Skip to main content
Rorschach (Endless Column 1)
Artist
Cornelia Parker
(English, born 1956)
Date2005
Medium14 silver-plated objects crushed by 250 ton industrial press, metal wire
DimensionsOverall: 1/4 × 162 × 19 in. (0.64 × 411.48 × 48.26 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of the Director's Council and Museum purchase, 2006
Object number2006.1.A-N
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Cornelia Parker. Courtesy the artist and Fritz Street Gallery, London.
Category
Label TextThe British sculptor Cornelia Parker achieves a form of abstraction by removing recognizable items from their fundamental usage or meanings and arranging them in new configurations. In Rorschach (Endless Column 1), 2005, a group of silver-plated vases, bowls, candelabras, and other objects have been squashed into abstracted shapes and hung in a row.
Parker was inspired by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist who pioneered the use of inkblots for psychoanalysis. Ink was allowed to fall onto a piece of paper, which was then folded in half, spreading the ink into a symmetrical pattern. Rorschach prompted his subjects to “see” shapes and images in the inkblots, and these were interpreted as direct projections of the subconscious. The reflective surface of Parker’s silver, symmetrical “blots” literally mirrors the viewer.
Like Rorschach’s inkblots, Parker’s sculptures are open to countless subjective interpretations. The title Endless Column 1 pays homage to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who created Endless Column, 1918, as a memorial to Romanian soldiers killed in World War I. Brancusi’s sculpture consists of a series of vertically stacked wooden shapes that repeat and rise from the ground like a totem pole. Parker’s similarly elegant line of balanced, symmetrical forms, however, is insistently horizontal. The floating objects highlight their—and viewers’—precarious battle with gravity.
Parker was inspired by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist who pioneered the use of inkblots for psychoanalysis. Ink was allowed to fall onto a piece of paper, which was then folded in half, spreading the ink into a symmetrical pattern. Rorschach prompted his subjects to “see” shapes and images in the inkblots, and these were interpreted as direct projections of the subconscious. The reflective surface of Parker’s silver, symmetrical “blots” literally mirrors the viewer.
Like Rorschach’s inkblots, Parker’s sculptures are open to countless subjective interpretations. The title Endless Column 1 pays homage to the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who created Endless Column, 1918, as a memorial to Romanian soldiers killed in World War I. Brancusi’s sculpture consists of a series of vertically stacked wooden shapes that repeat and rise from the ground like a totem pole. Parker’s similarly elegant line of balanced, symmetrical forms, however, is insistently horizontal. The floating objects highlight their—and viewers’—precarious battle with gravity.