Christopher Madden

humor

  • Power and its overthrow: mural visualisation

    Power and its overthrow: mural visualisation

    Digital visualisation 2024

    A digital visualisation of a proposed mural on an art gallery wall.

    The mural depicts two men standing on stilts. One of the men has much taller stilts than the other man. The man with the shorter stilts is sawing through one of the tall stilts.

    The image is partly a metaphor for power and attacks on that power. It’s also just a funny idea.

    The image can be interpreted as a metaphor for political power and opposition to that power. The person on the tall stilts is invested with the power while the person with the short stilts is wanting to topple the person in the position of power (as an act of rebellion against political oppression, military repression, economic exploitation or one of any number of engines of social or political inequality).

    The power that is personified in the image needn’t necessarily be the power of large scale institutions and entities, but could also be the power gained at an interpersonal level by an individual who has status enhancing qualities such as an appealing personality or striking good looks, making the attacks on that individual the consequence of personal envy or resentment.

    The man on the tall stilts represents a person in a position of high status or power. The structure of that power (the tall stilts) however makes him isolated from people with less power (the shorter stilts). This flaw makes him vulnerable to attacks from below, especially if the person below has a metaphorical saw.

    I’ve used a cartoon-like quality for the image is because the cartoon medium is the perfect way to convey the concept in the image. I think that cartoons are an excellent medium for political or social comment art as they can convey concepts directly and unambiguously. I’ve drawn cartoons for publication in newspapers, magazines and books since the 1970s. You can see my cartoons here.

    The large photograph on the wall in the visualisation is from a series of studies of skulls.

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  • Humour in Contemporary Art

    In the history of modern art and contemporary art a noticable number of practitioners started their careers working in areas of commercial art such as graphic design and illustration. They had to earn a living after all.

    Pop artist Andy Warhol is probably the most well known, but he’s joined by others such as Philip Guston, Ed Ruscha and Edward Hopper.

    Some artists started out by trying their hand drawing cartoons. Philip Guston enrolled in a correspondence course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning.

    A lot of artists tend to take themselves very seriously, so drawing funny cartoons isn’t necessarily the best fit for them.

    If you look at the cartoons in Punch magazine from around the year 1900 and you compare them to the style of cartoons drawn today you’ll notice how good the draughtsmanship was in the earlier cartoons, but also how unfunny they often are (at least to us in the twenty-first century). That of course may be partly a symptom of humour not aging well, but it could also be partly that in those early Punch cartoons the cartoons were drawn by artists of high technical skill but with low senses of humour, while today it’s more likely that cartoons are drawn by people with high senses of humour but low technical skills.

    Humour in contemporary art
    Humour in contemporary art

    The contemporary art world is generally a very serious place, in which the deeper meanings of art are to be prized and where works are scrutinised for evidence of profound political, social and psychological insights in every brushstroke or choice of colour.

    In the world of contemporary art seriousness prevails, however, at the same time serious issues (currently dominated by identity politics) are tackled in a totally different way within the genre of comedy, especially stand-up, where the main purveyors such as Ricky Gervais can earn a fortune from a single Netflix special.

    Humor in contemporary art
    Humor in contemporary art

    Cartoons are often dismissed as being trivial and unworthy of serious consideration. I would strongly disagree with this, being a cartoonist myself (See the book below). The same criticism can be applied to all disciplines of creative endeavour after all.

    Humor in art
    A book of humour about art

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

    Humour in contemporary art - a classical statue with a cartoon head

    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.

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