Baseball Hat Pyre   (2003)

Baseball Hat Pyre   (2003)

[from Design for a Carnival*]
3 series of 7 images each:
1) ‘….on every sixth Thursday after a flood’ 2005
2) ‘….whenever a bridge to the city is closed’ 2006
3) ‘….every time the motorway is empty’ 2006

21 Polaroid photographs
6cm x 10cm each
framed

♦

Removing a hat to bare ones head, then set alight: A ritual to honour, commemorate or catalyse some very particular events.  Baseball hats are burnt on pyres and documented with polaroid photographs.

*Design for a Carnival, 2003, is an evolving project. It exists as a series of videos, re-mixed music, billboard projects, drawings, large scale public art works and small ephemeral events which collectively propose an entirely new form of festival – a model for a community to engage with each other in a way which is full of play and disorder, free from commerce, words, reason, and fixed hierarchies or identities. But this is a community which is heterogenous – its identity apparently rooted in the ‘local’ yet networked internationally as the carnival migrates across a number of spaces and times:
Lace-making catalyses a new method of DJ-ing; A large billboard sign in Turin announces a meeting in a hotel bar in Haiti; Local teenagers destroy and carefully reconstruct a woodland sapling; Ants prepare a constellation of sparkling sequins on their ant hill; Baseball caps are burned on pyres; A collaboration, with fashion designer Jonathan Saunders, will see a colossal dress specially tailored to ‘garland’ an 80ft high wind turbine. Clothes are swapped between countries and micro-parades are mapped out to vacillate between places 100’s of miles apart.
To document the carnival an elaborate structure made of bones and telephone cable is created as a camera filter, the resulting images acting as a mask for its audience and subject. Together, the outline of an event is being suggested, a tentative sketch, ambiguous, dark, excessive and joyful, far from the safety of the contemporary, commodified, urban street festival. But is everything Chodzko shows us in Design for a Carnival preparation for the carnival’s future existence? Or is what we see the carnival itself; a carnival of preparation, of speculation, allusions and ideas, taking place here in the gallery itself, between object and audience?

Baseball Hat Pyre   (2003) shares many ideas and imagery with Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire (1999-).  The notion of clothing (as ‘costume’) forming part of a ritual extension of bodies, transforming their possible relationships to the world appears in works such as Product Recall (1994), Slow Down Skin Shed (1994), White Magic (2005),  M-path (2006),  Borrowed Cold Lodge (2008),  One day’s work/wear worn through (2018) etc.