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Royal Academy summer exhibition 2024

The usual procedure: tens of thousands of artworks submitted by members of the public and Royal Academicians (RAs) and then reviewed and chosen by a panel of eight or so RAs. Result: twelve galleries crammed from floor to ceiling with 1,710 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, architectural models, hangings, mobiles, photos and videos.

So, as usual, it takes a lot of time and effort to really focus on, assess and process so very, very many works. By less than half way through I was feeling overwhelmed. Doing the whole show properly requires stamina and determination.

Each work is accompanied by a wall label which just gives the work’s number so it’s well worth investing £3.50 in the little pocket catalogue because only by referring to this can you find out the work’s name, the artist and – subject of perennial fascination – its cost, because the majority of the works on display here are on sale. As far as I could see the cheapest work cost £100, the most expensive was a room-sized installation which could be yours for just £300,000.

I think it was the Guardian who accused this year’s show of being a chaotic jumble sale, but it always feels like that to me. And despite there being few real bangers (like the life-size sculpture of a gorilla made out of coat hangers or the life-sized sculpture of a tiger covered in red and silver Tunnocks teacake wrappers from former shows) there were a lot of really good things.

There’s always a chair of the curators, or chief co-ordinator, and they choose the show’s overall theme. This year’s co-ordinator was Ann Christopher and the supposed theme is MAKING SPACE.

As I walked very slowly through the rooms I marked up on my catalogue the works I really liked or were striking for one reason or another. Here’s my selection of personal favourites. She is quoted as saying:

“I plan to explore the idea of making space, whether giving space or taking space. This can be interpreted in various ways: to make space can mean openness – making space for something or someone, also making space between things. It is my belief that the spaces in between are as important as whatever those spaces separate.”

I think it’s fair to say I didn’t notice or recognise this theme anywhere in the exhibition and you could happily walk through the whole thing without being aware of any central theme, such is the range and diversity of the plethora of works on display.

A few Big Names are represented: the ones whose names I know are Rachel Whiteread, Ron Arad, Frank Bowling, Michael Craig-Martin, Anselm Kiefer, Mick Moon, Allen Jones. The only ones whose work I recognised unprompted were Michael Craig-Martin for the four or so big schematic paintings of everyday objects in room 3, because he has such a clear and recognisable brand and Allen Jones for the sculpture in room 9 because the heads on it had his very characteristic look.

The Annenberg courtyard

In the courtyard is a monumental textile sculpture. From a distance I thought it was a concatenation of chains and was going to be yet another reference to imperialism and slavery, the top subject of our times, but I was wrong. It’s by British artist Nicola Turner and is made of found organic matter, including horsehair and wool with the tips of each of the monstrous legs ending in old-style table legs on castors.

Apparently it is based on one of Reynolds’s own paintings, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents and this explains why the slender tip of what turns into this monstrous rampage of rope emanates from the tip of Sir Joshua’s paintbrush. The work ‘explores the boundaries between life, death and the liminal spaces in between’.

‘The Meddling Fiend’ by Nicola Turner (Exhibit 1)

Room 1 (63 works)

Each room or set of rooms is hung by a member of the selection committee. The first two rooms were hung by Hughie O’Donoghue RA. Not to be too harsh, but both these rooms felt grey and dreary. It’s only in room 3 that things pick up. Apparently O’Donaghue was attracted to works that ‘displayed a painter’s sensibility in which the physical process of painting and a sense of the hard-won image were evident.’ I do, in fact, see what he means and my favourite pieces in this room do just that, show the process of painting making in a way I’ve always like, using or incorporating found materials, having a strong industrial vibe.

This is most clearly demonstrated in a hug work by O’Donoghue himself, ‘Channel’, which is not only dramatic but is painted on industrial tarpaulin complete with eyelets.

Channel (oil, mixed media on tarpaulin) by Hughie O’Donoghue RA £75,000 (32)

In the same spirit I liked Considerate Construction by Lee Maelzer, mainly for the dramatic gold and orange colouring but also for its industrial vibe.

Considerate Construction (oil and latex) by Lee Maelzer £16,000 (28)

In a completely different vibe, the friend I went with liked:

Love Myself (knitting wool and cotton filling)by Chunyoung Yang £500 (42)

Room 2 (77 works)

Also hung by O’Donoghue. Amid the jumble sale disorder of so many images a number were about the sea, which emerged as a theme in both his rooms.

High and Dry (woodblock and etched lino) by Ian Burke £380 (71)

There was a little area devoted to the works of ‘the late Mick Moon RA’ including this, which I think I’ve seen at a previous show, dramatic in its size and painted on rough industrial planking so right up my street.

Outward Bound (acrylic and mixed media) by Mick Moon £30,000 (111)

The Large Weston Room (242 works)

It comes as a visual and psychological relief to emerge from the first two rooms, characterised by grey and blurred images, and into room 3. This is curated by the fabulous Cornelia Parker who has themed her room round the seven colours of the rainbow and it immediately feels like it. This is the room with the four big Michael Craig-Martins with his trademark flat colouring, and you are also struck by several works with colourful vertical strips. Big relief after the first two grey rooms.

Orchid (by Sir Michael Craig-Martin £8,600

My friend is a birdwatcher and nature lover so she liked the clever Bird Colour Wheel by Jim Moir.

Bird Colour Wheel (pigment print) by Jim Moir £1,250 (149)

There was also the first humorous offerings, including a pair of 18th century paintings spoofed by having 21st century products collaged onto them, by Toby Holmes.

