Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain review: A retrospective that doesn’t shy away from the present

Exploding garden sheds; guillotined dolls; a vast collection of silverware run over by a steamroller. Cornelia Parker’s first Tate retrospective is full of implicit noise and violence. But the experience of looking at the objects in the gallery is in complete contrast: there’s stillness, silence, even elegance.

Take Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), the work that gave Parker fame, and can now lay claim to being one of the most popular British artworks ever. Parker had a shed and its contents detonated by the Royal Artillery, then suspended the remaining fragments around a central light. The silhouettes and shadows fill the space and the surrounding walls, so that a split-second moment of blinding mayhem is contained forever in the stillness of the gallery.

When first exhibited, the work seemed of a piece with a subversive new spirit in British art, typified by the then emergent Young British Artists, or YBAs. Yet approaching the work today, you’re struck less by that perceived edginess than by the meticulous care with which the whole thing’s been assembled: with the smallest fragments closest to the light, radiating out towards whole sections of wall hanging over the viewer’s head.

The work’s popularity stems, I suspect, from the way it discerns a reassuring order beneath its initial explosive excitement, and the fact that its rationale makes clear and obvious sense – which puts it at an immediate remove from most contemporary art. So does that make Parker a safe, even a cosy artist?

Far from it. Where most career retrospectives look comfortably back on past achievements, this exhibition highlights Parker’s preoccupation with British identity and carries her exasperation with the state of Britain today right into the last room.

Born in 1956, Parker belongs to a slightly different generation to the YBAs. She’s only seven years older than Tracey Emin, but such differences matter when art is framed around “youth”. Parker’s experience as a young artist was informed more by subsisting in short-life housing than by glitzy parties and gallery openings.

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988), which opens the show, is another of her signature works. For this, she scoured markets and car boot sales for silver plated utensils and cutlery, which she then arranged to be run over by a steamroller. The crushed objects are suspended just above floor height in thirty circular formations – “pools”, she calls them – in a rectangular, room-filling formation. Again, it’s the sense of order and symmetry that impresses. Parker’s wall texts describe the way Tom and Jerry-style cartoon violence, where characters are blown up and dropped off cliffs, but spring straight back, influenced her attempts to undermine “the traditional seriousness of sculpture”.

Yet she also confesses that her unstable living conditions, in a house about to be demolished to make way for the M11, “may also have had something to do with it – I can feel the anxiety even now”. Her need to create order from self-created chaos seems to have stemmed from the sheer precariousness of her life as a young artist, and also perhaps from the effects of an abusive childhood – she states in the catalogue that she was persistently beaten by her father.

As the show progresses, Parker “transforms the identities of objects” in ever more ingenious and often sinister ways. There’s an Oliver Twist doll spliced in two by the very guillotine used to behead Marie Antoinette; later, we see drawings made with dissolved fragments of pornographic video tapes. An old school minimalist or conceptualist would have left these works unexplained, leaving the viewer to complete the visual conundrum, but for Parker the cultural associations of these objects and processes are intrinsic to the work. And often these associations are very British.

open image in gallery

Clumps of woolly black fluff in The Negatives of Sound (1996), formed from the waste matter produced from “engraving” music onto a vinyl master disc, were salvaged from Abbey Road Studios. Bronze casts of pavement cracks, turned into another elegant floor-filling installation, were made in Bunhill Cemetery where those iconic British authors William Blake and Daniel Defoe are interred.

The circle of crushed marching band instruments whose shadows cover the walls in Perpetual Canon embody the “thousands of breaths that circulated through them in their lifetime”, but also “a robustness we used to have”, so Parker told me in an interview in 2010, “related to the unions, the British Legion, the Salvation Army – an anthem that is slowly winding down”. That elegiac mood is poignantly underlined by snatches of Jerusalem, played by the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, drifting through from an adjacent room. That music provides the soundtrack for a film Flag, (2022) in which footage of a Union Jack being made runs backwards, suggesting that a certain idea of Britain is being deconstructed before our eyes.

This is a very well put together exhibition, to which Parker’s own thoughts and reflections provide an engaging commentary in the wall texts. Her fascination with the fallout of British culture and history becomes the dominant – if unstated – theme as the show builds towards its conclusion.

Any sense of wistful nostalgia is undercut by Parker’s unease at the state of post-Brexit Britain, a place that appears in her perception – and millions of others too – in a state of national nervous breakdown. Magna Carta (An Embroidery) (2015), a vast collective embroidery of the medieval document that supposedly guarantees our freedom, is based not on the actual document, but – typical Parker – its Wikipedia page. Film and photographs of demonstrations, whether pro-Trump in New York, or anti-lots of things in London, bring a sense of immediacy, making this an exhibition that feels much more about the present than the usual comfortable career-trawling retrospective.

It all comes together in the final room, in a newly created work, Island, in which a domestic greenhouse – bought on eBay, of course – seems to stand in for Britain itself, a structure that represents industry and fertility on the one hand and parochial insularity on the other. Its windows are smeared with chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover – a place that is both the beginning and end of Britain – its floor created from reclaimed tiles from the Houses of Parliament. Inside a light pulses slowly and ominously at the tempo of a lighthouse, an ambiguous structure that acts both as a welcome and a warning. It feels a brave and necessary gesture to end this important exhibition on a public rather than a personal note – to be focusing not on a climactic career high, but looking forward to an uncertain collective future.

Until 16 Oct (opens 19 May)