The notion of ‘theatre’ has haunted advanced Western art since Michael Fried's seminal essay on ‘Art and Objecthood’, which was Fried's foreseeing (and condemning in advance) of the genres of performance art, installation art and video art – indeed, the whole practice of what in time would come to be called postmodernism. Scheer begins by taking up this (in)famous analysis while arguing in favour of the terms Fried criticized. He describes as precisely the aim of Australian artist Mike Parr, whose performances often involve actions undertaken over hours or even days, to open up a ‘lived experience of time’ (p. 6), and to insist on presence of the artist in the same space as the spectator. The Infinity Machine offers detailed readings of what it understands to be the five stages of Parr's career: the early Rules and Displacements, in which Parr performs actions upon his own body; the Black Boxes, in which he incorporates modernist icons into his work; the Self-Portrait Project, which features self-portraiture as a form of performance; the Brides, in which he adopted the role of a transvestite bride; and the explicitly political work of the 2000s, which deals with the detention camps built to house asylum seekers in Australia.

Scheer differs from previous accounts of Parr's work in seeing his œuvre as essentially consistent. After an early period of direct actions, often involving attacks upon his own body, Parr abandoned performance for self-portraiture. He feared a kind of ‘photo-death’ or artistic self-consciousness that was entering the work, and which threatened to corrupt the intensity of physical affect he was striving for. He only returned to the genre in the 1990s, this time factoring in the mediating effects of technology by incorporating video and the Internet into the performances. Scheer – and this is the delicate line he attempts to tread – argues that the two modes of performance are not opposed, insofar as Parr's practice is described as always having involved a ‘double register’ of time, which claimed both presence and its very impossibility (p. 146).

At certain crucial points of Scheer's account, the terms of Fried's guiding opposition between modernism and minimalism become lost. On a simple level, it is incorrect to say that Parr would stage a ‘violent or ironic encounter’ with a minimalist object as a way of attacking modernist ‘timelessness’ (p. 6) because Minimalism itself is already this attack. More seriously, Scheer is unable to argue that Parr strives for a durational and self-aware spectatorship and at the same time describe his work as ‘against theatricality’ (p. 9), as though these two aspects could readily be reconciled. He attempts a complex analysis that is not always applied consistently to the work, but it does remind us of the high theoretical stakes involved in forming any adequate response to the works of this major Australian artist figure.