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Excerpts from:
Gabriel Coxhead - The Times T2 13th October 2004.
About 'Night Shift'
-“I was partly thinking of the tent as an
ark, a structure created by a small group of people to preserve
their culture from imminent disappearance….They run their
route through the art fair as though it just happened to be in their
way. Overlooking the displayed artefacts, they move instinctively,
with an absolute ignorance of our culture’s value systems
and conventions,” Chodzko says.
-“It’s ambiguous as to where exactly the work is,”
Chodzko explains. “Is it the map? The animals touring? Or
our imagining of this?”
-These pieces are poignant expressions of the gap between imagination
and representation. Similarly, his aim in Night Shift is “to
combine something quite fantastic and dreamlike with something utterly
pragmatic, practical and dull – like a trade-fair plan”.
-For there is something magical, a fairytale quality, in the thought
of all these animals marching about at night. Most of these creatures
have folkloric or occult connotations. Others are just feared or
reviled. Maybe others broke out of the zoo. But for one glorious
carnivalesque night of misrule they become exclusive VIPs, roaming
free.
-“The whole work should operate like a dream that has disappeared
by morning.” Chodzko says. “The normal order returns,
but there is always some trace, some haunting, a reminder that normality
is constructed and contingent.”
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Excerpts from:
Maria Fusco, ‘Whitstable Interiors,’ Art Monthly, No.
280, October, p.35 2004
About 'Whitstable Interiors'
-Probably just about as fine as a piece of desktop
publishing gets. Whitstable Interiors by Adam Chodzko is an odd
gazetteer both familiar and strange at the same time.
-A speedy reader could be forgiven for thinking that Whitstable
Interiors is (to paraphrase) a local book for local people but this
‘(sub)urban discourse’, as Michel de Certeau might put
it, extends far past the doorstep of idiolect and instead tools
its own critical space, one which is universally filmic rather than
domestically televisual. Here in an exchange between Chodzko and
a Whitstable resident called Martin there seems to be a sensibility
present which is more reminiscent of The Shining rather than Changing
Rooms:
‘You’ve got a nice collection of firewood.’
‘Yes, this is the interior of the old bathroom. It was like
a shed, inside the bathroom were kind of planks, so I’ve been
slowly working through it and using up old fence posts and things.’
‘That must feel good; burning your own bathroom.’
‘Yes it is; it was so horrible.’
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Mark Beasley, ‘frieze’, no. 82, April, 2003, p.84-85
Adam Chodzko
Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury
Thirteen-year-old Austen sports a ribboned hat and
travels the streets of Whitstable on an electric bike; attached
to the rear is a makeshift trailer, piled high with bottles bound
for recycling. Occasionally the local youths chase him through the
streets, launching missiles in his path. With a top speed of 25
miles per hour Austen evades his persecutors and makes it to the
bottle bank, an environmental triumph, replete in Quentin Crisp
fedora.
Austen’s account of life in a seaside town features in Adam
Chodzko’s latest publication, Whitstable Interiors (2003):
a photocopied DIY lifestyle fanzine along the lines of Sniffin’
Glue meets Elle Decoration. The ‘odd corners and damp patches’
of Whitstable’s domestic architecture and the dreams and aspirations
of its long-time inhabitants and recent converts, displaced from
the urban sprawl, constitute a series of cut-up interviews conducted
by the artist. It’s a familiar tale, an Aesop’s fable
of town and country and the prevailing sense of self dictated by
one’s environment. As Chodzko’s title suggests, what
we are really privy to, beyond the discussions of home décor,
are the interior lives and desires of individuals: an appealingly
localized re-take of Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (1969–72).
