Definitely Visual

Cornelia Parker in her appearance on BBC 4's series Great Lives, chose Marcel Duchamp. Throughout the programme she emphasised the artist's opposition to 'the retinal', which I take to mean that he wanted to appeal to the mind rather than the eye, conceptually rather than visually.

I have in my scrapbook a photograph of Parker's famous work which involved the blowing-up of a garden shed. It was made into an installation by somehow suspending the wooden fragments and lighting them within an enclosed space, so that shadows are cast on walls, ceiling and floor. It seems to me that the result is definitely visual. And wonderfully so. 

Looking at the careful arrangements of the elements of the shattered hut, with the placement of the intact window frame and the various planks standing out from an overall texture of small fragments, I would go so far as to say, that it is a triumph of calculated composition over aleatory effect. It is not the explosion that gives the worthy aesthetic experience. I doubt if actually witnessing it would have been very interesting however much the process attributed to the artist's and the piece's celebrity. It is entirely different from the guy in Edinburgh who broke a gallery window as his work of art. It is traditional skills that have made Parker's work more than a flash in the garden.


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