Cornelia Parker: ‘I don’t want to tick anyone else’s boxes’
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Version 0 of 1. ‘I have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don’t think,” Cornelia Parker says, with the briefly explosive laugh that punctuates most of her efforts at self-analysis. “I’ve always wanted to kind of trespass elsewhere as much as possible.” We are standing in the building site that will shortly be the entrance to the new Whitworth Art Gallery at Manchester University, surrounded by scaffolding and rough concrete and hanging wires. The gallery, which has been closed for 18 months, will, I’m assured, be completed by the time of the grand opening, in just over a fortnight’s time, but at the moment that idea sounds like a fairly implausible piece of conceptualism. Parker, who is the star turn of that opening – which will involve among other things a homemade meteor shower – is a great enthusiast of materials and processes, an instinctive fossicker of order out of chaos and is, as such, very much in her element. A love of getting things done runs deep in her. Now 58, she grew up on a smallholding on the Duchy of Lancaster estate, not far away in Cheshire, the awkward second of three sisters. Her family had lived in their tied cottage for many generations. She was, as she says a few times in our conversations, her father’s designated son, tinkering in the farmyard or mucking out pigs or laying hedges after school. “I was my father’s sidekick in a way,” she says. “He was a very dominant, forceful character.” It was a role she seems to have both accepted and been determined to subvert. A lot of her art involves collaboration with serious grown-ups – scientists, military men, ordnance experts – but the result is triumphantly playful and often anarchic. The piece with which she made her name, her famous blown-apart shed, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, the shrapnel suspended after a controlled big bang, is a case in point. It works not only as a metaphor of the creative process in general, but of Parker’s own methods in particular: holding disparate fragments of surprise in singular tension, and delighting in the new shadows that are generated. Cold Dark Matter will be reassembled in one of the newly whitewashed hangar-like galleries here, and you might say the piece is also, happily, the genesis of Parker’s retrospective show. Dr Maria Balshaw, the irrepressible gallery director at the Whitworth (and all-round Manchester culture commissar), saw the work in London when she was 22, and recalls it as love at first sight. “It blew me away,” she says. “I had seen a lot of abstract art but this was something different – something genuinely emotional and exciting.” Balshaw had a career as an academic but she always had a thought, once she came to the Whitworth in 2006, that she would love to invite Parker to do a show. When the new space was planned here, that thought became insistent. The gallery, Balshaw suggests, has a unique relationship with the university, and she believed she could use that collaborative spirit to persuade Parker to be the first artist to occupy the new space. “I had sat next to Cornelia at a dinner a few years ago,” she says. “When I raised the question of her doing something here her first question was ‘Who could you introduce me to?’” Balshaw and curator Mary Griffiths held that thought. They came up with the answer at a Manchester United football match a couple of seasons ago (Balshaw had been invited to watch from the executive box of Tom Bloxham, the Urban Splash entrepreneur and university chancellor). Also invited that day was one of the university’s Nobel prize winners, Konstantin Novoselov, co-discoverer of the world’s first “2D substance”, graphene, sheets of which are one atom thick. When Balshaw next spoke to Cornelia Parker she wondered if she would like to meet the creator of the world’s thinnest (and strongest and most flexible and most conductive) material. How could she say no? Parker says she and the Russian émigré scientist sparked off each other immediately. “I loved the idea of working on a nano level,” she says. “The idea of graphene, something so small, being a catalyst. Its power is enormous.” A keen student of place, Parker sees Novoselov and his research partner, Professor Andre Geim, as the true heirs to the unique innovative spirit of Manchester, the spirit that fostered the industrial revolution and later led, for example, to Ernest Rutherford first splitting the atom up the road (a Mancunian spirit which Maria Balshaw characterises as: “Fuck it, let’s give it a go!”) Parker loved the fact that graphene had originally been isolated in the Manchester labs using Scotch tape to pick up single atomic layers of graphite from a drawn pencil line. She once asked Novoselov (a keen calligrapher) what he thought the difference between their disciplines was; the physicist suggested there was little difference, they were both “at the extreme end of creativity”. Thinking about those extremes, and about the post-industrial landscape of dark satanic mills around the Whitworth, Parker came across some William Blake drawings in the university’s collection. Her mind makes connections intuitively and she had the feeling that the creative impulse Novoselov outlined could be a reawakening of that original combustible Romantic spirit, a new Jerusalem, if you will. Further, graphene itself seemed symbolic of that possibility – the “miracle” substance promises among myriad other applications to hasten a “green energy” revolution in its ability to capture hydrogen for fuel cells from the air. “Who needs fracking when you have graphene?” Parker asks. Anyhow, she had Novoselov harvest graphene from one of Blake’s drawings. “He got a microscope and a tiny pair of tweezers and with the conservator hovering over him he collected something from it,” she recalls. “With graphite there are always loose flakes that move around, fall in the gutter of sketchbooks. Blake used very hard pencils, which was ideal really.” On