Austen’s tale is reminiscent of an earlier work by Chodzko,
a poster bearing an image of the artist, caught wide-eyed, marooned
on the page, sandwiched between an imploring text: ‘Were you
a strange child? All people who were strange children are invited
together to make a beautiful place for ourselves. Please call Adam
for details now.’ It’s an appealing proposition. What
kind of world would that be? A place of contradiction, somewhere
for the soul to rest, for the mind to wander unhindered by cultural
middle management and those figures Trocchi termed ‘Grundys’
and Burroughs, less euphemistically, the ‘Shits’. For
some it’s a place by the coast and wistful glances beyond
the sea line.
Chodzko’s move from London to the Kent coast roughly coincides
with the period of work on display. Three years of projects have
been gathered together for the first time as part of his multi-sited
Kent Institute of Art and Design exhibition ‘Strangers to
Ourselves’, an ‘exploration of the complex social, political
and economic issues surrounding migration both current and historical’.
Two documentary slide works present the meeting of disparate social
groups. In Cell-a 2006 (2002) Kurdish asylum seekers are placed
in charge of the archive of the relocated Cubitt Gallery in London.
In The Gorgies Center (2002) a similar relocation places the archive
of the Manchester-based architectural practice MBLC – principally
in charge of the urban remodelling of the city – in the hands
of a community of gypsies near Canterbury. It’s a beguiling
disruption of information, a distended discussion of the controlled
and the controllers.
Design for a Carnival (2003) is Chodzko’s latest body of work.
The minimal assemblage of Polaroid images, skeletal costume and
an MDF-packaged dub plate appears at first glance like an exercise
in anti-spectacle. The hushed academic tones, sombre hallways and
boxy environment of the university campus do little to evoke the
mood of carnival. The vernacular of art meets the constituent elements
of the Mas carnival procession; music, costume and ritual. Chodko’s
dub plate The music from Float 17, as it stops briefly under the
fly-over, as it makes its way into the city (2003) replaces calypso,
soca and steel drums with a garage house mix of, among others, Joy
Division, Peaches, Fela Kuti, Sergio Mendes and Trojan records.
A proposal to dress a wind turbine with an outsized psychedelic
garment designed by the leading fashion light Jonathon Saunders
is propped scarecrow- like against the gallery wall.
A small TV monitor in the corner of the room loops through six minutes
of Design for a Carnival (2003). On screen a community of ants moves
to and fro, arranging a number of scattered sequins; one of the
ants stumbles, and the electric blue circle it carries flashes brightly
in the sunlight. The video cuts to a group of local kids out on
foot, searching the forest. Their attention is directed towards
a sapling; grabbing the trunk, the group pull the tree to the ground,
smashing branches and foliage in the process. Vinyl spins on a record
deck, the needle jumps as it hits a cocoon of lace woven around
the disc. Back to the kids, who now reconstruct the sapling with
coloured plastic cable ties. Springing back to its full height,
it represents a crippled totem, a public monument to creative disorder.
It’s a beguiling plein-air ritual enacted by rural youth:
a considered collage of disparate social and anti-social activity
book-ended by lace and black vinyl.
An assemblage of bone, cartilage and telephone cable held together
with vivid pink, orange and blue thread forms a grisly carnival
mask. Sat on a grey plinth, Mask Filter (2003) has been designed
to house a video camera – a roving eye framed by Chodzko’s
skeletal headwear forever present in the frame of the lens, a filter
of influence as West African voodoo ritual meets the English rural
coast. Is it a perverse attempt to blend in with the non-existent
crowd, to mix things up a bit, or a mask for cultural rubbernecking?
Baseball Hat Pyre (2003) consists of a series of Polaroid photos
pinned to the wall. Burberry check and Nike swooshed caps are ablaze,
caught in the orange glow of the funeral pyre: an amnesty of burning
peaked cloth. Can the baseball cap, the adopted sign of urban, suburban
and country youth, be considered a dangerous symbol? In Whitstable
Interiors, when speaking with Austen, Chodzko suggests a crisis
of imagination in the local Whitstable youths, evidenced through
the conservative nature of their casual dress code. Much despised
by the local media, the Chavs – the recent media term for
such youth, derived from the town of Chatham – have become
the new scourge of suburban and rural towns.
