Mick Hartley

Isn’t it exciting, keeping up with the latest developments in the art world? Somewhere down the line from the Tracey Emin school of self-obsession-and-personal-neuroses art, and the Chapman brothers’ naughty-boys art, here’s Nigel Madden:

A Napier artist who last year exhibited photographs of his dead father lying bruised on a mortuary slab has followed up by offering his father’s ashes for display.

Nigel Madden has entered the ashes in this year’s Norsewear Art Awards, saying his father, Neville, an alcoholic and Radio New Zealand announcer in Napier during the 1960s, was proving to be “much more useful dead than he ever was alive”.

The ashes are in a Belgium-made pewter urn Madden bought over the Internet. It sits on a handmade plinth.

Though his entry in last year’s awards, Three Portraits of Neville Madden, was a lament for a dysfunctional father-son relationship, this year’s piece, entitled The End of Art, was less personal, he said.

“I take my father’s incinerated remains, entombed in a reflective funeral urn, and place it on a pedestal. So, my father’s remains function as a symbol and a stand-in for art.”

Madden quotes Picasso, saying “in art one must kill one’s father”. He said he liked the cold, reflective surface of the urn, which left the viewer “dwelling on their own thoughts rather than the object itself”.

He’s right though: if I came across it in a gallery, I’d very likely be dwelling on my own thoughts rather than the object itself. Not very charitable thoughts, mind…