the Whitworth’s opening night a firework display (“of very Blakean fiery, fearful symmetry”), will be set in motion by Novoselov breathing on the graphene from Blake’s drawing and setting in motion an aerial reaction. Among the fireworks Parker will have fragments of meteorite fall to earth, time-honoured portents. “There will be a photo to capture the moment,” Parker says, “I was thinking of calling it Breath of a Physicist. I think Blake, who was always looking out for comets, would have loved it.” All of this is planned for the night of Friday 13 February. What could possibly go wrong? The pyrotechnics will be, Parker hopes, a proper prelude to more fizzing energies in the show itself. Not content with Blake as firestarter, Parker explains to me how she is also bringing a piece of Jerusalem to the gallery. For a while she has been taking casts of the cracks in pavements, using a rubberised solution, and then casting them like hopscotch ladders in filigree bronze. On a recent visit to occupied East Jerusalem for a Palestinian arts festival, she covertly took a cast of a stretch of ancient marble pavement, dodging Israeli police, and smuggled it home in her suitcase. It will be placed alongside a matching cast from the paving around Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, in the city of London – “And did those feet…” Walking around the gallery she explains, 19 to the dozen, how those sculptures will act as touchstones for the other work around them – photographs Parker took of statues of female industry in London’s Threadneedle Street under protective chain mesh; the gold of a tooth filling stretched into a fine wire having been threaded through a needle (“it is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven…”); embroidered samplers made of overlapping lines of the dictionary definitions of fundamental oppositions – “good” and “evil”, “passive” and “aggressive”, “conscious and unconscious” – all hand stitched by prison inmates (“I’m just waiting for ‘war’ and ‘peace’ now,” she says); line drawings of simple geometric shapes made in her own blood; examples of her “bullet drawings” in which the lead of bullets is drawn out into a fine wire mesh. In some senses each of the pieces is a cool abstraction, a nod at minimalist art, but a knowledge of its history and context makes it something more human and visceral. Within that cat’s cradle of associations Parker has had more than her fair share of eureka moments: in Bethlehem she filmed an Arab man who spent his days making crowns of thorns for Christian tourists. “He had been doing it for 33 years,” she says. “He’s in this place where he lives surrounded by barbed wire…” Usually the ironies are not so naked. “Sometimes my process seems very scattergun,” Parker says, “but I never worry whether it is all going to link up. And I don’t care if people don’t make all the same connections as me.” She rather hopes they make patterns of their own. “I want the work to be dead simple and not really polemical. I want it to be read by more than just a small target audience. I want to be porous and provocative.” When she showed some of this work in China the combination of bullets and squares had one connotation; in the light of the events of the last few weeks, bullets and drawings seem to have another. Pulling the strands of Parker’s own life together is a similarly dynamic process. Our conversation at the gallery is the second time I’ve spoken to her in a few weeks; we first sat down before Christmas after I’d watched her deliver a lecture to several hundred sixth-form art students about her work. All that time, I’ve been trying to think who she reminds me of. There’s an element of Mary Poppins about her, but she is more grounded than that. She describes herself sometimes as a “pleb” or a “peasant girl” but there is something quite proper and confident about her presence too. Watching her speak to her the students, hugely enthusiastic in the face of their affected indifference, the adjectives I write in my notebook are “fearless” and “gung-ho”. At one point she put up a slide of herself in a steamroller, flattening a bunch of busted brass instruments, for her ghost orchestra piece. She never lets good ideas get away from her: “You only get one life so it seems to me you might as well do the things you want to do,” she says. “If people say ‘You can’t do that’, you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.” She was recently told by her London GP for example that he wouldn’t take her blood for use in art (even though, as she pointed out, she often gives it for science) on the grounds that it would be “self-harm”. Fortunately she found a doctor in Manchester with no such qualms. The resultant drawings (“Self portrait as a square” etc) are like any blood oath, a reminder that she really means it. Parker’s art does not often feel so obviously autobiographical, though her obsessions point to some preoccupations that have stayed with her from childhood. One of the rooms at the Whitworth will be called “the War Room”. Long before poppies cascaded at the Tower of London Parker became interested in the poppy-making factories that worked year round for Remembrance Sunday, staffed by veterans in Richmond and Aylesford. On a visit she found that the poppies were stamped out of long swathes of red crepe paper. The cut-out material left over fascinated her. She will drape the war room with it, a huge tent of 350,000 crimson poppy negatives; a counterpoint, in some ways, to the exploded shed. “I imagine it as quite a contemplative space,” she says, envisaging how it will look. She mentions that her own background was “quite a lot about war stories, spoken and unspoken”. In what way? She laughs her laugh. “Well, I had both sides of it really. My grandfather was in the trenches in the first world war. And my mum was in the Luftwaffe.” Parker’s mother grew up in Karlsruhe. She was 17 when the war started. “She never really talked about it,” Parker says, “but it was all clearly pretty horrific. She was a prisoner of war for a