Chodzko spins media cliché, revelling in the desire to find
parity in associations far from the beaten track, a future situation
where such relationships are accepted and valued. Do these constructed
social antonyms serve to disturb the status quo or to reinforce
it? These are the inchoate beginnings of a future festival; a carnival
for the displaced, the overlooked and the marooned. Chodzko has
more in common with the playful revelatory wit of artists such as
Alan Ruppersberg and Douglas Huebler than the social instruction
and dogmatic rhetoric of his European counterparts. His is a desire
to find new relations, removed from existing cliché. In his
backyard Austen has constructed two flagpoles: one flies a pirate
ensign, the other a peace symbol. For him such polarity is uncomplicated;
it makes perfect sense. Long live the strange children.
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Excerpts from:
Will Bradley ‘Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!’
In ‘Adam Chodzko Plans & Spells’ 2002, Essays by
Chris Darke, Will Bradley, Polly Staple, Jeremy Millar and Steven
Bode.
Published by Film & Video Umbrella
. …Adam Chodzko’s work can be seen as
a paradoxical study of this problem by the method of avoidance.
Like those medieval sects who believed they could only truly be
saved once they had experienced every kind of sin, Chodzko is trying
to describe the indescribable – the infinite, the sublime
– by repeatedly exposing the tricks, self-deceptions and calculated
illusions that make up the language he has to use.
… This investigation of negative space and absent meaning
produces as a by-product a large quantity of high-quality and intense
pathos, an outcome that is encouraged and manipulated. All these
experiences – of the lost, the missing, the forgotten –
carry an emotional charge, a calculated trigger for a chain of thought
that spins off, away from the work itself, into a wholly subjective
world…
…Chodzko relies on the viewer to create rather than decipher
the meaning of his work, but in a fundamentally different way from
the way that most classic ‘conceptual art’ operates.
The art itself is not simply a concept; it has a real, sensual existence.
It’s usually either a real event that people took part in
or even, in the case of Limbo Land, a wholly fictional scenario
that needs to be understood, at least initially, according to well-established
codes. It often invokes the currently unfashionable concept of imagination
as one of its central ideas. This might seem like an academic distinction,
but it isn’t. The procedures of conceptual art require that
the art as pure idea be enough to communicate the meaning of the
work. In Chodzko’s situation this is no longer sufficient.
The work most often starts with an open-ended question, even a material,
political question, which can never be answered in its own terms;
a question, sometimes apparently naïve, that can’t be
answered without stepping outside the framework that makes it possible
to ask at all. The work defines an absence of meaning that can only
be filled, subjectively, by the person looking at it, in full knowledge
of the fact that the predictable, banal answer has already been
anticipated and cancelled by the work itself. In Chodzko’s
art, truth and meaning are mutable, personal ideas. More than that,
the work seems to suggest that if the sublime, the infinite, is
inexpressible, then our only contact with it can be through our
own imagination. It all comes down to personal experience, but that
experience turns out to be the most real thing we have. About Plan
for a Spell 2001
…Plan for a Spell takes these themes of chance and contingency
one stage further. The work reconfigures itself at every viewing,
each time asking the viewer whether this particular combination
of sound and image could be the promised one, the one with an unnamed
power greater than the sum of its parts. The magic of the spell
in question is something like the symbolic power of art, presumed
missing or lost several centuries ago, and the imagery of the ¸lm
ranges over ancient traditions and contemporary rituals. In some
configurations we even get to see a close-up sequence of basket
weaving, possibly the first such instance in the history of video
art. It’s tempting to see Plan for a Spell as a kind of requiem
for an unmediated culture, for experiences that haven’t been
defined to death by their own representation, but there was a time
(and that time was the 1970s) when it was possible to find footage
like this on mainstream TV. It’s more like a simulation of,
or a metaphor for, a collective memory. It’s an artwork that,
with admirable honesty, openly displays its own limitations but
also imagines the possibility of transcending them to produce magical
effects, encouraging the viewer to speculate on what these effects
might be and whether art, now, is really capable of delivering them.
