Cruise the Collection
Peter Madden
In 2004, Tessa Giblin, assistant curator, Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand, wrote Enduring Eternity, an essay that accompanied Peter Madden's exhibition, Forever Present, at Michael Lett, 478 Karangahape Rd, Newton, Auckland, NZ, 20 October - 13 November 2004. With both the writer and artist's kind permission, we print the essay here for Chartwell website readers.
Peter Madden, Leave, 2004, leather shoes, found images, 100 x 280x 285mm
Enduring Eternity
by Tessa Giblin
Necrolopous - a city for the dead where life is parodied, time is avenged, and the cosmos is held in the palm of your hand.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanites; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation paseth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.
Ecclesiastes 1:2 - 4
Throughout Peter Madden's strange worlds, his structures are littered with references to the passing of time and the imminent onset of death. A rose in full bloom, brutally plucked from its life giving stem has long served as a symbol of mortality. Life is cyclic, and in order to regenerate living organisms must go through stages of decline. As a gentle allegory '(Fibrillating Rose)' posits a rose protruding on a stem from the bottom of a picture frame, the picture having been obliterated by a wash of white paint.
Following the concentric patterning of the petals the rose is perforated with tiny hearts, which when set against the starkly white canvas" (mirror/void/gallery wall) (see footnote 1) creates an effect of fibrillation. The rose seems to slightly quiver. It is vanity which causes us to desire such things as roses in vases. And as such it is also destructive.
Madden's rose full of fibrillating hearts provide a bittersweet analogy for that other severing of life giving cords - producing joy and new life, but also marking the beginning of the process of aging, which leads our cells without pause towards their own mortal end.
The opening words in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, are a not-so-subtle foreshadowing of the theme of the book. "The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses…" (see footnote 2) has some reiteration in Madden's studio, filled not with the rich odor of roses, but cluttered with multitudes of photographs. Chopped and spliced, pasted as filaments or flattened by card, their delicacy belies their potent symbolism.
In an introduction to an exhibition entitled Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art, John Ravenal writes, "a host of pressing global issues - including frequent outbreaks of civil and international warfare, widening polarization between rich and poor, and pervasive environmental destruction - make it impossible to avoid the perception that conflict and crises are the hallmarks of contemporary life."
Where is this history better documented than in the amassing years of National Geographic publications? It is largely here that Madden chooses to source his montage material. (see footnote 3)
Peter Madden, Ram Mount, 2004, found objects, found images, 300x250x200mm
If crises and conflict are the hallmarks of contemporary life, it is no wonder that National Geographic has provided such a lush hunting ground for the skulls that proliferate works such as Necrolopous. Peter Madden is not the only one interested in the onset of death in human cultures and bodies. How can one forget the wonderful Holographic skull gracing the cover of a mid-80s National Geographic? Necrolopous makes for fascinating dialogue, as rather than exist as an allegory for something other, it is answerable only to itself. Madden's playful articulation of morbid ideas vaults into hyper drive. As a skeletal form itself, this city of death rises up out of the black earth on its spindly legs.
Throughout there are skulls, almost in decoration, as well as dead flies, pictures of elephants, and little gold stars which waft like manuka dew from the building structures. (see footnote 4) Like the buildings of Dark City (Dir. Alex Proyas 1998), the towering skeletons of Necrolopous rise as though by will, and pull the underworld up with it. Perched atop one of these night-scrapers, a cemetery is resting. Crosses haphazardly mark the graves of the mortal, and dangling roots reach for the earth below. As Madden comments with a wry smile, the whole thing descends quite quickly into farce.
Through the gaping mouth of the skull overlooking the entrance to the city (or maybe theme park ) (see footnote 5) is the silhouette of a wolf howling at a huge yellow moon. And you know what they say about a yellow moon. But it is in this same skull that rests the magical quality of the work. The eyes are filled in with a blue rendering of the cosmos.
For those who contemplate death, it follows that one must think something on the subject of eternity. And eternity is one of those concepts that defies reason. It is a concept like 'infinite', 'sublime' or 'God'. If "the limits of our language are the limits of our world" as Wittgenstein professed, then these concepts only have a name so that we can refer to our sense of them. These concepts are the limits of our world. They are not waiting for the person with the smarts to finally define them - they are wonderful terms that are purposefully outside of our perception.
Eighteenth-century English philosopher Edmund Burke "described the sublime as the feeling of awe, often accompanied by terror, that one experiences when confronted by phenomena such as huge scale, overwhelming darkness, or vast space whose parameters are impossible to define and thus defy human mastery". (see footnote 6) And one thing we do know, which we may even have learned from National Geographic, is that the cosmos in its vastness is beyond our comprehension. But here, in the eye sockets of Peter Madden's largest skull, is the cosmos.
He has taken a concept which exists in a similar way to 'eternity' and has concretely placed it within his world. (see footnote 7) And this isn't the only cosmos to populate Necrolopous. Honing his skills as a miniature painter (not a quick undertaking), Madden has managed to fit the entire cosmos onto a tiny egg.
At the back of the dark dark city there is a dark dark tower, at the top of the dark dark tower there is a dark dark nest, in the dark dark nest there is a dark dark egg, and on the dark dark egg there is [gasp!].
Tessa Giblin
Footnotes
1) Madden leaves much of his work deliberately open to interpretation. I love to imagine this white frame as a mirror, with a rose lodged in the bottom pane - the sentimental residue of some romantic encounter; the fibrillating heart as a symbol of mortality, but also of heart-fluttering love. The disquieting thing is that the mirror reflects nothing; no form, no light, and no reaction to the reality we believe we stand in.
2) Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1949
3) See self-professed National Geographic junkie Tessa Laird's discussion of Madden's work in http://www.naturalselection.org.nz , Issue #2, Section 11, where she responds in her own writing to his method of cut and paste.
4) In an interesting article called 'Death and Praxis in the Funerary Architecture of Mamluk Cairo', Wendy Pullan talks about the "encroachment of the dead upon the living", the binary of life and death, and also eternity in relation to the mausoleums and tombs which are a part of the everyday territory of contemporary Cairo.
Heck, C. and Lippincott, K., Symbols of Time In the History of Art, Brepols, Belgium 2002, pp 151 - 164
5) Necroworld!TM
6) Ravenal, John B., Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art, Richmond, VA: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2000, pp 13 - 34
7) One of the wonderful symbols in our visual library is the mathematical symbol for "less than" < , which with a slight gesture can so easily become "less than or equal to" £ , immediately shifting it from an open concept embracing the infinite, to something embedded in a material world view of reality.
