Thursday 8 February 2018

Cornelia Parker - Artist Research



Cornelia Parker 
 For Thirty Pieces of Silver (1989), she flattened a motley collection of silver-plated objects, including musical instruments, teapots, candlesticks and cutlery, under a steamroller, leaving them "robbed of their third dimension"




Taking on the role of curator, English sculptor and installation artist Parker has been inspired, in part, by the museum’s 18th century tokens: small items left by mothers with their babies as a means of identification should they ever return to the Foundling Hospital to claim their child. “In order for something to be ‘found’, it has to at some point in its history been ‘lost’ ” says Parker. Her intention is to create a “collective cacophony”.


Thirty Pieces of Silver comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver. When the work was exhibited in the Hayward Gallery’s British Art Show of 1990, Parker commented on the work in the exhibition catalogue: 

Silver is commemorative, the objects are landmarks in people’s lives. I wanted to change their meaning, their visibility, their worth, that is why I flattened them, consigning them all to the same fate. As a child I used to crush coins on a railway track – you couldn’t spend the money afterwards but you kept the metal slivers for their own sake, as an imaginative currency and as physical proof of the destructive powers of the world. I find the pieces of silver have much more potential when their meaning as everyday objects has been eroded. ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ is about materiality and then about anti-matter. In the gallery the ruined objects are ghostly levitating just above the floor, waiting to be reassessed in the light of their transformation. The title, because of its biblical references, alludes to money, to betrayal, to death and resurrection: more simply it is a literal description of the piece. 
(Quoted in British Art Show, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 1990, p.88.) 

Parker’s work frequently transforms the nature of an object or material through the use of extreme force. She has crushed, stretched and exploded numerous objects, while also enlisting the help of such unlikely collaborators as the British Army, the Colt Firearms Factory in Connecticut and H.M. Customs and Excise. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991 (Tate T06949) is a pivotal piece in Parker’s career and exemplifies her often violent approach to materials. It comprises the charred remains of a garden shed that was blown up for the artist by the British Army. The residual fragments are suspended around a single light bulb. Thirty Pieces of Silver was the first large-scale work that featured what Parker calls a ‘cartoon death’. She has long been fascinated by the violence of cartoons: ‘flattening Tom, Jerry filled with bullet holes, Road Runner falling off a cliff. The deaths are only token ones as the characters always pop up again in the next frame.’ (Quoted in Virginia Button, ‘Conversation with Cornelia Parker’, Ninety, No.27, 1998, p.68.) Similarly, Parker is not interested simply in the destruction of materials, but more their resurrection and transformation.

Parker has since made many other works involving silver. For example, to make Measuring Niagara with a Teaspoon 1997 (Tate T07430), she took a Georgian teaspoon and had it melted down and then drawn into a wire whose length was equal to the height of the Niagara Falls. The value and meaning of silver, as well as its physical properties, have been a source of continual fascination for her. She has said that this is ‘because it is the most reflective metal that exists and [it] also has the ability to be the opposite very dull and black, it has the plus and minus in one material. Also linguistically in terms of the use of silver in language, ‘silver tongued’, silver lining’. It has a very poetic aura around it, it’s used in mirrors in which we see ourselves and in telescopes to look at the universe ... It’s part of our cultural make-up somehow, it has all kinds of ways of being in the world. Metals, in general, I love but I think that silver is my favourite’. (Quoted in unpublished excerpt of interview with Tate curator Virginia Button, 1998.) 
                                                                                                                                          

"Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist," she says, "I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile and then I make them. So, in that sense, I'd always thought of my work as being a bit all over the place." 

                                                                                                                                           


Cold Dark Matter


                                Cornelia Parker


Cornelia Parker (b. 1956) is a British sculptor and installation artist who is interested in the potential of materials. Her latest involvement is with Glasstress: White Light / White Heat, as one of 65 artists challenged to work with glass. The show runs at two different locations in London: London College of Fashion’s Fashion Space Gallery (until 23 February) and The Wallace Collection (until 26 February). www.glasstress.org.

