A Plan for the Perfect Night    (1992)

A Plan for the Perfect Night    (1992)

A series of 15 c-type photographic prints of stars (taken from a NASA 35mm slide film set), ‘improved’ by invited participants, through adding an extra star, using white Tippex correction fluid.
Print size: 12″ x 16″

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First installed in the group exhibition “Instructions Received”, Gio Marconi, Milan, curated by artist Liam Gillick, who improved Chodzko’s A Plan for the Perfect Night by adding an extra star, using white Tippex correction fluid.
Further versions were exhibited with other works by Chodzko in High Fidelity, Kohji Ogura Gallery, Nagoya (1994).
The work was inspired from Chodzko’s memory of being in a local library and witnessing an old man sitting next to him carefully map out star positions on a sheet of paper with a pale hard pencil, and then very slowly write the title above them; A Plan for the Perfect Night.  In terms of an allusion to a fundamental, quotidian form of creativity it forms a celestial ‘landscape’ to the ‘portraits’ in The God Look Alike Contest (1991-1992).

Other versions of the installation of A Plan for the Perfect Night    (1992)  included a death row prison commissary list (ie; all the items available to buy within a prison, as a prisoner on death row) from Ellis Unit 1, Huntsville, Texas, US.  The list had been sent to Chodzko when he began a letter writing correspondence with a death row prisoner, through https://www.humanwrites.org/.

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Related works:

Secretors          (1993 – )
Nightvision    (1998)
Transmitters    (1991 – )
O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix  (2020)