A Bottle of Dog (Newkie Brown) (digital collage; giclee print) by Toby Holmes £250 (188)

I like the woodcut vibe and loveliness of this fine image (in fact a linocut).

Traitorous Trueness (linocut) by Gerard McMenamin £250 (205)

In a similar vein I liked the strong cartoon outlines of this nude.

Untitled Nude 2 (linocut) by Morag Bassinthwaite £250 (256)

At about this point it dawned on me that maybe, faced with a bombardment of images, the mind prioritises the realistic, naturalistic images. Was that why I was liking recognisable naturalistic images? Is that why I liked this one so much, where Paul Stephenson has merged an original 1820 oil painting (of John Porter by William Bradley) onto an image of the calm flat infinite sea?

Reflets sous la pluie (ink on original oil painting) by Paul Stephenson £2,500 (211)

Remember I mentioned the tiger covered in Tunnock teacake wrappers. The famous tiger was done by David Mach (and there are a couple of smaller works in the same style in the penultimate room). Here’s a jokey hommage by Paula Martyr.

A Teacake Cat (collage) by Paula Martyr Not For Sale (NFS) (210)

When someone’s bought a print which comes in multiple editions, the gallery puts a round red adhesive label by it. I thought it telling that this Parker room has a whole stand devoted to twee and humorous images of cats and dogs which were festooned with red labels. People want art that is a) affordable b) makes you smile.

Resisting the appeal of winsome cats and dogs, I liked the casual gracefulness of this image by Julia Andrews.

In My Mind (five-later screenprint) by Julia Andrews £350 (266)

Small Weston Room (1 video)

The work in the Small Weston Room is by invited artist Carey Young. Filmed at SIGMA Corporation in Japan, ‘The Vision Machine’ captures the company’s female employees, creating a speculative fiction that suggests a lens factory run (and perhaps owned) by women. The factory is used as a metaphor for photography and cinema in a wider sense, and shows how women are framed within, and in relation to those fields. The piece pays homage to women as skilled makers and creators, whilst suggesting a female-centric vision, or perhaps a wider visual culture created by women.

There’s a page of stills from the film on her website. My friend – a woman and a feminist – walked in, watched the video for sixty seconds, and walked out again. Given our saturation with American TV and movies which are designed to grab and keep our attention for every second, it’s very difficult for any art video maker to compete.

Room 3 (63 works)

This room is massive, maybe three times the size of the previous rooms, so it needs big works to make an impression. It was hung by the exhibition’s overall co-ordinator, Ann Christopher who is a sculptor. Her aim (apparently) was to create contrasts of scale. A large collage of woodcuts by Anselm Kiefer (American), a new painting by Rose Wylie and a vibrant work on canvas by Sir Frank Bowling. Alongside are smaller works by artists such as David Remfry and Diana Armfield. Some sculptures are hung on the walls. Cornelia Parker ‘Psychobarn (Flotsam)‘ leans against a wall, while Honorary Academician El Anatsui’s intricate wall-hanging dominates one end of the gallery. I normally love Parker but didn’t react to her shed and the Anatsui is genuinely huge but left me meh. Richard Serra is ‘known for his large-scale abstract sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings’ which is why it was odd to see him represented by a painting, which admittedly had a nice Rothko-like abstract vibe (well, without the blurry edges).

Those are all big names but the actual works selected weren’t that exciting, for example a couple of drawings by Rachel Whiteread, who cares? It would have been much better to have one of her huge sculptures, specially for such a big space.

Maybe my favourite piece was the Bowling. There’s a reason why the famous guys are famous – at their best they have a certain something which lifts them above, in this case, the hundreds of other semi-abstract paintings on show. (Incidentally, I think the silver slipper is depicted in the central diamond, something which is much more obvious when you see it in the flesh, as it’s a whopping 3 metres tall.)

Silver Slipper (acrylic and acrylic gel with collaged canvas with marouflage) by Frank Bowling NFS (440)

Room 4 (71 works)

Room 4 was also curated by Christopher. I liked Horror Vacui by Paul Benney which is a digitally animated painting of a candle under a bell jar using up all the oxygen and snuffing out. There’s a slightly worrying big print of a naked man facing away from us by the famous Wolfgang Tillmans. It made me realise how relatively few nudes there were in the show and, as usual, mostly female.

Small but striking (maybe just because it reminds me of the photomontage pioneered by Peter Kennard whose show at the Whitechapel Gallery I recently visited) was this photomontage by Michelle Thompson.

Bomb (digital artwork) by Michelle Thompson £145 (520)

Room 5 (183 works)

Room 5 was hung by Hurvin Anderson and feels packed. Anderson is Black and it’s probably no coincidence that this room has the first real Black presence, for example the big (and not very good) portrait of Linton Kwesi Johnson and a multiple portrait of Bob Marley. (Having been reminded of Johnson I wrote this review listening to his 1979 album ‘Forces of Victory’.

There’s a vast messy colourful painting by Elizabeth Cope; I admired the colourfulness but not the design. My companion liked Storm Light by Leslie Dabson. Interestingly, this doesn’t reproduce at all well online; in the flesh it’s very small and compact and so gives a very strong vibe of a rainy evening in London’s Victorian terraces. One of the most vivid images is the hyper-naturalistic depiction of an abandoned car overgrown with vegetation by Geoff Archer.