What made you want to participate in this particular project? Was it an interest in the material that drew you to it?
Yes. The material is often where my thinking starts. I’ve used glass on a few occasions: for example, I did a piece called One Day This Glass Will Break (1995), which is a stack of glasses with a one-word engraving on each. I don’t really make things from scratch; I’d rather destroy something. The premonition that this fragile material will break is the inspiration behind my piece for Glasstress: a glass drum I call Decoy, as it lures people in to want to beat the drum, whereupon it will shatter. The drumroll will be falling glass.
Why does your work often include fragmented structures, such as in Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988-9)?
I prefer things when they’re fractured for some reason. I’ve always responded to fragmented things: if something’s squashed in the road, I’m drawn to it. A squashed object is much more interesting than an intact one and I think brokenness is very much a part of society. Civilisations fall, for instance, or a very recognisable object can become mysterious and more open to interpretation when it’s in pieces. To me, that’s more interesting than what is whole. I have also been inspired by other artists who deal with the fragment and things that are immaterial, such as Marcel Duchamp and Tony Cragg.
Are there particular objects that you find yourself drawn to, apart from those that are crushed?
I use a lot of clichéd objects: a pearl necklace, a silver spoon, a hat for church, a window or the instruments from a brass band – things that are kind of commonplace and that are so ubiquitous everyone understands what they are. I take very simple things and use them to achieve the abstract. I find that recognisable things and found objects are a way into the surreal.
You’ve worked with the actress Tilda Swinton on her piece, The Maybe (1995). Are you interested in performance art? That came out of a collaboration. Tilda had the idea of sleep in space and Snow White in a glass coffin and we decided to get together. I created an installation where she slept as herself surrounded by found objects purporting to have belonged to well-known historical figures. It was a great partnership based on something that was different from our previous experience.
When you are producing work are you overly concerned about what the audience’s response will be?
It’s hard not to be. Usually the things I make are those that keep pushing away at my subconscious wanting to be made and I just hope that people respond to them. I like using the found object because people don’t have to worry about what it is. There’s mystery there but it frees the viewer to be able to project onto it. I’ve had a great reaction from the general public: it’s almost as though they’ve been given permission to enter the work.
Do you find that the personal informs your practice?
Yes, of course, but it is also influenced by universal concerns. Death is something that affects everyone and this appears in This Glass Will Break. The work reflects a psychological state that is comparable to mortality; we all know that it will come to an end one way or another; it’s just a question of time. However, my work is often based on a neurotic fear of mine that I need to get out of my system, although I don’t want my baggage to weigh it down.
When you construct your installations, do you have an idea of the space in which they will be presented before you make them?
With a large-scale piece, I will make it fit the original space but I don’t mind expanding or contracting it to suit other venues, as necessary. However, it’s not only the physical dimension that can change, it’s also the psychological space it occupies, depending on the audience. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) was an exploded shed on display at the Tate and a lot of people in war-torn countries saw that elsewhere and responded to it; they had a very different history to the people who saw it in London. In Ljubljana, I showed a piece about a house that fell off the White Cliffs of Dover (Neither From Nor Towards (1992). The refugees from Sarajevo who saw it thought of it as a political statement, which reflected what they were going through.

                                                                                                                                                               


Reflection


By using objects people are familiar with Parker allows people to easily decode the language of objects.  The first impressions of Parker's 'Cold Dark Matter' the work hangs there like a huge question mark in the room. Still there is nothing more that sets up my engagement to a piece of art then unanswered questions. Whether it is a logistic question like how was the work installed or a more philosophical question, that leave your mind working for days, the question must be there to create the engagement with the artwork. Parker seems to do this almost effortlessly within the piece, 'Cold Dark Matter' where she explodes a shed and they hangs the fragments of its remains like a freeze frame of its last moments. The moment of change, drawn out in time, like a long wave goodbye. The shadows drawn out from the work elevate the presence of the object into a chaotic conference of forms the sounds of which you can almost still hearing ringing in your ears. The same can be said about 'Thirty Pieces of Silver', that Parker crushed and robed of its functions and yet still offered it a new life. Changing the object from a commemorative or function one to a decoration or possibly tutorial one.When applying this to my own work, I am intrigued by the way Parker manages to take the object and leave it in limbo, I am planning on following a similar idea by encasing objects in salt water, the resulting forms will develop a unique variation of salt crystals all over them. This act aims to entomb the objects in a perpetuated state of entropy. As the objects are now encased in salt which is acting as a barrier, no more changes can infuse onto the object. It is now protected, yet due to the nature of the salt water also slowly degrading. It is this parallel that intrigues me.


                                                                                                                                                      


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