Cornelia Parker
Leah Oates: Secret Selves
The show’s largest and earliest piece, Thirty Pieces of Silver (1989), is a grid of 30 circular arrangements of several dozen silver-plated household objects–tableware, trays, goblets, pitchers, a candelabra, each hanging by one or more thin filaments from the ceiling. But something is wrong here: the objects have all been flattened. Nearby is hung a darkly humorous photograph showing how this was done: a steamroller is moving down a rural road, the objects laid in a band before it. Parker chose a road that bends, and the way the objects follow the curve gives the process a strangely merry air. The finished piece both expresses hostility toward the domesticity the objects represent and turns them into tapestrylike designs with their own beauty. Does the piece document Parker’s rejection of the housewife’s role? Jessica Morgan’s helpful catalog essay mentions “a particular type of British etiquette in which the best teapot or cutlery is displayed to impress visitors,” adding that “Parker’s steamroller literally flattens class pretensions.” Her title’s biblical reference to betrayal adds an edge, though one imagines several betrayals are evoked–Parker’s of bourgeois conventions, and those conventions’ betrayal of authenticity.
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Parker’s themes converge in the exhibit’s most stunning work, Hanging Fire. Burnt shards of wood–the results of “suspected arson,” as the label tells us–hang on some 100 wires arranged in a grid. Arson evokes the destruction of homes, insurance fraud, and mental illness. But apart from these cultural associations, Parker’s burnt fragments remind us of the transformation of meaning when materials are transformed. Whereas in Embryo Firearms she suggests a material’s future–these are “Colt 45 guns in the earliest stage of production”–Hanging Fire evokes a rich and varied past. Suspending her fragments in a giant matrix, Parker presents them almost clinically, like specimens in a museum case–and indeed Morgan suggests that one of Parker’s themes is the way museums deaden the objects they display. But this installation also cuts the other way: Parker creates a ghostly labyrinth that beckons the viewer, its three-dimensional complexity revealing something of the rich fabric that the arson destroyed.
Parody becomes a bit more explicit in a few of Ziga’s images. In Smarten Suit 2 she beads a businessman’s suit, femininizing the male in the way Newport does with his trading cards. Ziga covers the bits of gray hair on his bald pate with silver beads, gently joking about what little he has left of this traditional symbol of youthful potency. In Same Women, her original is an oddly archaic shot posing six women in long dresses amid motorcycles and oil drums in front of an old brick building. Here Ziga’s beads clash powerfully with the scene, reminding us that the original photo represents less a view of gritty reality than the conversion of the unstylish to the stylish, as oil drums become glamorous through their association with motorcycles–to say nothing of the six models.