440 (oil) by Geoff Archer £2,800 (631)

I really liked a couple of abstracts by Subai Zheng, 628 and 651. As far as I could tell every single one of the thousands of dots had been created by hand with a felt tip pen. The more I looked the more I was drawn into this mesmerising image.

Weaver: 30 Houses (felt tip marker and acrylic on canvas) by Subai Zheng £15,000 (651)

On the left-hand wall I surprised myself by liking Stone Pines Rome by Katharine Edwards, maybe because of its echoes of Piet Mondrian transitioning from naturalism to abstraction. Or just because I liked the design and the colours.

Stone Pines Rome (acrylic) by Katharine Edwards £4,000 (574)

On reflecton, it may also be because so many of the images have a rather dingy grey overcast feel. Maybe without realising it, the curators are biased by the simple fact of living in England to prefer works which are dingy, overcast, grey, or rainy i.e. like the English climate. Thinking about it, there are very few images depicting a fine sunny day let alone the light blue Mediterranean skies you associate with, say, the art of Raoul Dufy or Matisse.

Next to it another imagine I liked the more I looked at it was ‘Yellow Umbrella’ by Bill Jacklin. To me it felt romantic, like an illustration for an adventure novel, two huddled figures rushing through a snowstorm.

Yellow Umbrella (monotype with oil pastel) by Bill Jacklin £5,775 (623)

(See also his Sea at Night I in a later room.)

Room 6 (121 works)

Each year there’s an architecture room and I always amuse myself by calling it ‘the room of shame’. This is based on my lived experience of the vast discrepancy between the pretentious, high-falutin’ language of architects fantasising about building ecocities in Brazil or colonies on the moon, and the crappy, badly built, poorly insulated houses and flats most of us live in, the gritty streets dominated by big impersonal blocks which most of us hurry through against the gritty wind or dirty rain.

Anyway, this year exhibition co-ordinator Ann Christopher handed Room 6 over to Assemble RA with a view to making it ‘a space for making’. Who are Assemble RA?

Assemble RA is a collective based in London, who work across the fields of art, architecture and design. They began working together in 2010 and have described themselves as having between 16 and 20 permanent members. Assemble’s working practice seeks to address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made. Assemble champion a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, seeking to actively involve the public as both participant and collaborator in the ongoing realization of the work.

And so Assemble RA transformed this room into ‘an industrial warehouse space, a creative’s store, full to the brim with an eclectic mix of models, machinery and curious objects. On the walls are photographs of interiors and artists’ workspaces, and works exploring different materials such as moss (720), 3d-printed sand and woven rush.

What with the shelves lining the walls and the shelf units displaying architects’ models etc this is the most cluttered and busy room. The standout piece for me was a set of industrial tools which have been remodelled to seem like giant metal monster claws.

Installation view of Room 6 at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition room 6 showing Nippers (812) by James Capper (photo by the author)

Among the earnest models of sustainable blah blah were a few humorous models such as friends used to make at school.

Amorgos Monastery (plywood, painted light plaster, tree bark and tree branches) by Vasilis Politis NFS (709)

My companion liked this, Vast Seas in Green to Grey by Julie Massie which consists of hundreds of thin fragments of coloured porcelain embedded in wood to create this beautifully shaded but slightly worrying relief.

Vast Seas in Green to Grey (porcelain on wood) by Julie Massie £800 (707)

Room 7 (256 works)

Gallery 7 is the first of two adjacent rooms hung by printmaker Anne Desmet. I recently visited the big exhibition of her work at the Guildhall Art Gallery, which is still open and well worth visiting. There’s a thread of architecture and buildings running through it. But straight off I liked a couple of humorous works by Laura Beaumont who’s gotten old Observer Books, carved a square hole in them and then created tiny dioramas using model railway figures and foliage.

Observers Dogs by Laura Beaumont £1,500 (829)

My favourite piece in this room was hung up high and so you craned your neck, appropriately, to look up at an image of a high rise block. This reproduction doesn’t do it justice. In the exhibition the paper is set on dark brown wood and creates the impression that it’s made of weathered copper.

Cottingley Heights On Oak (Three) (acrylic on oak veneer) by Nicola Rawnsley £380 (841)

In a different mood, I liked Blueprint by Peter Lawrence, maybe because it reminds me of 1950s jazz LP covers. It also links in my mind with the wonderful prints by the Yoshida family currently on display at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Blueprint (wood engraving) by Peter Lawrence £175 (872)

Lovely, minimalist and clean are Ian Ritchie’s etchings of foxes (926). For me the standout work in the room was a lovely etching of the BBC offices in Langham Place, possibly because they remind me of the wonderful exhibition of 1930s linocuts at Dulwich Picture Gallery a few years ago.

W1A – BBC AND All Souls Church, Langham Place (etching) by John Duffin £795 (977)

There are lots of images of London streets and buildings which are Desmet’s own subject, in all kinds of styles. I was impressed by the realism of this image of Oxford Street through a rain-drizzled window, presumably of a bus.

Oxford Street (acrylic) by James Condon £5,200 (1015)

Honourable mention Urban Beings V (1024) by Francesco Russo.

