silk cuts
Auckland-based artist Peter Madden generally, if not always, leaves the flurry of images he excises from encyclopaedias and stacks of National Geographics on the scale he finds them (like Hannah Höch in her original magazine-shredding shock tactic). For this reason many of his works, whether two-dimensional photomontages or tabletop systems of images arrayed on wire stalks, require the viewer to get in at a focal distance of half a metre or less, as for a standard printed page. His recent exhibition ‘Silk Cuts’, however, included some objects apparently more for picking up or sitting on than peering at. A gilded baseball bat, stool and bicycle seat stood out, visible from a distance.
The cultural resonances of covering something in gold leaf could no doubt be read up at length—perhaps in just such sources as encyclopaedias and National Geographic—but in the gallery, any arcane references were stopped dead. The same glossy magazines might as readily offer up Benson & Hedges advertisements milking this obvious connotation of value, already explicit in the brand’s golden carton. Madden’s brushing with this overfamiliar coding had a compellingly uneasy effect on me. For all their graspable size and icon-like visual simplicity, these were tough objects to see, speed bumps to slow my appreciation of his customarily lush collages.
The myriad flowers, birds, humans, insects and dust clouds he recombines, in his new works more than ever, present us with a visual simultaneity into which we can dip again and again. Up close, they fill peripheral vision with a decentred panorama. Individual images are notes in a chord of symphonic breadth. Amidst the blooming profusion, the images that do stand out to me first, this