At the still point of the turning world:
Cornelia
Parker’s Abysmal Transformations
Her installations
and photo works are hyper-aesthetic, sometimes idyllic shots that address
both cultural and historical violence. Cornelia Parker employs scientific
exactitude to explode huts and churches or flatten silverware with a
steamroller. The photographs of her series Avoided Object portray
peacefully drifting clouds. In reality, however, these pictures were taken
with the camera of a Nazi mass murderer. Louise Gray met the
London-based artist.
Avoided
Object, 1999, © Cornelia Parker / Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
When you can’t look down,
when life on earth is too awful to comprehend, where do you direct your
gaze? When making the photographs that were to become Avoided Object
(1999), the British conceptualist Cornelia
Parker knew there was only one answer: up. And so it was to the sky
that she directed her gaze – or the eye of the camera. The pictures – shot
with infrared film to darken the darks and whiten the whites – show an
ordinary blustery day in London.
Look
carefully at the heightened contrasts of the monochrome: there is black,
there’s white, there are shades of grey. If the photographs had been a
video, the colors would have swirled into one another, leaking across a
series of porous boundaries, rather like an osmotic process. And it’s this
bleed, this neither-one-thing-nor-anotherness that Parker is interested
in. “For me, art is friction,” she says, and in her work, this friction
creates a constant to and fro, a motion between polarities. But whatever
else her art is, it is also materialized truth – that no thing or motive
in this world is ever simply black or white.
Avoided
Object, 1999, © Cornelia Parker /
Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London
Deutsche
Bank Collection
To express this motion so
necessary for her work, Parker has often borrowed or transmuted items into
something else. But in making Avoided Object, Parker was to use
possibly the most loaded object of her career. The camera that took the
photos for Avoided Object had belonged to Rudolf
Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz
between 1940-43 and one of the main perpetrators of the Nazis’ Final
Solution. What would Höss, a man responsible for deaths in the
millions, have photographed? This SS officer, who described himself as a
loving family man in a testament written prior to his execution, was the
epitome of what philosopher Hannah
Arendt later described as "the banality of evil." And yet, in his
professional life (if one can use such a term), he was a proud and
inventive mass murderer. One of his ideas was the introduction of the Zyklon
B gas that facilitated Auschwitz’s inhuman efficiency.
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Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton, The
Maybe (Detail), 1995,
Courtesy
the artist & Frith Street Gallery, London
Parker
had originally, she explains, wanted to photograph the interior of the
camera – its dark chamber – but when this proved too difficult, she took
the instrument out of London’s Imperial
War Museum, where it now resides, and turned it towards the sky
instead. She recalls her reaction to handling the camera. "Having this
object in my hands made me feel…" – she’s still lost for words and makes a
noise that expresses a shudder of horror. "The camera is not evil, because
an object can’t be evil, but I didn’t want its history to become inert. By
using it myself, it was a way of reactivating the object and taking it
forward in a different way." Parker had originally sought out the camera
for use in The
Maybe, the famous installation she and the actor Tilda
Swinton – who appeared sleeping in a glass casket in the middle of the Serpentine
venue – collaborated on in 1995.
Cold
Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991,
Courtesy
the artist & Frith Street Gallery, London
In the event, she never got to use Höss’ camera for The Maybe
at all. The Serpentine Gallery’s staff lobbied against its inclusion, and
Parker replaced it with that of Lee
Miller, the American photojournalist (and Surrealist muse) who had
been present at the liberation of other concentration camps – Dachau
and Buchenwald – in 1945.
"Miller’s camera had photographed Dachau and Vogue
models – both ends of a spectrum, you might say," says Parker, indicating
that this was her way around the Höss conundrum.
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Political Abstract, 1999,
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© Cornelia Parker / Courtesy Frith Street
Gallery, London,
But why use Höss’ camera? "A lot of my work is about
destruction and resurrection," Parker says, adding that there is also a
component in this particular work that carries enormous personal
resonance. Parker herself is half-German (her mother, from Karlsruhe, was
a nurse in the Second World War and subsequently a prisoner of war before
moving to Britain and marrying), and she grew up in England’s Cheshire
countryside with an acute and uneasy relationship to that recent past. In
exposing Höss’ camera to a benign sky, was there an idea of some
homeopathic principle: that the light of the photographs might triumph
over the dark and so exorcise an idea of evil. "I like that term a lot,"
Parker answers, "the homeopathic premise of treating sick persons with
extremely diluted agents that – in undiluted doses – are deemed to produce
similar symptoms in a healthy individual. The idea to add a dilution of
poison so as to negate it is interesting to me."
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