Room 8 (259 works)

Second room hung by Anne Desmet, this had a noticeable theme of trees along one wall, with all manner of seascapes on the far wall, many of which I liked. This impressive work is an etching made on sycamore leaves, presumably commemorating the chopping down of the tee in the Sycamore Gap of Hadrian’s Wall. It’s more impressive in the flesh than this reproduction

Acer pseudoplatanus L (etching on sycamore leaves) by Emma Buckmaster and Janet French £7,500 (1132)

In line with my general preference for woodcuts and works with strong outlines, I liked this simple but effective linocut, ‘Trees Beneath a Lemon-Yellow Sky’ by Paul Hogg £750.

Trees Beneath a Lemon-Yellow Sky (linocut) by Paul Hogg £750 (1140)

Twenty of more images of the sea captured it in all its moods, from a lovely print by John Mackenzie of shallow surf over a light sandy beach, to images of waves crashing against rocks, a batch of Norman Ackroyd‘s trademark etchings of remote Scottish islands surrounded by gulls.

An Ocean to Swim (woodcut) (woodcut) by Trevor Price £580 (1189)

High up on a wall was a set of ‘London Heads’. This is small and cute in the flesh (40 x 40 cm) so doesn’t benefit from being blown up in reproduction.

London Heads by Sally Cutler £350

This might be the best room with a wide range of smaller but attractive and quality images. I liked the one of a single fern leaf, another painting of woodland floor all brambles etc. On the opposite wall were characterful images of individuals and groups. This one, also, was all the more powerful for being small (15 x 13 cm) like the illustration to an interesting novel.

Waiting For The Rain To Stop by Barbara Jackson £350

Funniest entries in the show might be the two jokey prints by Ceal Warnent.

Revolutionary by Ceal Warnants (photopolymer relief print on vintage book paper) £130

These prints had almost as many red labels on them as the cute cats and dogs in room 3 and you can see why. They would make you smile every time you look at them.

Room 9 (64 works)

Gallery 9 was hung by Ann Christopher and is dominated by the biggest piece in the show, ‘String Quartet’ by Ron Arad. This is a big carpet draped up the wall and across the floor, on which sit four chairs on which are placed the four instruments of a string quartet and over hidden loudspeakers is projected string quartet music which you can hear from the nearby galleries. It’s odd, really, how little modern art makes use of music or sounds of any sort.

The Quartet by Ron Arad (sculpture made of wood, steel, copper, silicon and cotton £300,000 (1408)

There’s another big showy work, a huge sculpture of a pair of black hands by Tim Shaw which I didn’t like at all. The curators comment ‘a pair of hands where the negative space forms part of the work’ – well, which sculpture does not create a greater or lesser space around it? On the plus side, some of the children visiting the show were enjoying pretending to shake hands with them or dancing in and around them which was fun to watch.

The Space Between (Does Not Come in a Vacuum) by Tim Shaw (sculpture of Painted foam) £35,000 (1410)

My companion the naturalist liked all images of birds throughout the show but particularly the strutting crow.

Strutting (acrylic) by Lisa Badau £645 (1384)

The Lecture Room

This room was hung by Veronica Ryan who had the bright idea of painting the wall turmeric ‘a colour inspired by the culinary spice which is known for its healing properties’. This turns out to be a very dynamic and enjoyable colour to stroll in. This room is full of sculptures, maybe it was unofficially ‘the sculpture room’ and Ryan has made the little innovation of replacing traditional white plinths with wooden shelves and trestle tables. This is cool but also brings out a strong village church jumble sale vibe as well. All kinds of things to admire. My photo of a battleship made of card shows the turmeric colour in the background.

Installation view of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2024 showing ‘Worship-Warship’ by Richard Wilson and, in the background, the orange turmeric colour of the walls and the bric-a-brac vibe created by the trestle tables (photo by the author)

Maybe the most striking piece is an oriental carpet out of which a tiger’s head is mutating, like the alien bursting out of John Hurt’s stomach. It’s life size and genuinely a bit disturbing.

Brown Tiger by Debbie Lawson (sculpture made from Jesmonite, carpet and wood)

There was, maybe, an understated feminist theme in this room, with some paintings of menopause medication by Sara Gregory (1429). I liked the sculptures using an image of a mother and child printed on a metal plate and surrounded by rooster feathers to create a kind of ‘native’ African shield effect.

Female Warrior Army, Motherhood 2 by Emma McGuire (photo decal on porcelain with rooster feathers) £3,500

In a related African vibe (on the same wall) are hung a couple of big prints by Yinka Shonibare CBE (1525, 1526) whose exhibition at Serpentine South you can still visit. I quite liked a lot of things in this room but not burningly so. I suppose this is quite amusing and many of the other sculptures were in the same category: quite good, quite funny. Possibly I was just exhausted by this stage of the marathon.

The Invader by Hannah Simpson (stoneware ceramic) £1,050 (1620)

Wohl Central Hall (81 works)

The Wohl Central Hall is the last room in the show and the second of Assemble RA’s two rooms. The idea is that they’ve ‘created a studio setting and explored the creative process’. This explains why there are random swatches of paint on the walls and a clutter of props including a drafting table and a joinery bench. The plinths in the gallery have been repurposed from waste materials such as discarded slabs from an industrial estate etc. Probably there was lots of interesting and stimulating work here but I was full. My companion, blessed with more stamina than me, and also much clearer about what she likes, liked the big mosaic of ‘Hackney Birds’ and spent a minute or two checking off the ones we see in our garden.

Some Hackney Birds by Hackney Mosaic Project (wall-based glass and ceramic mosaic) NFS

Maintaining the ornithological theme I liked this – maybe because by this stage I was on my last legs and only noticing the really bright obvious pieces.