Borges wrote that ‘the immanence of a revelation that does
not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon,’ but more
than this you get the feeling that the work is a prototype, a proof-of-principle
experiment for a much larger and older and more mystical idea. Somewhere
in history, in some combination of human knowledge and action, is
hidden a greater truth which has either been missed or forgotten
– or perhaps more precisely needs to be made, put together
from the unreliable and malleable material of experience –
but which has the power to transform everything…About ‘Limbo
Land’ 2001
Limbo Land could be seen as markedly different to most of Chodzko’s
previous work, even as it develops many of the same ideas and strategies
and again presents itself as incomplete, self-conscious. Long tracking
shots showing empty, desolate landscapes from an unearthly, floating
viewpoint are intercut with emotionally charged scenes of two people
attending the bedside of a third, unseen character. There is a moment
when the camera (i.e. the viewer) looks straight into the eyes of
the other actors, drawing you into the middle of a scene in which
the other characters are also only observers, powerless to influence
the outcome. At other times the camera moves through the landscape
in ways that don’t correspond to any possible human experience
of motion, with an intensity that recalls scenes from Tarkovsky’s
‘Stalker’ — a film that was an extended meditation
on the meaning of miracles in a secular world. These images are
framed by the attempts of a sound recordist to soundtrack the film
itself, as she tries to understand what has taken place and how
she should respond. So the soundtrack becomes an open, contingent
element. We hear it as a tentative response to a situation whose
meaning is not yet fixed and whose purpose is unclear. At the same
time, it guides and alters our experience of watching. Abstract
clicks and crackles and echoes drift in space, intensifying the
sense of distance, of disconnection, and we realise that this process
– the attempt to represent an event that cannot be completely
understood or expressed – is the process of the film as a
whole.
The bedside vigil, the glimpses of abandoned clothing lying in the
snow, the title of the work, all make it clear that this is somehow
a representation of the point of transition from life to death.
It’s also a representation made with the knowledge that it
can never be true, or complete – a reflection on the fact
that, for all the emotional power of these images, of images in
general, certain situations or states of mind are unfilmable, inexpressible.
It’s a given thing in our society that there are certain questions
that are not acceptable to ask. Limbo Land is mature enough not
to ask these questions directly, but it’s intensely concerned
with how they might be represented in a meaningful way. In a society
where the meaning of death has been allocated to a series of mostly
banal categories, Limbo Land introduces the idea that we are no
nearer to understanding what it is we’re talking about, never
mind construct a coherent moral or aesthetic system in which it
might be expressed.
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Excerpts from:
Martin Clark ‘Untitled’, No. 28, Summer, p.59. 2002
About ‘Plan for a Spell’:
…random sequences or apparently arbitrary
details all become potential moments of revelation. The tension…
-It alludes to the interconnectedness of all things on both the
macro and micro level.
-With Plan for a Spell Chodzko continues to develop themes explored
in much of his previous work around, chance, ritual, folklore and
mythologies (both historical and contemporary) as well as simultaneity,
revelation, causality and the margins of the metropolitan, of society.
There is a sense that the work is making itself before your eyes,
that this structure, this ecology if you like, is playing itself
out, producing itself through its very operation. If works of art,
at best, can simultaneously create and inhabit their own universe,
existing as a microcosm for the visible world as well as producing
a new world through this same action, then Plan for a Spell can
be seen to be not only exploring this, but enacting it.
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Excerpts from:
Michael Wilson, ‘These Days’, Untitled, p.7-9, No.25,
Summer 2001.
Adam Chodzko interviewed by Michael Wilson
Adam Chodzko specializes in ‘bad questions’.
