She has long been fascinated by the violence of cartoons: ‘flattening Tom, Jerry filled with bullet holes, Road Runner falling off a cliff. Thirty Pieces of Silver was the first large-scale work that featured what Parker calls a ‘cartoon death’. The residual fragments are suspended around a single light bulb. It comprises the charred remains of a garden shed that was blown up for the artist by the British Army. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991 (Tate T06949) is a pivotal piece in Parker’s career and exemplifies her often violent approach to materials. She has crushed, stretched and exploded numerous objects, while also enlisting the help of such unlikely collaborators as the British Army, the Colt Firearms Factory in Connecticut and H.M.
Parker’s work frequently transforms the nature of an object or material through the use of extreme force. (Quoted in British Art Show, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 1990, p.88.) The title, because of its biblical references, alludes to money, to betrayal, to death and resurrection: more simply it is a literal description of the piece. In the gallery the ruined objects are ghostly levitating just above the floor, waiting to be reassessed in the light of their transformation. ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ is about materiality and then about anti-matter. I find the pieces of silver have much more potential when their meaning as everyday objects has been eroded. As a child I used to crush coins on a railway track – you couldn’t spend the money afterwards but you kept the metal slivers for their own sake, as an imaginative currency and as physical proof of the destructive powers of the world. I wanted to change their meaning, their visibility, their worth, that is why I flattened them, consigning them all to the same fate. Silver is commemorative, the objects are landmarks in people’s lives. When the work was exhibited in the Hayward Gallery’s British Art Show of 1990, Parker commented on the work in the exhibition catalogue: The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver.
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. 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. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. Thirty Pieces of Silver comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones.
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