A conceptual artist on the campaign trail
“Many were bemused by the announcement that Cornelia Parker was to be the official artist of the 2017 general election,” said The Economist. Not because Parker’s credentials are in doubt – she is thought to be one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists – but because few knew that “such a post exists”. Besides, in the past the role has been filled by portraitists, photographers and cartoonists. Parker is the first conceptual artist to take the job. She is best known for works featuring an exploded shed, a nine-metre-long shotgun, and 54 brass instruments that had been squashed by a steamroller. She has set up an Instagram account to offer “an eclectic commentary” during the campaign: so far, she has posted pictures of road signs, homeless people, newspaper headlines and her cat, among other things. “One image, captioned ‘the election contenders’, shows a group of waving garden gnomes.”
The scheme is the brainchild of the late Labour sport minister Tony Banks, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The artist receives £17,000, plus travel expenses, to observe and record the campaigns. There are only two conditions: first, they must remain politically impartial, capturing the general “mood” of the election; and second, they must produce a work of art for Parliament’s collection. In 2001, Jonathan Yeo painted three portraits of the main party leaders on canvasses reflecting the size of their majorities: “a wide-frame, grinning” Tony Blair, flanked by a smaller, “tired-looking” William Hague and a “diminutive” Charles Kennedy. In 2015, Adam Dant created a giant cartoon of British politics as a “big, bonkers Victorian machine”.
Given Parker’s track record, finding a place to display her work in Parliament could prove tricky, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. In 1995, she produced a piece consisting of a glass cabinet in which the actress Tilda Swinton slept for eight hours per day. The 60-yearold artist, who is half-german, also has a taste for the risqué: when she appeared on Desert Island Discs, she chose a “solarpowered vibrator” as her luxury item.