Crass Chair
1940’s Tecta Chair by Eric Lyons upholstered with early 1990’s leather jacket with Crass logo.
95cm x 45cm x 50cm

Commissioned as furniture for Lawson Park, Grizedale Arts, Cumbria. www.grizedale.org


Crass Chair, Adam Chodzko 2009
 
Leather jacket by a Crass fan, 1990’s. Tecta chair by Eric Lyons 1940’s.
Eric Lyons worked for Span, a high density housing ideology that  
suggested communal living within carefully designed shared buildings.  Lyons was a true community architect and his designs worked well and remain popular although many of the unique ideas of the Span schemes have gone, most importantly the communal dining.
Crass were an almost anti-punk band who became synonymous with punk.  They doggedly pursued an anti-capitalist ideology from their commune in Essex. The commune, Dial House became a magnet for the young idealist, dog-on-a-string brigade and is still going, running compost toilet workshops and releasing organic gardening dvd’s, so still trying to save us.
Adam Chodzko brings these two related, and in his mind problematic ideologies, together as a chair for Grizedale Arts new artist residency and farm Lawson Park, as a kind of warning; beware the chair, the artists’ chair, the poets’ chair, kingship. He creates a critique of an attempt to save the world, to create a utopia. That’s what artists have been doing since the 1960’s, being critical,  debunking the status quo, the systems so carefully established over millennia, they call it deconstruction – are we now looking to artists to reconstruct the mess for us? Could be a long wait, it’s been 50 years and there is little sign. Can art save us? Well, maybe it should because it got us into this mess.

Adam Sutherland, Director, Grizedale Arts.

Text for exhibition 'Can Art Save Us' at Sheffield at Millenium Galleries.