Some work by the British visual artist Cornelia Parker resonates with these notions of de-centering. She has described her work as using objects for them to be ‘killed off symbolically and then resurrected’ (quoted in Iverson, 2018: 17). For the art historian, Margaret Iverson (2018), this is part of a project of defamiliarisation – by destroying the form of the object, another more formless, or re-formed, version, is revealed. And like Brecht’s model, this allows for the object to be rendered as if stripped of meaning, with no certain template of associations or translations; apprehended, as Bion might have said, without memory or desire. In her piece Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, Parker employs the British Army to blow up a garden shed, the pieces of which she then re- arranges around the lightbulb from the shed. Shapes suggest themselves in the shadows cast by the exploded structure, while the fragments themselves bear distinct signs of their origin: the sole of a boot, a piece of a ceramic pot plant, timber joists, and so on. Parker thinks of this shift in materiality as a turning away from permanence. Referring to Cold Dark Matter she says: ‘Nothing was solid, nothing was fixed, everything had potential to change, so it was the opposite of the monument, it was the moment’ (quoted in Iverson, 2018: 22). Her interests lie in undermining and questioning the symbolic structure of an object by pushing at the limits of the material and at the limits of the meanings invested in the material. Her 1989 work, Thirty Pieces of Silver, a site-specific action (as well as subsequent hanging displays of the crushed objects) involved a steamroller crushing a line of silverware – candelabras, goblets; the trappings of refined taste – that had been laid out in a snaking ribbon along a quiet London street. Her intention, ‘to change their meaning, their visibility, their worth’ (quoted in Morgan, 2000: 16), was achieved through the material, and the meanings associated with them – signifiers of wealth, family heirlooms, a solid, recognisable vernacular – being pushed to a limit that reappropriates meaning in a movement of detranslation/retranslation. Parker is attempting to take ‘very clichéd monumental things, things that everybody knows what they are (or you think you know what they are) and then trying to find a flip side to it or the unconscious of it’ (Ferguson, 2000: 46).