He initiates projects, places advertisements, arranges meetings
and gathers people and things together in order to find the solutions
for problems that have none. He delights in the oddities of chance
and misunderstanding, in the background and the backstage. His work
points to a contemporary ritual and folklore, and to the possibility
of achieving ‘inadvertent’ truths…
AC… From about 1991 I was working a lot with strangers who
I'd assemble via their chance encounters with a question I'd posed,
posted onto a wall or advertised in magazines; product recalls for
owners of a particular jacket, people who thought they looked like
god, people who were strange children and so on. These odd assemblies
were rallying points in which 'bad' questions could be posed. They
are proposals for a contemporary urban folklore or preparatory designs
for a ritual. It was important to me that they weren't artists because
I think artists mind their language too much. Here was a way that
for one day, or even just for a few hours, people would assemble
out of curiosity. Their contributions are collections (or exhibitions)
of advice. In each case there was something I was stuck on and only
a stranger could guide me. It was also important that their position
in relation to the question was fleeting; that the group didn't
already exist. It was a case of working with the people who I wanted
to be the audience. The risk was that things would go out of control,
and they always did. In Nightvision, 1988, the advice was contradictory,
and in Reunion: Salo, 1998, all but one of the 'murdered' adolescents
were missing. The one that did appear had, it turned out, eluded
her fictional annihilation. Some curators have presented these as
my attempt to reveal failure, but this is missing the point. The
question is 'wrong' in the first place. The response is 'out of
control', but taking all its contradictions together, the work is
proposing a space that might be a solution. In Limbo Land, the sound
recordist pretty much thinks she's 'failed', because nothing individually
is doing the job of summing up. But 'inadvertently', collectively
and poetically, each project describes the very thing it claims
has been impossible to achieve.
…I look for the ways in which social space can become dynamic
to begin to generate this sense of a parallel, 'other' space. These
opportunities have mostly been commodified and policed into submission,
particularly in the cities. But maybe art can do something about
it; imagining how people might interact and how social space might
be invented. This kind of art practice must do more than archive
existing examples.
… If Limbo Land is about a search for empathy and how we might
deal with its communication, the Book Works book similarly hopes
to find a person (who in reality only just exists), describe them
(despite this haziness,) and account for the fantastic narrative
that they catalysed one week in 1997. It begins in the form of an
instruction manual, and gradually turns into a novella. The quest
begins in a small but turgid newspaper article that I've hung onto
for nearly five years. The account starts clearly; a woman is arrested
in London because she is in possession of an extensive and lethal
arsenal. But the information ends there because she refuses to say
anything once caught. None of the investigators find out much about
her, failing even to establish her identity. The contradictions
that riddle the small amount of information that is available seemed
to baffle the police, judge, solicitors and press (and, until now,
the public) to the point where no one wanted anything to do with
it. Looking for her is very much like trying to make a decision
on acid; despite the desire to act there is always another desire
that interrupts. It is reminiscent of Bunuel's Exterminating Angel,
in which the way out from the dinner party is absolutely clear,
but the guests imprison themselves within its structure through
their individual inability to exert the will to leave. Similarly;
no one in the law or media was able to deal with this individual
because the language required to describe her needs to be invented.
So again, I think art might be able to make this acknowledgement
possible.…
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Excerpts from:
Jonathan Jones. ‘Frieze,’ Issue 52, May 2000. pg 95.
About ‘Better Scenery’
Adam Chodzko…is an artist of shaggy dog stories,
a fabulist of the everyday. His latest piece has a preposterous
quality, yet when you let it work on you it’s genuinely dislocating,
reminiscent of the feeling generated at the end of Donald Cammell
and Nicolas Roeg’s film Performance (1970), when Chas and
Turner uncannily swap identities.
-Chodzko’s art has the same dry irony, but hints at something
more Dionysian. There’s a sense of mystery about this map
gone wrong.
-Chodzko has created a seductive, troubling fiction. He knows how
to tell a story better than many contemporary writers, one that
sinks in your mind and leaves you longing to pack your bags and
go on the adventure he describes.
