30 Pieces of Silver

Until October 30th York St Mary’s church is exhibiting Thirty Pieces of Silver, an instillation piece by Cornelia Parker. Parker is famous for her deconstruction and reconstruction of everyday objects. Her Cold Dark Matter installation saw the reconstructed pieces of an exploding shed exhibited in Tate Modern. Currently, in York’s St Mary’s lies a similar installation. It consists of thousands of silver objects including trombones, teapots, spoons and glasses, flattened by a steamroller and suspended just above ground level, each held by a thin wire, to form thirty perfect disc- shapes, each ninety centimetres in diameter. It takes a few minutes to realise the mathematical precision and complexity of each disc’s arrangement. Initially it appears that the objects rest on circular trays, but on closer inspection, each spoon and fork is held by a single wire, perfectly balanced to become one part of its circle. Aptly displayed in a church, religious connotations run throughout the work. The thirty coin-like discs are representative of the thirty pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed Jesus, each silver piece gaining negative value when associated with betrayal, and we are reminded of Jesus himself, of his death and resurrection.

The exhibition as a whole questions our relationship with ‘silver’. It is a material, a commodity, and the exhibition displays silver pieces borrowed from York’s museum collections. There are booklets about silver through history and written notes by the public who relate a story in connection to it. Most people experience silver as a celebratory metal, used for jewellery, pomp and ceremony, or as something valuable, which has been inherited and preserved. Silver is decorative, expensive, holds both status and sentiment. Parker takes these traditional views of silver, and squashes them. She creates, in her own words, ‘anti-matter’. She reduces it to mere metal with a shine. Yet after her violent manipulation of objects, she proceeds to give each flattened silver piece a new status as part of a newly constructed statement. The statement is visually compelling and genius in the physics of its absolute balance. Appropriately staged in this church where voices are low and stained glass saints allow their green and red light to trickle amid Parker’s silver block, it is aesthetically pleasing, somehow defying gravity. It exudes a sense of resurrection of broken materials, and questions the use of and the history of these objects.

Yet, despite a degree of aesthetic pleasure, which is inherent in the material itself, novelty of display and ingenious grasp of physics, what does the work say? Perhaps I’m a cynic when it comes to post-modernism but I left with no conclusion. I felt instead a sort of sadness that pieces of silver which before were beautifully crafted for some purpose and served that purpose well, were then crushed by a steamroller in the name of Art. But students of York, if you are walking out of Topshop and still don’t feel fulfilled, pop over the courtyard to St Mary’s Church to experience a sparkling serenity and ask this question yourself! It will cost you nothing and might make your spirit that bit richer.

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