African Phoenix: Coffin for Qm Nana Yaa Asantewaa by Elsie Owusu (carved wood, paint and glazes) NFS

Thoughts

Despite all the curators’ talk of themes and issues, the experience of visiting is massive, chaotic and exhausting. That said there are hundreds and hundreds of things to like if you have the stamina, determination and patience to look carefully at everything. I wrote this review the day after visiting and was surprised to realise how many works I really liked, including many I haven’t shown here.

After a dingy start in the grey murky opening rooms, and despite the absence of any real showstoppers (apart, I suppose, from Arad’s Quartet and Shaw’s hands, and maybe Parker’s shed and El Anatsui’s wall-hanging, none of which did it for me) there are lots of smaller, sometimes very small, gems, which are worth the effort of carefully reviewing everything in the room to find and cherish and marvel, feel and chortle at.

Tunnocks Maneki-Neko by Robert Mach (kinetic sculpture with confectionary foil on plastic and wood) £1,400 (1555)

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Cornelia Parker @ Tate Britain

Cornelia Parker (CBE, RA) is a very well-known and successful figure in British art. Born in 1956, she’s become famous for her ‘immersive’ i.e. BIG works. Above all she is a conceptual artist. What is conceptual art? According to the Tate website:

Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

In some exhibitions you react to the painting or sculpture immediately, as an object in space which fills your visual cortex with sensations and impressions. You don’t necessarily have to read the wall labels. With conceptual art it is almost always vital to read the wall label in order to understand what you’re looking at. Sure, you could still respond naively and sensuously to the work’s appearance but you would be missing out on 99% of its meaning and intention.

The wonderful wall labels

This major retrospective of Parker’s career brings together almost 100 works, spanning the last 35 years. So that’s quite a lot of reading you have to do in order to understand almost every one of these pieces.

But a major feature of the exhibition is that the wall labels are written by Parker herself. Most wall labels at exhibitions are written by curators who, in our day and age, are obsessed with the same handful of issues around gender and ethnicity and lose no opportunity to bash the visitor over the head with reminders of Britain’s shameful, imperial, racist, slave-trading past etc etc.

So it is a major appeal of this exhibition that, instead of every single piece explained solely in terms of race or gender – as it would be if Tate curators had written them – Parker’s own wall labels are fantastically interesting, insightful, thought-provoking insights into her way of thinking and seeing the world. Instead of the world of art being reduced to a handful of worn-out ideas, Parker’s wall labels are as entertainingly varied as her subject matter, full of stories, anecdotes, bright ideas, explanations of technique, aims, collaborations.

They give you a really privileged insight into her worldview and into her decades’-long ability to be interested, curious, take everyday objects and have funny and creative ideas about how to transform them. After spending an hour and a half working through her thought processes for the different pieces, some of her creative spirit begins to rub off on you, you begin to see the everyday world the way she does, full of opportunities for disruptive and fun interventions. In this respect, this exhibition is one of the most genuinely inspiring I’ve ever been to.

Types of work

The exhibition includes immersive installations, sculptures, photographs, embroidery and drawings, as well as four large-scale, room-sized installations, and two rooms showing her art films. At the simplest, physical level, the pieces can be divided into two categories: Small and Large. Examples of the small will serve as an introduction to the large.

Introductory

In the downstairs atrium of Tate Britain stands a single sculpture, preparing you for the exhibition ahead.

The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached) by Cornelia Parker (2003) © Tate Photography

It is, of course, a life-size cast of Rodin’s sculpture, The Kiss, wrapped up in a mile of string. A vague symbolic gesture towards ‘the ties that bind’ people in relationships, maybe. In the nearby wall label Parker describes this as a ‘punk gesture’, which I found very significant. It’s the only time she mentions punk but she was just 20 when it hit, maybe at art school by then, so its attitude of really offensive, in-your-face irreverence must have taken her art school by storm. The point is, various later wall labels repeatedly say that she is interested in destruction and violence – but not violence against persons, against things. Her art does violence to inanimate objects in all kinds of inventive, creative and often very funny ways.

But there is, as so often, a further twist to the tail. Wrapping The Kiss in string is a relatively tame thing to do compared with Dada, Surrealist, Duchamp provocations from 100 years ago. It becomes more interesting when you learn that some opponents of conceptual art within the art world, fellow young irreverent artists, vandalised the original version of The Distance by cutting up the string into short sections, thus ‘liberating’ the sculpture.

And best of all, that Parker was undaunted and promptly gathered up all the cut-up pieces of string and tied them back together around a mysterious object at the centre, ‘a secret weapon’, which is unnamed and unknown.

‘The Distance (with concealed weapon)’ by Cornelia Parker (2003) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Small

I’ll jump straight in and give examples.

‘The Negative of Words’ (1996)

Parker realised that when an engraver engraves words into silver, for example into a cup like the Wimbledon champion’s cups, tiny fragments or curls of silver are generated. This piece is a pile of the shavings thus created. Parker contacted a silversmith, who agreed to her proposal, and it took several months to accumulate enough shavings for her to create the little mound, with sprinkled outliers, which we see on display here. As she points out, each sliver represents a letter, is the trace of a letter, is the inverse of writing, of language. They are absences made solid. This idea really resonated with me as I admired this carefully created little mound and its sprinkled outliers.

