biennales.

References aside, the use of multiple personalities allows Burke to forego the usual road to personal recognition. Anonymity permits him crucial liberties. These are precisely the same powers and sunny freedoms that media moguls bask in: public consensus in the passive reception of messages. One of Burke’s first super-fictions was the FutureX performance in late 1999. In the last hours of the millennium, self-professed scientist Professor Clarence Chan distributed a batch of 2000 Millennium Pills – the antidote to the Y2k bug – to pedestrians on the streets of Melbourne. FutureX was said to question and participate in the intense media hype leading up to the millennium and the notorious Y2k bug.
Burke’s earlier forays into mass media communications – operating outside of the gallery and on the street – were via headlines and newspapers. Adopting the pseudonym of “Max”, between 1998 and 2004 Burke pasted at least 600 newspaper headlines on the facades of the abandoned Herald Weekly Times building in Flinders Street and other locations around inner city Melbourne. The early slogans dealt with the poetics of everyday life, exposing the profound in the mundane with headlines such as SHOE LOSES SOLE and SNAIL EATS MAIL. Later the headlines played on current popular events, for example the Olympic Games and RACE RELATIONS, and at the turn of the Millennium with the headline HISTORY REPEATS.

In September 1998 Burke produced the Commuter News, a 16-page tabloid. Commuter News was distributed throughout subways and on trams and trains around the central Melbourne. The cover story was “Man loses button” and there were other lyrical headlines such as PERFUME FILLS TRAIN and HAPPINESS OUTBREAK–EPIDEMIC PROPORTIONS. Burke then published a second newspaper in March 2002, the Pedestrian Times. Paperboys on the steps on Flinders Street Station handed it out during peak hour. In super-fiction style, many of the photos of the characters were of Peter Burke dressed up; half the advertisements were real and half fictional, and the Page 3 pin-up girl was one of Burke’s fledgling characters – Shelly Innocence.

Art movements like Dada, Fluxus and the Situationists have established precedents for art as social activism – and right now the ‘intervention’ is the fashionable form of protest being showcased in the galleries. Admit it, it’s not art for the masses. Besides, there’s a widespread perception of art as an elitist endeavour that logically prevents artists from taking a publicly accepted critical stance against society. Regardless it is clearly absurd that so few artists in Australia are engaging in any sceptical way with the implications of an unregulated mass media – other than some large displays with genteel social critique like the billboard projects by Patricia Piccinini and Julie Rrap shown on La Trobe Street in 2004.

A number of artists on the international scene, however, have enlisted public mass media forms a means of intervention and analysis, like the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) and Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). These collaborative art actions run parallel to an upsurge in the workings of activists, such as Adbusters, under the banner of ‘culture jamming.

Burke recognises the challenge. In Pedestrian Times and Commuter News he reflects on the news and the clichéd way it is reported to a seemingly uncritical public readership, and yet the sentiments lurking behind his jibes are more sympathetic than accusatory. Burke has a stab at the ‘art doing politics’ in a post-critical climate and the white cube versions look a bit pathetic compared to the directness of Burke’s engagement, let alone the sheer scale.

By engaging in mass media campaigns, Burke does culture jamming too. Starlink Express involved Peter Burke and Robin Hely carrying a huge parcel around Melbourne looking for (falsified) delivery addresses. Hidden video cameras captured Starlink’s encounters with an unwitting public, whereby the street became a lively performance space for improvised narratives, the mysterious parcel a MacGuffin (Hitchcock’s metaphor for a nameless object of desire). On Monday 15 July 2002, Starlink Express made a delivery of 100 cardboard boxes to Post Office Square in Elizabeth Street. Burke and Hely bombarded media outlets with propaganda and it was reported several times in Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper. The headlines read: “What a load of rubbish, or is it art?” (17 July); “Box full of mystery” (19 July) and “Serial box mystery deepens” (23 July). The upshot of Starlink is that it made interventions into everyday life that toyed with the public’s -– and surprisingly, the media’s expectations of truth, namely the necessary faith that both the person in uniform and package are what they appear to be. Starlink raises an ensuing dilemma: why is it that Australians are such great sceptics and yet are so easily sucked in by media mirages?

The retort to this conundrum and the culmination of Burke’s interventions was the Innocence™ project. Through a series of public displays and performances, Innocence™ functioned as a full-blown marketing campaign, for which Burke invented a corporate image, as an experiment in manipulating public perception. Shelly Innocence, a former supermodel, international athlete and a retail in-store demonstrator, was the face of the campaign and her product range included Honesty™, Integrity™, Hope™ and Trust™ and Happiness™. Between 15 May and 30 July 2004 six billboard displays promoted these products with slogans like: “INTEGRITY™ It’s not for everyone” at Richmond Station; and “HONESTY™ The truth hurts” at North Melbourne Station. Innocence™ challenged the fine line between art and advertising via “direct marketing of the human spirit”; it engaged the public with the consumable fictions as a critique of advertising and commerce. In the guise of Shelly, Burke sought to reinvest meaning in a world of commodities where the truth had become indiscernible from fiction – an ambitious task but not one without justification.

The art of Peter Burke operates on the wholesale faith that mass media commands and his work is a public conversation that whispers a wake up call to whoever might be listening. It’s a simple message: none of us are innocent because we are complicit in our daily consumption of media.

Lily Hibberd is a Melbourne based artist, lecturer and editor of un magazine