Tate Britain

Cornelia Parker looks at the world around her, and all she wants to do is destroy it. So she smashes it to bits, grinds it to dust, blows it to pieces and squeezes the life out of it. But Parker isn’t into destruction for its own sake. The British conceptual artist – at 65 now one of the most instantly recognisable artists working today – destroys to remake, to uncover new ideas. She’s like a kid pulling apart a radio, not to see how it works, but to find out what stories all its bits have to tell. This big retrospective show opens with dozens of flattened bits of silverware hovering inches above the ground. Parker has steamrollered them and taken away their volume in the process, leaving them as squished ghosts of themselves. It’s obvious that this is work about destruction, about what remains after violence has left its mark. The silver tells the story of its own annihilation.  The same thing happens with her iconic exploding shed (it hangs here, reconstructed mid-boom, a frozen moment of wild vandalism) and her band of suspended flattened trombones and trumpets. Obliterated and smooshed, these works hum with stories of loss, anger and a desperate urge to make sense of the world. It’s not all dour and serious though, Parker’s a humorous artist, and the smaller works are like visual puns. There’s a pile of discarded metal shavings from an engraver, a line of dust made from grinding a whole gun down to nothing, cloths marked from polishing famous bits of silverware, drawings

There’s a post-colonial, anti-capitalist carnival happening at Tate Britain. And if that doesn’t sound like much fun, that’s because it isn’t. It’s serious. The colourful procession is British-Guyanese artist Hew Locke’s big new commission for the grand neo-classical central gallery of this old building. There are hundreds of life-size models here. You’re greeted by brightly dressed kids banging drums, flanked by people on horseback draped in flowers, then figures in skull masks dripping with jewels and pearls. The parade courses the length of the gallery, with dozens of faces, figures, outfits and masks. It nods to carnivals, sure, but also to protests, to refugees, to the fleeing of migrants. The flags and banners being brandished are old currency and share certificates from colonial Panama and Nigeria; the skins of the drums are marked with the insignia of the Russian General Oil Corporation; the dresses are cut from old paintings of Black soldiers and slaves; the horses are wearing images of colonial buildings; there are photos of ships, maps of Africa. This is part celebration, part protest, part funeral march. It’s about owning history, powerfully and beautifully Locke is partly trying to draw attention to the history of the Tate. The museum was founded by sugar magnate Henry Tate, who created this place, as the gallery itself says, ‘from wealth derived from an industry previously built on the labour of enslaved African people’, which is a mealy-mouthed, half-arsed wa

Walter Sickert is disintegrating. He’s melting into nothing, disappearing right in front of you in a staggeringly good, muddy, sombre early self-portrait from 1896. This neatly encapsulates what makes the English painter (1860-1942) so interesting: it’s not his handling of paint or how he captures light or anything, it’s the bubbling undercurrent of darkness that courses through his work. Because where the impressionists and their successors exalted in the effects of natural light, found ecstasy in the beauty of nature (easy enough when you live in the South of France instead of north London), Sickert’s work is caked in the filth and thick smog of the city, the grime and decay of Camden. This show of art from across his long career takes in portraiture, landscapes, urban scenes, nudes and a whole bunch of murder. His early work owes hefty debts to his mentors James Whistler and Edgar Degas. He took the muted tones of the former, and the fascination with everyday life from the latter.  It’s deliberately provocative and disconcertingly morbid Sickert, a former actor, repeatedly paints the stages and music halls he loved. There are actors frozen in searingly bright spotlights, draped in luminescent red and white dresses, trapeze artists caught mid-flight, singers caught mid-song. So far, so Degas, but the real gold is in the crowds. Sickert’s masses of rapt bodies are trapped in the gloom, shadowy observers that smudge into one another, becoming big anonymous, amorphous globs o