ARTIST PROFILE JUSTINE VARGA • YVONNE KOOLMATRIE • LINDA MARRINON • CORNELIA PARKER • JAN KING • IZABELA PLUTA 49 2019 THE NUDE NOW Erin McFadyen Justine Varga with KIRSTY BAKER Aus $21.99 NZ $21.99 ISSUE 49 artistprofile.com.au CORNELIA PARKER • IZABELA PLUTA • YVONNE KOOLMATRIE LINDA MARRINON • ATONG ATEM • SUSAN NORRIE • JAN KING PROFILE Cornelia Parker Cornelia PARKER Anything you want 92 93 AHEAD OF HER SHOW AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AUSTRALIA, CORNELIA PARKER’S CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST PROFILE, LIKE HER ART, RANGES FROM INSTALLATIONS TO FILM, DRAWING, PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCULPTURE, ALL THE TIME CONCERNED WITH ISSUES OF INNER BEAUTY, CLIMATE CHANGE, WAR AND THE ROLE OF ART IN EFFECTING CHANGE. Story ROSE VICKERS 01 Cornelia Parker at the Parliament of the United Kingdom, photograph Jessica Taylor PROFILE Cornelia Parker 94 95 03 C ornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums. Her large-scale artwork War Room (2015) will be one inclusion at the MCA. It’s a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, red fabric memorial poppies conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs; it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of statesanctioned conflict. 02 Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many of her works transcend national borders to speak to a global community. Two examples are Apocalypse Later (2008), which stems from an ecologicallycentric interview with Noam Chomksy, as well as her early, now iconic installation Cold Dark Matter: an exploded view (1991) comprising an exploded domestic shed and its material contents. The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian audience. Another early artwork, The Maybe (1995) interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this, coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention, provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display. The contemporary art world has been leery of beauty for some time – theorists such as Jacqueline Millner and Phillip Fisher have written extensively on art-critical skepticism towards beautiful works in the post-Duchampian tradition. How do you embrace formal qualities of beauty in your practice – do you 02 Pope Innocent III, stitched by Anthea Godfrey, Embroiderers’ Guild (Eastern Region), from Magna Carta (An Embroidery), 2015, half panama cotton fabric, pearl cotton thread and other media, embroidered by over 200 individual contributors 03 Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, installation view, The Whitworth, The University of Manchester, 2015, blown up garden shed and contents, wire, light bulb, 2019, photograph David Levene 97 96 PROFILE Cornelia Parker PROFILE Cornelia Parker I’m pluralistic in my work, from installation to embroidery to photography, films. I’m happy making the work despite the medium. 05 98 actively seek it, or go with it when it appears, or is it simply a by-product of conceptualism? If it is at all beautiful, it’s because the beauty is inherent in the material and not something that’s stuck on the outside. I love Duchamp. I made a piece with Rodin’s The Kiss – you know the sculpture – which I wrapped in a mile of string, so it was like the original was being subsumed by Duchamp’s ‘mile of string’. The small works I make are less beautiful, just because they are smaller and kind of quiet; but just as powerful I hope. There are lots of small works on paper and small sculptural pieces where the setting is not as sumptuous as the large-scale works. With War Room I was hoping to pull away from beauty and guide people towards looking at war graves (as) all in a row, where everything is formalised. Those particular places in France are quite magnificent and overwhelming in their beauty. And sometimes it is hard to avoid beauty; beauty is part of life and if it crops up I embrace it. It’s not something I’m going to ignore. Do you think political art can effect real change, and should it even aim to? Most artists don’t want to be labelled as making political art. Not that they don’t care about the issues but it reduces you to a niche audience and you don’t want that. I think we all do what we can do. Those who want to be vocal can be vocal in all sorts of ways. I am very often vocal by just opening my mouth (laughs), and having something to say in a verbal rather than an artistic way. I am not one-hundred percent sure if art can change things, like stop climate change or change governments, or all the other sorts of things we need to have happen. Wolfgang Tillmans, I think, has become quite political with his photography since leaving the EU. There’s an ongoing fight for that, but then, he is an activist. More recently I have been involved with a number of artists who persuaded the Tate to declare a state of climate emergency. That was one of the biggest museums in the world to do so. But I don’t want the work to be read in a narrow way. I want the work to be as open as possible. Political art can shut the door on other things and I think I am always scrambling for that space. Your art can be about anything you want it to be and occasionally it will be about a political thing that has crossed your path. An artwork has a life of its own; it gathers meaning or not, it depends on how many times it’s shown and what context it’s shown in. Something you said in a previous interview about your 2008 artwork Apocalypse Later caught my attention; a section in which you said, ‘I had worried that an interview with Chomsky might be dry, but in the end it turned out to be emotive and compelling.’ That particular work is about climate change but it’s understated and quite different from what many people think about when they conjure the term ‘activist art’. When a work appears to be risky and unconventional how do you know when to push through, to let an idea take its own momentum or, alternatively, abandon it? I’m quite pluralistic in the work I make, from installation to embroidery to photography, films etc. I am happy making the work despite the medium. My more political works have often turned out to be films. There was one made in Bethlehem and there is one with a Muslim family – a father and son – making crucifixes and crowns of thorns. I interviewed them about what they were thinking about when they were making the wreaths and they just 06 07 99 ended up talking about what was happening in Palestine, which wasn’t something I was thinking they would be doing, but they did. Later I made a film called War Machine (2016) which is about a poppy factory. It hasn’t got any people in it, but the poppy machine (which just pops out poppies all the time) goes on and on and on. The film is really short and spans what is happening from seven o’clock in the morning to seven o’clock at night, every day of the year. It’s a never-ending commemoration going on. Are you aware of any translational challenges, as a British artist showing in Australia? I haven’t seen the space yet! But I’ve visited it before and have exhibited in a lot of museums so I’m kind of used to that environment. A full installation is hard to do. Sometimes you have to re-build, and also, I’m going to make a new work where I’ll be painting on the windows. So I will be making something new for the space which has this aspect onto the water. The convicts who came from Britain came in their boats. I am making something with that in mind, using chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover. The MCA windows are an enormous surface area. Yes! And for me, when you talk about site-specific work, I have to choose a material which will have an importance to the people of Sydney. For instance the artwork Subconscious of a Monument (2005), which is earth that was taken away from the opposite side of the Tower of Pisa and that caused the tower to sink (when they removed the earth it allowed the tower to sink back on its foundations, and stop it from falling). The last time I came to Australia, which was about twenty years ago, I used the same chalk from the White Cliffs. People were saying ‘Is this a post-colonial statement? What is this artwork, why are you bringing the White Cliffs of Dover to Australia?’. So I am bringing the White Cliffs of Dover to Australia (again), but this time in the form of a drawing. EXHIBITION Cornelia Parker Sydney International Art Series 8 November 2019 to 16 February 2020 Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney @corneliaparkerartist 04 War Room, 2015, installation view, Whitworth, Manchester perforated paper negatives left over from production of remembrance poppies, with thanks to The Poppy Factory, Richmond and The Royal British Legion 05 Subconscious of a Monument, 2001–05, installation view, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2007, earth excavated from underneath Leaning Tower of Pisa (to stop it falling), photograph Jerry Hardman-Jones 06 Thirty Pieces of Silver (detail), 1988–89, silver-plated objects flattened by a steamroller, wire, © Tate, London 07 Left Right & Centre (still), 2017, video, colour, sound Courtesy the artist, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Frith Street Gallery, London, The Whitworth – The University of Manchester, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Tate, London and British Library, London; all images © the artist The Light at The End of the Tunnel is a Train Author: Rose Vickers Issue: November edition Volume: 49 Page Numbers: 91 — 97 Publication Date: 2019 Publication Name: Artist Profile Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums. Her large-scale artwork War Room will be one inclusion: a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, memorial-poppy-fabric conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs, it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of state-sanctioned conflict. Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many of her works transcend national borders to speak to a global community: for instance, Apocalpse Later, which stems from an ecologically-centric interview with Noam Chomksy, as well as her early, now iconic installation Cold Dark Matter, comprising an exploded domestic shed and its material contents. The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian museological audience. Another early artwork, The Maybee, interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this – coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention – provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display. Interview pp. 91 — 97.