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Excerpts from:
Jennifer Higgie catalogue essay
from: ‘Adam Chodzko’, 1999, August publications. Texts
by Jennifer Higgie and Michael Bracewell.
Adam Chodzko’s projects evoke a similarly
ambiguous optimism. Something of a media iconoclast, he begins with
an interruption – usually an intriguingly worded, oddly contextualised
advertisement – which he develops into a meditation on the
way our imaginations can extend, if not explain, the often restrictive
parameters with which we define ourselves…
Chodzko relays enigmatic – even secretive – messages,
questions and images requesting meetings, answers or responses.
But despite his references to various sources and his reliance on
the chance interaction of strangers, the work is far from chaotic
or un-choreographed – each piece is a fragment of a greater
whole, illuminating the meaning and complexity of the parts which
precede and follow it…
Acutely aware of the raw, economic values of a world marketplace
both dulled and over-stimulated with choice, Chodzko’s work,
with its playfulness and strange collisions of meaning, is defiantly
anti-materialistic. Attempting to come to terms with the culture
we inhabit by at once distancing and submerging himself within accepted
systems of exchange, and then scrutinising the traces of overlooked
creativity, Chodzko’s is a hybrid project, and one which appropriately
enjoys its own lack of restraint. It’s an approach which lends
his work a peculiar, humanistic edginess – as if it wants
to rankle as well as reassure,…
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Excerpts from:
Michael Bracewell catalogue essay
from: ‘Adam Chodzko’, 1999, August publications. Texts
by Jennifer Higgie and Michael Bracewell.
If his work creates an intersection between the imagination and
reality, in which art can be created from the answer to a question,
then he is also concerned with translating the substance of fiction
back to its source within reality. In risking a route to the state
of the unknowable, Chodzko is also concerned with maintaining a
way back….
Chodzko’s palette has frequently included classified advertising
columns (from Loot to The Stage or a sex contacts magazine), posters
and flyers, which can all be seen as portals into the unknown –
ridiculous, threatening, life-enhancing, banal, infinite: metaphors,
perhaps, for a quantifiable notion of the universe….
… the mechanics of Chodzko’s enquiries – the see-saw
of question and answer, balanced on the fulcrum of chance –
are also required to generate a matching sense of anxiety. Ultimately,
Chodzko's work posits hope but never, finally, denies the void….
About Nightvision 1998
…
Projected on to the gallery wall, this film conveys an atmosphere
of surveillance which doubles, perhaps, as an articulation of the
unknown. Chodzko appears to be actually filming an impression of
rumination, or the indistinct shapes of unformed thought. At first
glance, this could be a film of some nefarious activity –
a generic occult gathering of barely visible people in a nocturnal
outdoor setting; but the collision, in terms of language, between
the technical specifications for lights, wattages and coloured gels,
and the inevitably poetic speculations as to the right ambience
for heaven, combines within the film to make a statement of endeavour…About:
Reunion: Salo 1998
…
Thus, not only did Chodzko’s Reunion: Salo, attempt an investigation
into the territory between fiction and reality, known fact and artifice;
it also, as a direct result of its own momentum, put forward a deeply
empathetic statement about Pasolini’s own concept of morality,
amorality and transgression. However, there remains a romantic temptation
to speculate on the dangers to ‘the soul’ which are
implicit in a film such as Salo. Is Chodzko’s Reunion an attempt
to redress the rituals of evil acted out in Pasolini’s filming
of Salo, and thus make an offer of ‘salvation’ ?
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Excerpts from:
Interview with John Slyce, ‘Looking in the Wrong Place,' Dazed
& Confused. August, no.57, p.100-106. 1999
Chodzko’s is a quest that merges the conceptual
with the romantic. His art is an action that maps out the imaginary
space of experience while tracing the over-lapping borders of fact
and fiction. In this, his art relies on the responses, input and
reactions of his collaborating respondents. Be warned: what you
see before you is a residual decoy more than a factual documentation
and subsequently – it’s still alive and kicking.
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