The War Itself: Cornelia Parker’s Official Election Art, Post-2016 Democracy and the Weaponisation of Social Media

Abstract

Introduction When a snap general election was called in the United Kingdom in 2017, Cornelia Parker, one of that nation’s most prominent and celebrated contemporary artists dealing often in war and conflict, was appointed as the official British election artist. The 2017 election followed less than a year after the 2016 Brexit referendum, as the Conservative government, committed to making good on the outcome of the 2016 referendum, hoped to have elected more pro-Brexit MPs into the House of Commons in an attempt to push through Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal with the European Union. The plan backfired, forcing May into leading a minority government, the second in a decade. This further prolonged and intensified the political turbulence and eventually led to May’s tearful resignation in 2019 and yet another general election later that year, called by the new prime minister, Boris Johnson. The 2016 Brexit referendum is commonly recognised as one of the most fierce and toxic votes in modern British history. Its campaigns were marked by widespread and blatant disinformation, overt ethno-nationalist politics, and the violent assassination of the pro-Remain MP Jo Cox. With the election following barely one year after the Brexit vote, and being triggered by the political impossibility of delivering the outcome of the referendum, Parker may well have felt more like an official war artist than an official election artist. Parker created two significant video works as the 2017 election artist. The first was Left Right & Centre (2017) (fig. 1), a haunting and aesthetically rich work shot mostly by drone in the chamber of Britain’s House of Commons, the democratically elected lower house of government. The work depicts the dispatch boxes at the centre of the Commons chamber stacked with various British daily newspapers, representing the left, right and centre of British politics. The drone’s rotors stir up the pages of the newspapers until the entire chamber is chaotically littered in drifts of newsprint. Parker’s other work, Election Abstract (2017),