Used Father’s Corpse For Art
After last year’s shocking exhibition of photographs of his father’s dead body lying on a mortuary slab covered in bruises, A New Zealand artist now exhibited his father Neville’s ashes.
Nigel Madden is competing in this year’s Norsewear Art Awards with this work. He says that in the end, his father, an alcoholic, is much more useful dead that he was alive.
The ashes are stored in a Belgium-made urn that Madden bought off the Internet and the plinth is handmade. I took my father’s ashes and placed them in a reflective urn and placed it on a pedestal. In this way my father’s remains function as a symbol and represent art, the author said.
Although his last year’s work “Three Portraits of Neville Madden” was the mourning of the dysfunctional father-son relationship, the artist claims that this year’s work, dubbed “The End of Art”, is less personal.
Madden quotes Picasso: “In art one must kill one’s father”. He liked the cold, reflective surface of the urn that ceases being important as an object and becomes the home of one’s own thoughts. He is also pleased with the ashes as material because it is not often that an artist gets to work with human mortal remains.
The work is up for sale for two thousand dollars, but finding a buyer is difficult.
The three photographs he displayed last year show his dead father on a mortuary slab, his body covered in bruises that he got after suffering a heart attack and falling off a bar stool in a hotel where he had been drinking before a rugby match.
The purpose of the photographs is not morbid in nature. Madden does not deem his conduct as immoral, but just raw and what it is because a dead body for him is just a shell. With the shocking photographs the artist wanted to depict something subtle, relationships. The photographs selected for the exhibition were marked with a warning sign for the audience.
The Norsewear Art Awards exhibition opens in hastings on New Zealand on April 14 and remains open until May 27. The winner of the award gets 20,000 dollars, and second and third contesters get 5,000 dollars each. This national annual award for modern art tries to discover and stimulate excellence in art. This year it is celebrating its 21st anniversary.
