Text by Rachel Margetts
As a student at Manchester some 30 years earlier, Parker has the city woven into her history. Fittingly, her exhibition at the Whitworth looks to discuss history through its material remnants. As with her debut installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), the Whitworth exhibition reveals time and space as inseparable from an aesthetic and its context. Even more so she attempts to materially contextualise Manchester’s historical culture. Her aim echoes the Whitworth’s aim to locate the gallery’s space in local collaborations, and in broader terms, Manchester City Council’s aim to expand its art scene internationally.
For this exhibition, the material history of Manchester is ever-present, binding its socio-political history with industrial, mass-produced artifacts. War Room (2015) conducts the empty spectacle of the industries of war. Industries which are birthed from the legacy of the industrial revolution and have replicated worldwide. Mimicking a wallpapered ballroom, empty factory stencils which make the 45 million Remembrance poppies sold every autumn loosely line the gallery walls. In an absurdly theatrical manner, the space rings with an awkward absence. Symbols intended to commemorate a loss of individual life are emptied to an industrialized multiplicity; all the more commenting upon the absurdity of the disregarded industrialisation of life in war.
In a brief conversation, Parker discusses what she sees as a worldwide material crisis. Ecologically motivated, she uses the residue of capitalism to reflect upon an aesthetic experience of politics. War Room flickers back and forth between the visible absence and the invisible presence between disguised power structures and the useless material waste of Western ideology.
Yet paradoxically, Parker is also concerned with engaging in industrial methods of production in her own work. For her firework display on the Whitworth’s opening night, Parker used graphene developed from her work with scientists from the University of Manchester (notably Nobel prize winning physicist Sir Konstantin Novoselov), which used traces of the sketches of Blake, Turner, Constable and Picasso, as well as a pencil-written letter by Sir Ernest Rutherford (who split the atom in Manchester). In a fusing of artistic and scientific creation, the display brought with it uncertain horizons.
Like her rattlesnake venom and ink prints, Parker provides both the poison and antidote; in this case to the dangers of the incessant technological renewal in a post-industrial world. While graphene provides hope for greener energy sources it could also lead to an abuse of power; being the strongest material known to man the possibilities (both good and bad) are potentially endless.
Never one to intellectually pander, these works don’t offer any easy answers. Yet in a tradition of conceptualism, they rely upon references and puns. Veering on a serious social critique, her insistence on aesthetic symbolism reduces such a critique to a visual pun. It seems that when Parker comes close to a more defined critique, her unfaltering return to materials mute her own voice.
In The Distance (The Kiss With String Attached) (2003), Parker takes Rodin’s original sculpture The Kiss and binds it with a mile of mass produced, household string. The stone lovers are shielded from view by more references; such as to Duchamp’s Sixteen Miles of String (1942). Manchester’s Culture Minister has discussed the educational potential of The Distance as part of an ongoing aim of the Whitworth to integrate the local community into its contemporary art practice. Yet once decoded, this piece is informative only within the history of institutionalised Western art.
Similarly, the Whitworth’s engagement with its own art history ends quite abruptly with the YBAs who are often guilty of having this centralized worldview. As a product of it’s times, The Distance falls into this trap. It is a digestible piece of conceptualism which deals fundamentally with the nature of art. For this reason it is also insular and disengaged with the political specificity of its place in society.
But Parker moves beyond this with her more recent works; still dealing with art’s existential questions, she attempts to bind them to a modern history. Take Breath of a Scotsman (2014) which makes reference to the recent Scottish referendum. Here Parker’s politics are explicit through subject matter but still simply ask questions. Her artistic joy is found in the politics of the unspeaking object; dancing between history, materiality, spectacle and their inseparable relationships to art.
Rachel Margetts is an artist based in Manchester.
(Cornelia Parker installation view. Photograph: David Levene.)
Cornelia Parker, The Whitworth, Manchester.
14 February – 31 May 2015
Published 01.03.2015 by James Schofield in Reviews
747 words