‘The Negative of Words’ by Cornelia Parker (1996) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

‘Luck Runs out’ (1995)

In the case next to it is an old dictionary. Under careful supervision, Parker arranged for a shotgun loaded with dice to be fired into the back of the book. The die penetrated to different depths into the text and jammed most of the pages together. As it happens the post-shooting dictionary automatically fell open at a page about ‘luck’. Hence the title, The luck of the draw. The roll of the dice.

Apparently it’s part of a series titled ‘Avoided Objects’, so-called ‘object poems’ which ‘explore the fractured, unmade and unclassified’. The series explores ‘the denied and repressed’, which sounds a bit hackneyed and stale until she goes on to specify what that means in practice – the backs, underbellies or tarnished surfaces of things, which is much more interesting. Hence shooting this dictionary ‘in the back’.

‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995)

While in Hartford Connecticut, Parker asked to visit the factory where the famous Colt 45 handgun is made. She was surprised to discover the process began with blank featureless gun-shaped casts, before any working parts were added. She asked if she could have one and the Americans, obliging as ever, gave her two and gave them a nice smooth industrial polish. Adding the word ’embryo’ to firearm juxtaposes the birth of the gun with the general idea of the birth of a human being, alongside a tool which might potentially bring it to an end.

‘Embryo money’ (1996)

Fascinated by money, Parker asked permission to visit the Royal Mint in Pontyclun, Wales. She asked for some samples of coins before they were ‘struck’ i.e. had the monarch’s face, writing, value, corrugated edges and everything else added – just the blank dummy coins. Embryo money, before it has accrued any of the power which so dominates all our lives.

See what I mean by ‘conceptual’. You could relate to these just as intriguing objects, but the stories behind them – the anecdotes of Parker’s expeditions to interesting and unusual places to see industrial processes in action – add immeasurably to the enjoyment.

‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996)

Parker developed a relationship with His Majesty’s Customs and Excise. She visited and got to know them at their Cardiff headquarters over a period of several months. One of the many, many types of contraband objects they confiscate are drugs. Parker persuaded them to let her have a seizure of cocaine after it had been incinerated. A million pounds worth of cocaine turned to ash, which is on display here, as a sad little pile.

In her wall label, Parker adds the coda, which you’d never have got from a curator, that she really loves the way Customs and Exercise destroy things in such a theatrical way, steamrollering fake Rolex watches or alcohol. ‘Like me, they are often symbolically killing things off.’ This kind of casual, candid opinion is a lovely insight into her way of thinking.

Inhaled cliffs’ (1996)

A personal favourite was ‘Inhaled cliffs’. She asked Customs about methods people use to smuggle stuff into the country, especially drugs, and discovered that some drugs can be used to ‘starch’ sheets, so a set of innocuous looking sheets turn out to be drenched in heroin, cocaine or other illicit substances which can be extracted once they’re safely in the country. This notion inspired ‘Inhaled cliffs’ in which Parker starched sheets with chalk from the white cliffs of Dover, ‘smuggling’ those great symbols of England into bed with her. She is tickled by the notion of ‘sleeping between cliffs’.

I’m focusing a bit much on these objects in cases. There were conventional things attached to the wall, prints, flat objects treated in various ways. Photographs, for example. On her way to her studio past Pentonville Prison she noticed workmen plastering cracks in the perimeter wall, creating vivid white abstract shapes. They then started to whitewash the wall as a whole so, before these irregular, crack-shaped gestures disappeared, she quickly took photos with her phone and developed a set of 12 prints which are hung here, titled ‘Prison Wall Abstract’.

Or the ‘Pornographic drawings’ (1996). As part of her ongoing conversations with HM Customs she asked for examples of contraband and they gave her (along with the bag of cocaine ashes) chopped up lengths of pornographic film. Parker dissolved the fragments in solvent to create her own ink. She used this ink to create Rorschach blots i.e. poured them on one side of a piece of folded paper, pressed the other side down on the inked side and reopened it to have a symmetrical image. For some reason, all the ones she made (or chose to display) came out ‘to be particularly explicit’.

It dawns on me that these works are beyond ‘conceptual’ in the sense that they might better be described as anecdotal. Often there isn’t a grand concept, project or goal behind them – there is happenstance and accident. Seeing an opportunity to do something interesting and seizing it.

The other obvious thing is that she’s about transforming objects from one state to another. She starts with ‘found objects’ – gun moulds, unstamped coins, porn movies, cocaine and so on – and, in the examples I’ve given, doesn’t even transform them herself, but recognises their artistic potential.

Medium

Using this technique of remodelling the existing and everyday, is a middle-sized work titled ‘Black Path (Bunhill Fields)’ from 2013. Parker describes playing hopscotch on pavements with her daughter. This led her to pay attention to pavements and to notice the antiquity of the old stone paving in Bunhill Fields near Old Street. She got permission to pour liquid rubber into the cracks in a path through Bunhill Fields. When the rubber dried she used the mould to make a metal cast, memorialising the captured cracks in bronze. She then suspended the mould on pins so that the cracks in the pavement hover a few inches above the floor, making it seem more spectral and ghostly. (It’s an accidental quirk that my photo of it features so many people’s feet.)

