picture source:frithstreetgallery
I liked the exploding shed, and as a very tenious link to the name of this blog!
But on a more serious note, I find her work intreging and particluraly like the two gun sculptures. As I'm heading that way later in the year, i will go and have a butchers - I'll post my thoughts.
Cornelia Parker: Never Endings IKON Gallery, Birmingham; until 18 November
It is not only Cornelia Parker's exploded shed that sends her work spinning off in every direction. How would you hold these recent adventures of hers together apart from with invisible wires: a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky about American barbarism; the dress worn by Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby; a tape recording of an inconclusive seance with the Brontes at Haworth; rocks and stones taken from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Jonathan Watkins, the director of the Ikon Gallery which houses this retrospective of her work of the last decade has a go: Parker, he suggests, is 'engaging with subjects that loom large in popular imagination, universal triggers perhaps of a collective unconscious'. Well, sort of.
Some of her triggers are much more pointed than others. Her 'embryo firearms' are a framed pair of Colt 45s in foetal state. Alongside them, lead bullets are stretched out into fine wire and made into Spirograph drawings. Parker performs the same trick with gold from a tooth, a silver dollar which is made the height of the Statue of Liberty, a war medal that becomes the measure of a man. In each case, the concept is far more engaging than its result.
Attempting to explain her scattershot obsessions, Parker has sometimes referred to herself as an artist of resurrection, intent on giving found objects new life in a different setting. She's not bad at black jokes in this context: Shared Fate (Oliver) is a little, jacketed mannequin that has been chopped in half by the guillotine that beheaded Marie-Antoinette. In a much more demure way than, say, her fellow ageing YBA Gavin Turk, she likes the idea of imposing herself on infamies, jackdawing bits of history and making them her own.
Stolen Thunder is thus a series of framed hankies on which the tarnish from resonant silver has been deposited: Guy Fawkes's lantern, Charles Dickens's knife and so on. The desire to touch what they have touched becomes a version of celebrity fixation. It also establishes the overriding sense of a reliquary that informs much of Parker's work; she is a deeply Catholic artist or, at least, the tarnish of a Catholic childhood is still rubbing off. Once again though, the objects themselves don't bear much looking; it's not the Turin shroud. The hankies are part of an ongoing series, but one you hardly hold your breath for.
Much more spectacular, even in repetition, are the pair of suspended animation sculptures that fill two rooms here. The first, made from hundreds of fragments of yellow stone from under the Leaning Tower of Pisa, rubble that apparently was removed to help the monument stay standing, a negative of underpinning, begins to suggest all sorts of interesting things about gravity, which is, in many ways, Parker's most enduring medium. You marvel again at how such a thing has been strung up; that marvelling is not diminished in the other, her blackened sculpture upstairs, an exploded cube of branches, spars and pine cones from a Florida wildfire of 2004, a 3D charcoal sketch.
These bigger pieces remain the best statement of Parker's compulsion with the afterlives of things. She is happy at times to borrow this atmosphere of spookiness from other, more conventional places, which diminishes the surprise. The Bronte room here, with its hyper-magnified photographs of the nib of Charlotte's pen and the surface of Branwell's wallet, is a case in point. Haworth represents readymade ghostliness and Parker's intervention doesn't make it any more spectral.
This opportunism is taken to a different extreme in the two most recent pieces, two films that are oddly out of kilter with the rest of the show. The first, a screen split into four quarters, shows American tourists waiting for an event to occur. You are asked to think of this event, in the context of what is elsewhere, as a coming apocalypse, I suppose, but the effect is hardly chilling.
Similarly, the fragments of interview with Noam Chomsky seem an attempt to borrow an explicit political manifesto for the rest of the work, which it generally does better by resisting. Chomsky's devastating monotone on the war on terror and global warming is essential listening in most contexts, but Parker has no need to borrow his sentiments to show she cares.
It is not only Cornelia Parker's exploded shed that sends her work spinning off in every direction. How would you hold these recent adventures of hers together apart from with invisible wires: a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky about American barbarism; the dress worn by Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby; a tape recording of an inconclusive seance with the Brontes at Haworth; rocks and stones taken from beneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Jonathan Watkins, the director of the Ikon Gallery which houses this retrospective of her work of the last decade has a go: Parker, he suggests, is 'engaging with subjects that loom large in popular imagination, universal triggers perhaps of a collective unconscious'. Well, sort of.
Some of her triggers are much more pointed than others. Her 'embryo firearms' are a framed pair of Colt 45s in foetal state. Alongside them, lead bullets are stretched out into fine wire and made into Spirograph drawings. Parker performs the same trick with gold from a tooth, a silver dollar which is made the height of the Statue of Liberty, a war medal that becomes the measure of a man. In each case, the concept is far more engaging than its result.
Attempting to explain her scattershot obsessions, Parker has sometimes referred to herself as an artist of resurrection, intent on giving found objects new life in a different setting. She's not bad at black jokes in this context: Shared Fate (Oliver) is a little, jacketed mannequin that has been chopped in half by the guillotine that beheaded Marie-Antoinette. In a much more demure way than, say, her fellow ageing YBA Gavin Turk, she likes the idea of imposing herself on infamies, jackdawing bits of history and making them her own.
Stolen Thunder is thus a series of framed hankies on which the tarnish from resonant silver has been deposited: Guy Fawkes's lantern, Charles Dickens's knife and so on. The desire to touch what they have touched becomes a version of celebrity fixation. It also establishes the overriding sense of a reliquary that informs much of Parker's work; she is a deeply Catholic artist or, at least, the tarnish of a Catholic childhood is still rubbing off. Once again though, the objects themselves don't bear much looking; it's not the Turin shroud. The hankies are part of an ongoing series, but one you hardly hold your breath for.
Much more spectacular, even in repetition, are the pair of suspended animation sculptures that fill two rooms here. The first, made from hundreds of fragments of yellow stone from under the Leaning Tower of Pisa, rubble that apparently was removed to help the monument stay standing, a negative of underpinning, begins to suggest all sorts of interesting things about gravity, which is, in many ways, Parker's most enduring medium. You marvel again at how such a thing has been strung up; that marvelling is not diminished in the other, her blackened sculpture upstairs, an exploded cube of branches, spars and pine cones from a Florida wildfire of 2004, a 3D charcoal sketch.
These bigger pieces remain the best statement of Parker's compulsion with the afterlives of things. She is happy at times to borrow this atmosphere of spookiness from other, more conventional places, which diminishes the surprise. The Bronte room here, with its hyper-magnified photographs of the nib of Charlotte's pen and the surface of Branwell's wallet, is a case in point. Haworth represents readymade ghostliness and Parker's intervention doesn't make it any more spectral.
This opportunism is taken to a different extreme in the two most recent pieces, two films that are oddly out of kilter with the rest of the show. The first, a screen split into four quarters, shows American tourists waiting for an event to occur. You are asked to think of this event, in the context of what is elsewhere, as a coming apocalypse, I suppose, but the effect is hardly chilling.
Similarly, the fragments of interview with Noam Chomsky seem an attempt to borrow an explicit political manifesto for the rest of the work, which it generally does better by resisting. Chomsky's devastating monotone on the war on terror and global warming is essential listening in most contexts, but Parker has no need to borrow his sentiments to show she cares.
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