couple of years after the war. She became quite mentally ill later on, I think as a result of what happened to her then. And I suppose that feeling was a big part of my childhood.” How did her parents meet? “Well, my father had been ill with Crohn’s disease and had stayed at home during the war supervising German prisoners of war who were working on his land. He got on quite well with them. In about 1948 my mother came over as an au pair to the estate manager for a couple of years. My father was still living at home with his parents at 33 but he somehow persuaded her he was the best thing since sliced. My poor mum wanted to start a new life in Canada and they tried that but came back. I think there was a lot of prejudice against her and a lot of unspoken trauma. I can only conjecture about what unspeakable horrors she witnessed, but I’m sure that’s what happened. I was born in 1956.” Set against that background Parker’s grandfather “would regale the family every weekend when he came round about life in the trenches in the first world war in graphic detail, about how they lived on potato peelings and so on. He kept himself sane, he said, by doing embroidery, and knitting. A lot of the men did – there is some of their work in the Imperial War Museum…” This, of course, in turn teases out an element of her thinking behind her embroidery project with the prisoners, that sense of craft as therapy. She likes the idea of narrative threads, of one thing leading to another. The dictionary-definition samplers are actually, in this way, a digression from the other major project that Parker has been working on – in response to a request from the British Library to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta on 15 June this year. Her idea has been to create a scrolled tapestry of the Wikipedia entry on the Magna Carta, which will be 13 metres long. As well as a desire to make the digital analogue, she says she loves the fact that the Wiki page on the original covenant is a constant work in progress, attracting 150,000 visits each month for tiny edits and arguments about the precise history and semantics of the document. The tapestry will be the work not only of her 66 prison inmates but pertinent sections will also be stitched by hundreds of people with a working interest in the encoded liberties and their preservation – from Shami Chakrabarti and Peter Tatchell and Wiki founder Jimmy Wales to invited bishops and politicians and royalty. “We like to think of the Magna Carta as a settled historical document,” she says, “but it is of course in constant need of renewal in each generation. We are living in an age where legal aid has all but been abolished by politicians. Eight hundred years on from the Magna Carta we have a government actively campaigning against the Human Rights Act. There are so many things I feel the need to be ranting about. I am getting angrier as I get older.” She has that sense that some of the freedoms fought for in the 60s and 70s are being erased. Though she has always, she says, felt herself an outsider to any art establishment – she studied at Wolverhampton Poly rather than Goldsmith’s, and though sometimes co-opted was never a convincing YBA – she enjoyed that golden period of free education at art school. If the funding structure was progressive, the sexual politics were less so, however. “If I had to sue everyone who touched me up at art school in the 70s I would never be out of court,” Parker says. “One old tutor used to regularly strip in the pub at night and quite often give you his dick to hold. I am still in touch with him. He was very sweet. I imagine that would be sexual harassment now…” When she first came to London she lived in squats and rent-controlled accommodation in properties in Shoreditch now worth millions. “I never really made any money at all until I was 40, which was fine.” She lately sold her first studio to buy a house in more suburban Kentish Town, where she lives with her husband, the American painter Jeff McMillan, and their teenage daughter. I wonder if she thinks about her art as overtly political? “Well,” she says, “I think just being an artist is a political act. Just doing things that are not mediated by anyone else. I don’t do many commissions because I don’t want to tick anyone else’s boxes. Sometimes I’m a bit tempted. I got approached by the Formula One team McLaren who wanted me to do something with the bits of a damaged car. It was a nice idea, but I don’t want to be a jobbing artist, or do anything that seems like advertising.” She’s not sure she has a mission, but if pressed she’d say it was to close the two cultures gap between literacy in science and art – not least because it represents our best chance of preserving the planet on which we all live. “Scientists use language in a very romantic way,” she says. “‘Blue Shift’ or ‘Cold Dark Matter’. I love that. I try to keep up to date. I did a collaboration with Nature magazine a while ago. I made these floating images, that were kind of stories in images and captions – dust from Freud’s couch or whatever. They looked like scientific illustrations but in fact they were just free radicals really. People were intrigued. I like the garden shed aspect of scientists, the way they like playing around with materials.” I’ve always assumed that Parker would have an (unexploded) shed of her own, to potter in, or escape to. Does she? “My studio is a shed really,” she says. “A lean-to. It is not very nice, but works OK. Off the Holloway Road in north London. I can play around there on a reasonable scale. Because my husband is a painter he is in the studio every day. But mostly I like to be out and about. I have been delivering bits of embroidery here and there the last few weeks, picking up stuff.” She laughs. “I like being at the shopping and socialising end of art. It’s the best way of staying sane, I suppose.” The Whitworth reopens on 14 February. Cornelia Parker’s retrospective runs until 31 May. For the full opening exhibition programme please visit whitworth.manchester.ac.uk |