LUKE PARKER
harmacy, 2003 

Exhibited: Front Room, Sydney 2003 

artist statement 



In early September 2001, I bought a postcard of an artwork by John Baldessari, from the Museum of Contemporary Art store in Los Angeles: Two Highrises (With Disruptions) / Two Witnesses (Red and Green) 1990, a double-panelled work of re-photographed found images. In the upper panel, painted circles obscure the faces of two standing figures; in the lower, two highrises are depicted mid catastrophic explosion. A few days after I purchased the postcard, the World Trade Center in New York collapsed. 

I was fascinated how Baldessari's work, made in 1990, foreshadowed September 11, and by my own involvement in this premonition via the act of purchasing the postcard a few days before the ‘real’ event. A global spectacle of terror reverberated with a strange personal coincidence. 

I had been making work incorporating chance and coincidence, as well as using readymade images, when, in 2002, I began to make a work using Baldessari’s piece as a formula or blueprint. I collected images of the real twin towers exploding, choosing those that resembled the highrises in Baldessari's work. I matched these with found images of two figures, compositionally echoing, as in the original work, the positions of the bodies above with the towers below. Finally, I painted circles to obscure the faces of the ‘witnesses’. 

The title of the work, harmacy, is taken from an album by the band Sebadoh. The cover image of the album is of the facade of a pharmacy, in which the shop’s sign is missing its ‘P’, thus reading HARMACY. I liked the associations that this non-word evoked, such as ‘harm’ and ‘harmony’. The title also relates to Duchamp's early readymade, Pharmacy (1914), in which he bought a second-hand landscape painting and added two small spots of colour (red and green), before signing and dating the work as his own. It is surely this work that Baldessari was referencing when he added red and green circles to his own ‘found' image.