So how does her approach help to make us think or feel? Perhaps it's got something to do with Jung's idea of the collective archetype, by allowing the subconscious to dictate some aspects of the creative process, the end result enmeshes both rational and irrational impulses.
Poison and Antidote Drawing: 2009
Rattle-snake venom and black ink, anti-venom and white ink on card: 6 x 4 in.
Parker often includes culturally significant materials in her work, which both heightens our emotional response to what she is doing and helps us to memorise the experience. However you get the sense that she chooses these materials because of some sort of 'feeling' that they are right, thus beginning a process that fuses subconscious awareness with a sort of inductive reasoning. Parker also gives us the interconnections that help to bind memories for us. In 'The Art of Memory' by Frances Yates, you will find detailed descriptions of how memory was understood as a part of the skills of rhetoric, and the conjunction of different concepts or things that have unexpected associations or correspondences, is a technique often used to stimulate the brain to hold on to an idea. I suspect that at one time or another Parker has read Frances Yates and that she has herself recognised the importance of making visual imagery that asks questions of the viewer, especially because of an initial illogical or odd appearance. In the case of the venom / anti venom concept, first of all it is important that it is 'rattlesnake' venom. She could possibly have used cobra venom as both snakes are culturally significant, but the 'rattlesnake' is of course more closely identified with an idea of the USA, and in this case it also makes far more sense in relation to Christian concepts of good and evil and the awareness we have of possessed preachers and the dark side of the American south. Black is an 'evil' colour, with an association with death and white is culturally associated with purity and goodness. Bringing these things together with the Rorschach blot taps into Freud and the unconscious and allows for a 'read' of the final image in the same way that any other Rorschach blot would be read, as a way to understand someone's unconscious motivation. The fact that many of these blots are either read as skulls or butterflies, reminding us of the nature of bi-lateral symmetry, a formal principle underlying both folding paper in half and the development of most life forms, especially if they have backbones. Parker describes what she did in a very straightforward way, ‘ I’ve made poison and antidote drawings using snake venom from a rattlesnake farm in Texas mixed with black ink, and anti-venom with white ink, to make Rorschach blots. The resulting drawings are a combination of 'good and 'evil'. (Maslen and Southern, 2014:54) She also states ‘For me the conscious part of making a drawing is deciding on a process, what the process then releases is something else.’ The 'something else' I presume is dependent on the unconscious. The fact that the process of interconnection releases certain metaphorical 'triggers' in the mind of the viewer, therefore creates questions, rather than direct 'answers' or clear 'meanings' is important here. Parker again; “I began with the idea of different sorts of oppositional things. I was thinking of Hitler and Freud, for example, in terms of how they seem to personify contrasting parts of the psyche. I also wanted to make something physically dangerous.” (Drawing, 2000). Opposites exist because we are fascinated by them; black is only identifiable as the opposite of white because our mental picture of these two concepts is set up in a particular way. In reality there are no opposites only continually morphing and changing relationships. What was once part of a helium atom inside a star might now be part of a calcium atom inside you. What you eat this morning might well have been part of a dinosaur sixty million years ago or a weathered rock from the same era. At a quantum level everything is transferrable to everything else. At one point Parker was using black Quink ink as a carrier for the poison and white correction fluid as the carrier of its antidote. The correction fluid is very viscous and the resultant texture when you fold the card over and print off the painted surface opposite is quite organic, almost hair like, reinforcing the fact that the blot could look both like a skull or a human being wearing a fur coat. Again as Parker states, ‘The material is often where my thinking starts.’ (Aesthetica Magazine, 2016) So the material can have two types of metaphoric operation, the first, its whiteness, signifying purity, the second, its tendency to be thicker and stickier, enabling it to make a texture that is similar to that of bone, or fur, or sick or semen. Signifying perhaps death in life or the comforts of a return to our furry animal nature, or the fact that sex and death are always close bedfellows. Hopefully you are beginning to get the idea of how her work can be used to build interconnections between things.