Large

The interest in destruction I’ve mentioned earlier really comes to the fore in the three most famous room-sized installations in the exhibition. These are by way of being her greatest hits. They are:

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 89)
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)
Perpetual canon (2004)

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)

I’ll quote her wall label in its entirety:

We watch explosions daily, in action films, documentaries and on the news in never-ending reports of conflict. I wanted to create a real explosion, not a representation. I chose the garden shed because it’s the place where you store things you can’t quite throw away. The shed was blown up at the Army School of Ammunition. We used Semtex, a plastic explosive popular with terrorists. I pressed the plunger that blew the shed skywards. The soldiers helped me comb the field afterwards, picking up the blackened, mangled objects. In the gallery, as I suspended the objects one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated. The light inside created huge shadows on the wall. The shed looked as if it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again. The first part of the title is a scientific term for all the matter in the universe that can’t be seen or measured. The second part describes a diagram in which a machine’s parts are laid out and labelled to show how it works.

I’ve seen photos of this many times. Seeing it in the flesh I realised several things:

it is a mobile – a very complex mobile, but in principle the same kind of thing my son makes to hang his origami figures from his ceiling
it has a cubic, rectangular shape i.e. it is the opposite of chaotically exploding outwards; it is very contained
this is achieved by hanging multiple objects from the same string, not just one
as people walk slowly respectfully round it the eddies of air they stir
and placing a single light bulb at the centre of it means not only that is casts shadows on the wall, but as the string move gently, so a) your perspective through the multiple layers of debris shifts and changes b) the shadows they cast on the wall subtly change

Perpetual canon (2004)

Again, I’ll give Parker’s words verbatim:

I was invited to make a work for a circular space with a beautiful domed ceiling. I first thought of filling it with sound. This evolved into the idea of a mute marching band, frozen breathlessly in limbo. Perpetual Canon is a musical term that means repeating a phrase over and over again. The old instruments had experienced thousands of breaths circulating through them in their lifetime. They had their last breath squeezed out of them when they were squashed flat. Suspended pointing upwards around a central light bulb, their shadows march around the walls. This shadow performance replaces the cacophonous sound of their flattened hosts. Viewers and their shadows stand in for the absent players.

The ghosts of music past. I was really taken by the idea that the shadows of us, the visitors, stand in for the long-dead players of these instruments.

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 1989)

Tate own this piece. In Tate’s words:

‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver.

And in Parker’s own words:

Drawn to broken things, I decided it was time to give in to my destructive urges on an epic scale. I collected as much silver plate as I could from car-boot sales, markets and auctions. Friends even donated their wedding presents. All these objects, with their various histories, shared the same fate: they were all robbed of their third dimension on the same day, on the same dusty road, by a steamroller. I took the fragments and assembled them into thirty separate pools. Every piece was suspended to hover a few inches above the ground, resurrecting the objects and replacing their lost volume. Inspired by my childhood love of the cartoon ‘deaths’ of Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry, I thought I was abandoning the traditional seriousness of sculptural technique. But perhaps there was another unconscious reason for my need to squash things. My home in east London was due to be demolished to make way for the M11 link road. The sense of anxiety lingers even now.

Newer works

‘War Room’ (2015)

The biggest thing in the show is a big long room entirely lined with red paper with holes in, titled ‘War Room’, from 2015. As usual, you need to read the wall label to understand what this is about.

In Parker’s own words:

I was invited to make a piece of work about the First World War. I had always wanted to go to the poppy factory in Richmond, London. Artificial poppies have been made there since 1922. They are sold to raise for money for ex-military personnel and their families. When I visited the factory, I saw this machine that had rolls of red paper with perforations where the poppies had been punched out. The fact that the poppies are absent is poignant, because obviously a lot of people didn’t come back from the First World War, and other wars since. In this room there’s something like 300,000 holes, and there’s many more lives lost than that. I decided to make War Room like a tent, suspending the material like fabric. It’s based on the magnificent tent which Henry VIII had made for a peace summit with the French king in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. About a year later they were at war again.

The story, the anecdote, is, as usual, interesting but the resulting work less so.. You walk in, you walk round, you walk out. Meh. A slightly shimmery effect is created by having two layers of hole-y red paper hanging everywhere but…this is a minimal effect.

‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ (2015)

One work dominates the penultimate room. It is an enormous, thirteen-metre long, hand-sewn embroidery of the Wikipedia page about Magna Carta.

It is a collaborative work which involved over 200 volunteers including public figures, human rights lawyers, politicians and prisoners. On the wall is a list of the worthies who signed up to be involved, an entertaining list of the usual suspects: media-friendly left-of-centre politicians (Tom Watson, 55), actors, psychotherapists (Susie Orbach, 75), academics (Germaine Greer, 83), other high profile artists (Antony Gormley, 72), writers (Jeanette Winterson, 63, Philip Pullman, 75) and so on.

What struck me was how old all these people are. Our generation is declining, now, Cornelia. We’ve trashed the planet, wrecked the economy and degraded the political system for our children: best to withdraw tactfully and not keep on shouting and marching and trying to dominate everything. We’ve had our time. Over to a younger generation and hope they can do better.

The videos

There are two rooms featuring 7 or 8 art videos running consecutively. The best thing in the first room is a new six-minute video titled ‘FLAG 2022’ and made specially for this exhibition. Very entertainingly this shows the creation of a Union Jack by seamstresses in a factory only run backwards – so we see the British flag being systematically unsown and unstitched. It’s accompanied by a straight orchestral rendition of the hymn Jerusalem. Shame. It would have been funnier if Jerusalem had been played backwards, too – but maybe that would be a bit too 1960s, too much like the old avant-garde.

