Jeremy Deller has contributed a page from John Lennon's school records, which lists the young Beatles’ run-ins with his teachers. One wrote that the impudent Lennon “groaned at me”. The relic is one of the many treats Cornelia Parker has picked for her show at London's Foundling Museum. The British artist-curator has infiltrated the exhibits and historic paintings in the museum that tells the history of an orphanage and school established in the 18th century with the help of the leading artists, musicians and writers of the day, including Hogarth and Handel.
Parker had little trouble persuading more than 60 of today's big-hearted luminaries to contribute a cherished found object or work based on one. Christian Marclay has made a new film, which stars all the bottle tops he has spotted while out walking. Other artists include Bob and Roberta Smith, Gavin Turk, Fiona Banner and Rose Wylie. Called Found, the show opens on Friday (27 May until 4 Sept) and includes some vintage works by Parker herself. Among them is a toy doll of Charles Dickens’s illegitimate boy hero, Oliver Twist. (Many of the babies left on the steps of the Foundling Hospital in the 18th and 19th centuries belonged to desperately poor, unmarried women.) Parker’s altered readymade is an Oliver she found in a street market more than 20 years ago. She cut the urchin in two, using no ordinary blade. Parker persuaded Madame Tussaud’s (where else?) to let her use the blade of the guillotine that decapitated Marie Antoinette among others to create Shared Fate (Oliver) (1998). The guillotine is one of relics that the original Madame Tussaud, witness of the French Revolution, fled Paris carrying to her new business venture in London.