Cold Dark Matter: An exploded view
Cold dark matter consists of the contents of a garden shed exploded at her request by the British Army. The contents and bits of the shed itself are then collected together and are hung by fine threads from a metal grid situated above the installation, which is illuminated by a single lightbulb that hangs down into the centre of the suspended components, casting dramatic shadows onto the walls. It appears as if a moment during which the explosion took place has been frozen, and you can walk around the hanging pieces of shed and examine in detail, what is there and where each piece is in relation to every other piece. We in effect come to inhabit a different time zone or we speed move so fast that things around us appear to become still. This device is also used in films, witness how the Quicksilver character moves in the X-Men film franchise.
Quicksilver in the kitchen
This association with comic culture could be taken even further. Before developing 'Cold Dark Matter' as a project, Parker had been working on a series of ideas that looked at creation coming out of destruction. Some of her images appeared to be very like orchestrated cartoon deaths, the invention in a cartoon like Wile E. Coyote, being often at its highest in the various ways that the animators could think of bringing an end to the central character.
Wile E. Coyote
Cornelia Parker has steamrollered brass band instruments and you suspect really likes the ‘exploded view’ images you used to get with Airfix construction kits.
Exploded view of a tank, lower section
You also get a sense that she is enjoying the idea of inventing forms of destruction in order to be able to reconstruct the objects in new formulations. She kills things off in order to resurrect them, an idea that we have also seen at the core of some religions. An religious icon for instance could be described as a living image of a dead God.
Breathless
The idea that art could be seen as ‘the living image of a dead thing’ is something that would have appealed to Roland Barthes. This was exactly how Barthes described the photograph, something that he argued it had in common with all portrait paintings and ancient Egyptian funerary objects; all those things were eventually going to result in living portraits of the dead. However for Barthes, what was unique to the photograph, was its punctum, which he defined as the sensory, subjective effect of a photograph on the viewer; as he states, ‘The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’ Barthes contrasted the punctum with the studium, which he described as denoting a more rational approach to the understanding of a photograph, one that is conditioned by historical and cultural experiences and is not categorically different from how other art forms are approached. However a sensory, intensely subjective effect of an image on the viewer, is something I would argue is a possibility for all sorts of images, not just photographs. What is unique about any experience is the encounter and how it is perceived.
Because all encounters are initially brief and fleeting perceptual events, (we are hardwired to respond immediately to perceptions so that we either fight or flee) their initial reading has to be instinctive, it is only when we have more leisure time that we can begin to rationalize what went on and work out meaning. A sensation or emanation that carries an image, is essentially in an image form, so on the point of its reception it is also received as a type of pattern. Therefore we could associate the ‘punctum’ in Barthes definition with how we instinctively react in any initial moment in an encounter with an image. A reflection on the nature of the studium comes later.
Evolution has hardwired our pattern recognition abilities to be instinctive and involuntary, however for them to go into operation at the speed they do, the thing we lose is a consistent ability to make the right call. Therefore we can begin to detect patterns that aren't really there. As James Geary (2011, p. 36) puts it, "The brain evolved to detect patterns of immediate significance, in do or die, fight or flight situations." Geary (p.38) goes on to describe McCulloch's experiments, that show how a frog is hardwired to try to eat anything that is about the size of an insect and that moves around in jerky movements. This automatic response to a certain type of pattern will sometimes mean the frog gets to eat inedible things that have simply drifted into its field of vision, however, the frog's chance of catching flies is greatly increased if it doesn't take time to think about where a fly might be and 9 times out of 10 that moving shape will be food and not just a scientist trying to fool it. We are not unlike frogs, and if we see something like a food pattern we decide it must be a food pattern. This process tends to make us create object agency, it can also lead to the giving of the characteristics of living things to inanimate objects. The behaviour patterns, or look of inanimate things, can be like the behaviour patterns or look of living things. Because of the bi-lateral symmetry created by folding a sheet of ink stained paper in half, at first glance it might be an animal, simply because most animals are bi-laterally symmetric. (Humans are of course animals with backbones, so we are hardwired to see that pattern). As Geary notes, "That swaying in the trees may be just a breeze or it could be a wild beast, coiled and ready to strike. You can misperceive the breeze as a beast or the beast as a breeze. Which mistake would you rather make? And if you were an early hominoid, which mistake would be more likely to ensure that you would survive long enough to reproduce?" (2011, p. 41)
This ability to give agency to things is at the core of how we produce metaphor, things are similar to each other, so one thing might be like another in other ways too. For instance we see images of human faces in old gnarled trees, in burnt toast and in the moon. We use a metaphorical technique called personification as an extension of this, something in advertising that is called 'brand personality', which is why a company might for instance strive to develop a 'sincere' image. Associations begin alongside perception, whether we want them to or not, prompting behaviours that can be totally outside our conscious control. These representations, or perceptual/pattern recognition combinations, also come with affects. Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson (2000) suggest that as we perceive, the representations we arrive at come out of what is called an 'affective pool' and as we pull them up into consciousness and judgement making, they come with what could be called unconscious bias.
