3. Extracts

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View
Extract from Avoided Object, by Jonathan Watkins, 1996

'When Cold Dark Matter finished at the Chisenhale the question arose naturally as to what should be done with the thousands of distressed pieces from the garden shed, as they were then, still with the smell of the explosion. Without the context of an exhibition they were not necessarily identifiable as component parts of an art work - in fact, when packed away into old cardboard boxes they looked just like loads of rubbish. Perhaps they might have been thrown out but somehow this course of action seemed inappropriate. Eventually a place was found to store them, just outside the gallery. Underneath a staircase.'

© Jonathan Watkins

Extract from an interview with Cornelia Parker by Bruce Ferguson, Dean, Columbia University, New York School of the Arts, October 1999

BF: 'Obviously with Cold Dark Matter: The Exploded View, you actually blew up a building which was probably scarier for everybody but you. What was the motivation for that?'

CP: 'I had done the piece with the steamroller-Thirty Pieces of Silver-and the piece with the train running over coins-Matter and What it Means. I was thinking of different ways of killing something off. I think the explosion was another cliched cartoon death. At the time I was living in a house that was due to be knocked down for a motorway in a few months time, but it kept getting postponed for another six months and so on for almost ten years. I think because of living for such a long time with this constant threat of demolition that is where the steamroller and explosion ideas came from. But it wasn't a home I blew up; it was just a garden shed, a surrogate. It's another British institution, the garden shed.'

BF: 'It feels more like J.G. Ballard than T.S. Eliot somehow, doesn't it? It has more of that kind of wit.'

CP: 'I think it came from all kinds of places. It's a modern condition: the threat of bomb scares, and the fear it symbolizes. From seeing explosions on the news and all the time in films you sort of think you know what they are, but really your firsthand knowledge of it is very limited. I realized I'd never walked through the detritus of a bombed-out building.'

BF: 'It's almost like you believe things are animated. Or that they're potentially animated. That they're sitting there still but if you do something to them then they're going to be animated.'

CP: 'I like the life/death resurrection bit, which is very Catholic, something dies, but it's resurrected in another form.'

© Bruce Ferguson