At the Tate Gallery in London, artist Cornelia Parker, along with her maker Caroline Smith, is looking for a suitable hanging position for a squashed tuba. From May to October of this year, the Tate held a retrospective that included a large number of Parker's installations, sculptures, photographs and films.

The flattened tuba is Parker's installation Perpetual Canon. In this work, the artist placed 60 crushed brass instruments in an empty dark room, suspended in a circle around a dim light bulb. Like a dying star and its rings suspended in space, the instruments are illuminated on the light side, all indentations and folds bright and clear, while the backlit side casts a solemn shadow on the wall, as if a ritual radiates outward as a silent force. The pervasive penetration of light and shadow into the space fills the room with a stagnant floating state and this sense of well-ordered and ritualistic order, while the occasional whistling of the space as the wind blows through the brass pipes, like the ebb and flow of the tide, injects a breathing gap into this stagnation.

Curator Andrea Schlicker describes Parker as a "poet of objects": "She writes about the poetry of the everyday." Parker likes to use objects with historical stories as her narrative material, preferring discarded objects and things with short lives like mayflies, with the intention of clarifying the connection between objects and the subconscious, violence, trauma, and our strongest beliefs and desires. The instruments in The Eternal Canon, which served with the Salvation Army and the British Legion, are a tribute to such fading British organizations and traditions, exploring the meaning of nation, country and identity.

Born into a Catholic family in the 1950s, Parker spent her less than stellar childhood on a farm in the north of England under the shadow of a repressive home environment and a violent father. "I would feel guilty about playing and having to sneak around, but because I associate art with play, I often feel guilty about it." Although the artist is now known for her sculptures and installations, it is perhaps from this core of contradiction and struggle that her work's ongoing exploration of sudden violence, accidents, destruction and the hidden narratives behind them, the almost coldly detailed dissection of scrapped objects and moments of violent outbursts, comes.

This core is particularly evident in another of Parker's masterpieces, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. After the artist destroyed a garden shed with the assistance of a targeted explosion by the British Army, she recollected the remaining debris and detritus from the blast, brought it back to the museum, hung it, and used the light source placed at the center of the installation to create a messy, intense, and dramatic shadow effect outward. The entire installation, like a reenactment of a blast moment, is a garden shed disassembled into fragments of different shapes and sizes, hovering in the air, compactly building a space frozen in time. Any viewer swept into this space will find themselves surrounded by the shadows behind them at a close distance from the explosion, facing the destruction and fragmentation, yet already isolated forever from this image of destruction by the dense debris. Being in the frozen moment of history, but never able to reach the core of change, this is a space and time that future generations can visit, but never participate in. To reconstruct and interpret the history of accidents and violence that have already occurred is to write rhythm and rhyme again in front of the historical symbols of destruction, in front of the absurdity and chaos that have been given shape.

In Parker's eyes, when an object becomes known, the nature of its existence changes, and it ceases to be the original object, but becomes a new object. In this way, Parker renews the life of discarded objects, re-marks the meaning of existence, and finds a way of resurrection in the midst of destruction. In From Mountain Landscape, Parker framed and labeled the nailed edges and canvases that the restorers took from Turner's masterpiece, making them into new works of art. What is a "subject"? What are the "edges"? What is the difference between them and what is their respective value? To whom do the rewritten marginal objects belong? With this strong political metaphor of difference, Parker presents her work as a political statement.

The Maybe, Parker's 1995 collaboration with Hollywood actress Tilda Swinton, extends this gaze on the relationship between existence and object identity to the human being, which is observed and explored in this work. In "The Maybe", Swinton is dressed in the most common shirt, pants and sneakers, lying asleep in a glass display case, with her glasses and some antique objects with traces of time scattered around the sleeping Swinton. "Like a sealed mummy, for eight hours a day, she is viewed through the glass, discussed, and given new interpretations by the audience, arguing for a new meaning of existence and identity that the individual may acquire under the gaze of the other. In another work, A Distance: A Kiss With Added String, Parker directly invited visitors to become part of the creator by wrapping Rodin's sculpture in long strings, which were cut with scissors by a visitor during the exhibition to free the sculpture. Parker herself loved this work, called Distance, which was almost a tribute to Duchamp, breaking the authority of art and giving the viewer a democratized voice.

The challenges of the post-epidemic era and Britain's own crisis pushed the artist to a more radical form of expression. For the installation Island, Parker built a greenhouse on Victorian tiles coated with chalk dust from the White Cliffs of Dover. "Island is about ourselves." Parker writes in the description, "At a time when we need Europe the most, we are out of the European Union, stripped and removed from Europe, at the same time as a climate crisis looms and sea levels rise, and everything looks very unreliable." The crumbling greenhouse "island," cramped on a few tiles and illuminated by a strong internal light source, casts dense, dappled shadows on the surrounding walls, underscoring the tension of Parker's politicized artistic expression.

From giving new histories to objects that symbolize destruction and then sorting them out, to having the viewer look directly at the objects and reshape them conceptually, Parker's work always contains a determination to remain open to a world view, throwing a narrative element into the world and then inviting formed histories and ideas to participate in it, filling in the gaps of the story. "I never think I'm telling one thing, I want to tell a million pieces." Parker's work feels like open questions, rejecting rigidity and dogma, showing inclusiveness and freedom, "Not all the art I create has a fixed meaning in it, the art just replaces the language, which is what they are supposed to be."

Article Source:艺术与设计

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