GILLIAN PERRY: I'm Gill Perry, and I'm Professor
of Art History at The Open University. Today,
I'm going to be looking at an installation
work by the British artist, Cornelia Parker.
It consists of the suspended pieces of an
exploded garden shed. It's called Cold Dark
Matter, An Exploded View. And it was done
in 1991.
And what you can see when you look closely
at this work is that there's a big, or a large
200-watt light bulb in the middle, shining
light on all these broken, charred, blackened
pieces of the shed, fragments of the stuff
that was in the shed.
It was first exhibited in the Chisenhale Gallery
in 1991, when these pieces were suspended
from the ceiling of the gallery. Since then,
it's been exhibited at venues all over the
world.
Parker often works with cliched domestic objects,
like garden sheds, teapots, dust, objects
that you find around the house. And she's
particularly interested in exploding or flattening
these objects. She's very interested in transformation,
in metamorphosis, how one thing can become
something else, how it can have a kind of
aesthetic resurrection.
When she made 'Cold Dark Matter', she was
working on a series of what she called cartoon
deaths. By this, she meant the kind of theatrical
or extreme deaths that you often experience
in cartoons, like explosions, or like being
flattened. Those 'Tom and Jerry' cartoons
come to mind.
Parker's shed underwent a rather dramatic
resurrection in this work. And the garden
shed is an iconic site of national domestic
life. It's where, traditionally, men go off
and potter. They do their DIY. They keep their
bits and bobs, their old tools, their old
magazines.
Parker was keen that this symbol, this kind
of anti-monument to British life, particularly
in the post-war period, should be exploded,
should be literally torn to pieces. And she
even added in it one or two things of her
own, including a copy of Marcel Proust's Remembrance
of Things Past.
The theme that has interested Parker throughout
her work, that's the theme of gravity. She's
fascinated by the way in which gravity pulls
things to Earth. And many of her works are
actually suspended.
But of course, an explosion defies gravity.
It sends objects flying everywhere. But Parker
then pulls those fragments back. She creates
order out of chaos as she suspends them around
her light bulb.
Another important point to note about this
work is that it's an example of installation
art. Installation art is an important genre
in contemporary art. It first emerged in the
post-war period and has become enormously
popular. It breaks away from the traditional
media of painting, sculpture, drawing, and
so on. It often involves multimedia.
But an important aspect of installation art
is the way we view it. Artists who use this
medium often claim that it breaks from a traditional
relationship between the viewer and the object.
You're invited to walk around an installation,
sometimes to walk in and out of it, to experience
it in a physical way. It does away with the
traditional frame that you might expect to
frame a painting.
Parker was particularly interested in this
medium. She's drawn to the way in which installation
art invites the spectator to move around.
It does away with the idea that the object
has a centre. She calls it 'this anti-centre
thing' For her, her works are anti-monuments.
This makes them easier for the viewer to move
around, to view from different angles.
You may have wondered about the title. Cornelia
Parker herself has explained why she used
the term 'Cold Dark Matter'. She said, 'I
like the sound of that. It's a scientific
term. It was coined to describe all the stuff
in the universe you can't quantify, all the
stuff they know is there, but you can't see,
which seemed a perfect description'.
The work is now the collection of the Tate
Gallery. But unfortunately, it's not always
on display. But you can find it on the Tate
website if you're interested.