In psychology unconscious bias is explored by using the techniques of free association as first initiated by Freud. He would ask people to tell him what the first thing was that came into their minds when he gave them a word to respond to. His pupil Rorschach, began to use inkblots to initiate the same process. People see different things in the same ambiguous inkblot image and as they tell what they see, an analyst will record their thoughts and then determine the significance of the associations made.
Something that evolved as a super fast response to flight or fight situations, now sits deep down in the amphibian brain, located at the centre of an activity that Johnson and Lakoff would argue was the creation of body schema metaphors. A typical body metaphor would be to be feeling centred or the opposite, of feeling off balance. These associations could be triggered by an awareness that well and healthy people stand up straight, but ill or dying people tend to lie down, or stagger about. Our concept of Justice holding her scales, is a metaphorical personification that stems from this idea.
Cornelia Parker's thinking process is centred around the nature of metaphor. Her art is about destruction, resurrection and reconfiguration. Demonstrating the importance of process, she frequently transforms objects by using seemingly violent techniques such as shooting, exploding, squashing, cutting and burning. Through these actions she physically alters the object and she herself becomes an active participant in the development of its story.
In order for Parker to engage with her subject she often has to destroy it. She might melt it down, blow it up, squash it flat, burn it or cut it up, but in the process she reveals something new about the possible meaning of something, the process of destruction leading towards various metaphorical readings. Hence in 'Breathless'; we associate brass band instruments with the 'blow', the deep intake of breath needed to exhale with pressure in order to sound them. If these instruments are squashed it is as if the breath was squeezed out of them. The process of finding new meaning often involves a resurrection or rebuilding from the parts of the initial deconstruction. Her reconfigurations often involve variations of or associations with the original subject and/or its process of destruction. She states that, 'a squashed object is much more interesting than an intact one and I think brokenness is very much a part of society. Civilisations fall, for instance, or a very recognisable object can become mysterious and more open to interpretation when it’s in pieces. To me, that’s more interesting than what is whole.
I use a lot of clichéd objects: a pearl necklace, a silver spoon, a hat for church, a window or the instruments from a brass band – things that are kind of commonplace and that are so ubiquitous everyone understands what they are. I take very simple things and use them to achieve the abstract'. Of much more importance is I think her interest in The Golden Bough by Frazer, a book that outlines the structures of various ancient religions, a book that states that some societies “had to kill something off every time they wanted something to be regenerated."
Anti-Mass
Anti-Mass is made from the charred remains of a Southern Baptist church with an African American congregation, that was burnt down by racists. She has used the timbers of the burned church to reconstruct a replacement, that is on the one hand an illustration of atomic forces, of a mass/energy configuration and on the other it is a resurrection of the church's charred remains, so that they can in effect perform their own catholic mass. Science and religion are brought together, these burnt fragments defying gravity and floating without weight, escaping their earth bound life to become a monument to an act of barbarity. As parker has stated, "For every death you get a resurrection.”
The most successful metaphors are those that you remember because of a new or unexpected connection.They are about rethinking the familiar, but with a conceptual link that binds the source to the connection. Without this conceptual tie, what you get when you bring two unlike things together, is as Geary states, "mere Surrealism." (2011, p149)
See also:
References
Geary, J (2011) I is an other: The secret life of metaphor and how it shapes the way we see the world London: Harper
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. London: University of Chicago press
Maslen, M. and Southern, J. (2014) Drawing Projects: An Exploration of the Language of Drawing London: Black Dog Cornelia Parker talks about her work in this book of projects
Finucane, M. L., Alhakami, A., Slovic, P., & Johnson, S. M. (2000). The affect heuristic in judgments of risks and benefits. Journal of behavioral decision making, 13(1), 1-17.
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