Cornelia Parker 'Avoided Object'

Cornelia Parker uses processes of destruction to transform found objects.

She steamrollers (silverware), explodes (a garden shed), lets degrade and turn poisonous (wine in glass flasks), and presents the remains of the object.

She collects tarnish, dust, stains, traces of the object… as an archive may store the trace or residue of an event.

How is memory attached to the object, does it become unstuck during the process? Does the object continue to embody its past in its morphed and rearranged construction? And how is this past still present, through the viewers’ projection of their readings, through clues given in the ‘found’ titles of the artwork?

Of the collected silverware, all with different stories, Parker says she wanted to ‘give them one story’, by flattening them with a steamroller.

Parker seems to also enjoy the unexpected stories- when the reader projects something new onto the artwork or interesting things are discovered within the ‘blow up’. For example, she was asked by a curator at the Tate if the Pornographic prints were made by a human body, which is the curators reading into the Rorschach inkblots. Einstein’s formulae on a blackboard, when photographed under a microscope resemble ‘sea creatures’, Parker suggests nature under the mathematics. She also photographs under a microscope dust collected from Donald Judd’s work, and describes the emerging imagery as ‘Gothic’.

The aspect of deterioration and destruction has an analogy to the brief life of the Canal at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The Canal worked towards its own ‘destruction’ of its intended life’s purpose, by transporting materials for the railways. The railways then surpassed the canal in speed, efficiency and quantity of goods transported, thus rendering the technology of the canal obsolescent.

Reference: ‘Avoided Object’ Lecture by Cornelia Parker at the Bartlett January 2007, London.