Contemporary Art – Page 11 – Christopher Madden

Humour in contemporary art – a headless classical statue with a graffiti face

Humour in contemporary art. Defaced/refaced statue.

Classical statue, marker pen. June 2015.

A humorous work consisting of a headless classical statue with a cartoon-like face drawn onto the oval form of the neck.
Part of the humor of this piece is the juxtaposition of opposites – the elegant and timeless form of the classical statue in contrast to the crudeness and immediacy of the contemporary cartoon head.
The piece also contains dark humour and an unsettling quality due to the fact that the drawn two-dimensional head is occupying the surface created by the decapitation of the statue’s three-dimensional head.
The drawn-on face also has the appearance of graffiti, so it could be said that the act of giving the statue a face is in fact defacing the statue. The word deface literally means to remove the face (as occurred with iconoclasm and the vandalisation of statues in the past), so the fact that the act of adding a face to a statue can be interpreted as defacing the statue is ironic.
Humour is an important element in a lot of my contemporary art work. As well as being an artist I’m also a cartoonist, with my cartoons having been publishered widely in publications such as the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Irish Sunday Independent newspapers, and magazines such as Private Eye, the Spectator, Prospect, the Critic and more.
Hammer and nails sculpture – a study of oppression and rebellion

The Oppressor Impaled by the Oppressed. Hammer and nails sculpture

Hammer, nails, plank. June 2015.

A sculpture composed of a hammer nailed to a plank of wood.
The hammer is being empaled by the objects that it normally hits.
This can be interpreted as a metaphor for oppression and rebellion, and it’s also a study in irony.
How did the nails come to be impaling the hammer? Were the nails hammered into place by another hammer? In this case the nails may not be the downtrodden oppressed rising up to overthrow their oppressor using their own power, but are possibly the followers of another power (another hammer?) that may turn out to be as oppressive as the hammer they’ve empaled.

Other versions of this piece have the hammer on a horizontal surface, such as on the top of a plinth, while further iterations use different numbers of nails. The vertical version shown here is in some ways disturbing because the vertical configuration gives more of an impression of the hammer being violently empaled rather than simply nailed down to the spot. It is also disturbingly suggestive of a crucifixion in Christian iconography.
30 Disks – interacting simple shapes forming complex shapes

This video starts slowly. Don’t stop watching it during the first 20 seconds or so.

30 Interacting Disks

Abstract moving image February 2015

An abstract moving image work from a series in which multiple copies of a single shape move and interact using simple computer algorithms, creating complex shapes.
In this work 30 disks follow circular paths. Where even numbers of disks overlap they present white, while where odd numbers of disks overlap they present black.
A key motive behind these video animations is the linking of art and science through the exploration of the creation of complex forms from the interaction of simple forms.

Below are some still frames from the animation.

To see higher resolution videos and more information about this series click here.
Fox skull memento mori

Fox skull: memento mori

Photograph. 2017

A photograph of a fox’s skull.
Nice abstract sculptural quality I think, accentuated by the lighting and the simple composition.
Like many people, I find bones, especially skulls, very evocative. I think that it’s possibly a mix of the aesthetic qualities of the physical form of the bones and a realisation of what they actually are. They are a very concrete reminder of the transience of life: memento mori.
You’d have to ask an evolutionnary psychologist what it is that makes them aesthetically pleasing, or indeed what it is that makes anything aesthetically pleasing.
Contemporary art and science – the creation of complexity from simplicity (Generative art)

The generation of complex forms from simple forms.

Digital works. Series begun 2008

This is a design to accompany a series of video animations that explore the creation of complex forms from simple forms. The animations are often in the form of rotating grids, though not always.
The works were first conceived as a device to visualise the creation of the complex structure that underlies the physical universe from extremely simple fundamental components.
Very much an example of art meets science.
More on the subject.
Cartoons

A selection of cartoons

I’ve been drawing and publishing cartoons since the late 1970s, on subjects such as the environment, politics, the arts, science, philosophy and current events.

They have been published in the Guardian, Private Eye, The Spectator, Prospect, Philosophy Now, BBC Focus, Chemistry World and New Scientist among others.

Below is a selection of my cartoons.

Cartoons about art

Cartoons about the environment.

Other cartoons
Sky Mirror 1970

Mirror art.

Parabolic mirror. 21cm diameter About 1969

These photos show one of my early artistic experiments using mirrors. My apologises for the quality of he images – they are quite old.

I think if I were give this work a name now I’d probably call it Sky Bridge or something similar, because it links the earth to the sky. The name Sky Mirror also comes to mind, but Anish Kapoor’s already used that.

The concept behind the mirror actually bears several similarities to Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, in that it’s a concave mirror that reflects the sky, although Kapoor’s Sky Mirror is thirty times the size and cost about a million pounds more. I think I probably paid for this one from the money from my paper round. Anish Kapoor wasn’t yet a student at Hornsey College of Art at the time of these photos.

The mirror is an eight and a half inch parabolic mirror for a Newtonian reflecting telescope which I constructed as a teenager in the late 1960s. My ambition then was to become an astronomer, not an artist. I ground the parabolic surface of the mirror myself.

As you can see from the first two photos, I’ve positioned the mirror in front of a rubbish bin (of a type that was used in the 1970s) in the least aesthetically pleasing part of my parents’ garden.

The second photo, below, (which is massively underexposed in order to show the mirror, which would otherwise be just a disk of burnt-out white), shows the mirror propped up against the rubbish bin. You can see the sun and the sky reflected in the mirror. This is perhaps meant to show the contrast between the beauty and purity of the sky in contrast to some of the rubbish created by human society. It’s probably also meant to show that ultimately everything is connected, the beautiful and the ugly, the transcendent and the mundane.

The photo below shows the mirror on the ground amongst some trees. This is probably meant to show the link between the earth, the natural world and the sky, and by extension the cosmos.
Fire Circle – art in the environment

Fire Circle – art in the environment,

Burnt vegetation. 2003

The results of a fire made of green wood.
The wood at the centre of the fire has been consumed by the intense heat of the fire.
The wood at the edges of the fire remain unburnt, forming an almost perfect ring of twigs and small branches around the ash core.
The work invokes issues conncerning both the constructive and destructive effects of fire, and by extension of human activity.

I’ve been creating environmental art and art based on environmental issues since the 1970s.