The second film room is about America. Oh dear. That far away country of which we hear so little, which is so rarely in the news, whose cultural products we so rarely get to see. This room contains:

One film which Parker shot at the annual Halloween Parade in New York, that city we so rarely hear about. Personally, I’d have though New York has enough artists of its own to do this kind of thing.
Another film showing supporters of Donald Trump milling about in New York outside Trump Tower sometime during his election campaign. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Donald Trump? He was quite big in America, apparently.

Frankly, these films are a let-down. It’s disappointing to see Parker genuflecting to God’s Own Country – as if New York or America need the slightest bit more coverage or publicity than the saturation exposure they already enjoy in the British media, TV, radio, films, academia, all across the internet and the toxic marshes of social media. There are other countries in the world, you know.

I’d like to have shared FLAG or any of the others in t his review, but I can’t find any of them on the internet.

Politics

From here onwards – in the second half of the exhibition – politics emerges as an increasingly dominant theme.

As well as the flag movie, the British film room includes a film made in the empty chamber of the House of Commons in 2018 using a camera attached to a drone, titled ‘Left Right and Centre’. Not only did they make this film, but they made a film about the making of the film, in which I caught Parker telling us how damn difficult it was to make because of health and safety, fire risk assessment etc. When artists start to think they are heroes…

I thought the result was very underwhelming. The drone hovered over the table you see in front of the Speaker of the House’s chair, set between the two front benches, which usually has the Mace on it – except in this film it had been covered with copies of England’s daily papers, which fluttered in the downdraft of the drone’s little rotors.

As with Donald Trump, I am sick to death of Parliament, the succession of incompetent politicians we have had leading our nation for the past 12 years, and the corrupt newspapers which lie and distort in order to keep the ruling party in power. Watching a 10-minute film on the wretched subject of contemporary British politics went a long way to destroying the happy, creative, open impression inspired by the first half of the exhibition.

In 2017 Parker was the first woman to be appointed official artist for the General Election. In this role, she observed the election campaign leading up to the 8 June vote, meeting with politicians, campaigners and voters and producing artworks in response. She made several films during this period including the aforementioned drone movie, and one titled ‘Election Abstract 2018’, a documentation of Parker’s observations during the campaign, posted on her Instagram account.

None of this, to my mind, is as funny or inventive as flattening a load of silverware with a steamroller, or displaying a little pile of incinerated cocaine, or soaking sheets in white cliff chalk, or taking a mould of Bunhill pavement. It just looks and sounds like the news, with little or no inventiveness and no particular insight. British politicians are idiots. Our newspapers are studies in bias and lies. So what’s new?

My heart sank even further when I read that another of her films is titled ‘Chomskian Abstract 2007’ and is an interview with the American social critic and philosopher Noam Chomsky, apparently about ‘the entwined relationship between ecological disaster and capitalism’.

Oh dear God. It’s not that Chomsky’s wrong or that hyper-capitalism driven on by American corporations and banks is not destroying the planet; it’s just that he is such a bleeding obvious choice for Great Man of the Left to interview. And so very, very, very old (born in 1928, Noam Chomsky turns 93 this year).

Is this the best Parker can do in the field of ‘radical’ or oppositional politics – interview a 93-year-old? It’s like waking up one morning and deciding you need to make a film about the environment and, after careful consideration, deciding you’d like to interview David Attenborough (aged 96) on the subject. Topics, and interviewees, don’t come more crashingly obvious than this.

Hundreds and hundreds of interviews with Noam Chomsky on YouTube

Each year thousands and thousands of students in Britain graduate from international studies, politics or environmental courses. It would have been so much more interesting to interview the young, the future generation, and get their point of view rather than the done-to-death, decrepit old.

And he’s another Yank for God’s sake. What is it with the British cultural establishment and their cringing obeisance to American culture, artists, film-makers, politicians and intellectuals. Of the 200 contributors to the Magna Carta embroidery, in their summary of the show the curators single out just two – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (who stitched ‘user’s manual’ into the embroidery) and Edward Snowden (who stitched the word ‘Liberty’).

Notice anything about them? Yes, they’re both American. Americans just seem carry more weight with Britain’s art establishment. They have a little more human value than mere Brits like you and me. More pizzazz, more glamour.

Lastly, what has Chomsky actually changed in his 50-odd years of railing against the American government and global capitalism? Nothing. Come to that, what good does getting 200 media-friendly worthies to contribute bits to a 13-metre-long embroidery achieve? Nothing. It’s a feel-good exercise for everyone involved and maybe it makes some of the gallery visitors feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous, too. Which is nice, but…

But meanwhile, out in the real world, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are destroying the economy, ruining Britain’s standing in the financial world, and declaring war on the poor, the unwell, the vulnerable, even trashing support among their own middle-class, mortgage-paying supporters, in a zombie march of ideologues divorced from reality.

Flying a drone round the House of Commons or stitching a room-length embroidery are not only feeble responses to the world we live in but, worse, I found them imaginatively limiting and cramped. If you’re going to tackle the terrible world of contemporary politics, at least do it with some style and imagination. Old newspaper photos of Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn didn’t take me anywhere new – unlike the pile of silver shavings or a cast of Bunhill pavement or most of the pieces in the first half of the show, which opened magic doors in my mind.

Maybe Parker should stick to what she does best – blowing things up. Guy Fawkes Night is coming. Just a thought…

More Tate Britain reviews

More Tate Britain reviews