Better Scenery   (2000)

Better Scenery   (2000)

A dyptich of installed signs: one sited in the Sainsbury’s car park, Finchley Road, London, the other in the Arizona Desert, USA.
Various dimensions and materials, with each sculpture lasting different durations, from weeks to years.

The work exists as a photographic record of these three pairs of sculptural interventions in the landscape:

For each of the three versions of Better Scenery:
Dyptich of C-type photographs
Each image is: 40” x 30”

See also: Better Scenery (2001), and Better Scenery (2002).

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Better Scenery  2000

[Text for sign in Sainsbury’s car park, London:]

Better Scenery
From Flagstaff, Arizona take route 89 northeast, then route 510 east, then 505 northeast for 7 miles until you reach a left turn soon after passing Maroon Crater. Follow this dirt track (the 244A ) for 6 miles northeast passing the volcanic formations of The Sproul and the Merriam Crater on your right. Half a mile beyond a small well take the track that heads north towards Little Roden Spring. After exactly 6.7 miles a rough, overgrown cinder track leads off to the left. Head west along this for a quarter of a mile until you reach a fence post. Then walk 100 yards 160° south SE. At this point stop and face due east (visible on the horizon are the Roden Crater and the glow of pink rocks in the Painted Desert ).
Situated here, in this place, is a sign which describes the location of this sign you have just finished reading.

[Text for sign in Arizona desert:]

Better Scenery
Heading north out of London along the west side of Regent’s Park is the Finchley Road (A41). Follow it through St John’s Wood and half a mile beyond to Swiss Cottage. From here, bearing north-west for a quarter-of-a-mile the Finchley Road veers towards West Hampstead. Keep Holy Trinity Church and the Laser Eye Clinic to your right and Finchley Road Underground station to your left. Then take a left turn, following the graceful curvature of the prodigious, concrete and glass, O2 building. This takes you down a steeply inclined unmarked road which opens out to an expansive tarmac car park bordered to the north and south by the tracks of railway lines.
Situated here, in this place, is a sign which describes the location of this sign you have just finished reading.

Excerpt from interview with Mark Godfrey, for catalogue essay for Adam Chodzko, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and Skira, published November 2007

“…I think, despite its existence as sculpture and then photographic diptych, Better Scenery, where I sited two signs in apparently opposite locations, each sign containing precise directions to reach the opposite sign, emerged more from thinking about films.  Vertov, Marker and Keiller, of course, but particularly at that point maybe Atom Egoyan’s crystalline structures of tense and perverse interdependencies between people creating a  haunting of places, and times (“Calendar” in particular), as well as Haneke’s films where a form which is seductive and ‘convincing’ is also made to be simultaneously highly reflexive, provocative and unstable in order that we question what it is we are expecting from the act of looking…

…Better Scenery and Settlement’s use of economy, the language of guidance and simple description reflexively exposing the structures of making comes partly out of Kiarostami’s films.  The idea of looking at a process of looking for something is paramount in my work.  Focus and distraction and coincidence.  Look at anything for too long and you see its instability and fluidity.  So, Better Scenery and Settlement both present a place and then set about both drawing us closer into the status of that site, its particularity, whilst simultaneously pulling us away from it.”

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Excerpt from Jane Rendell, Site-Writing, pp230, 232,233. IB Taurus, 2010

‘The two signs make no attempt to point to their immediate context, only to each other. Their relationship is self-referential. In speaking about where they are not, Better Scenery, described by Chodzko as ‘an escapist proposition’, critiques the ethos of site-specificity and accessibility behind many off-site programmes.’

Excerpt from Jane Rendell,  Art and Architecture: A Place Between, I B Tauris & Co Ltd, pp.30, 32–33, 2006

‘The signs relate the two sites dialectically, giving neither one preference. … they make no attempt to relate to their immediate context. Neither sign can be described as marking a site or non-site; the two are entirely equivalent, each one bound up in the other. … If art is placed outside a gallery, why should it be more accessible, how and to whom? If art is placed outside a gallery, should it be closely related to a particular site, which site and in what way? ‘Better Scenery’ questions the assumptions made about its ‘off-site’ location and asks the kind of questions we would expect from the kind of fine art discourse firmly positioned within a tradition of gallery-based conceptual art.’

About Better Scenery (200o): Excerpt from Rosamund West, ‘Print the Legend: The Myth of the West.’ The Skinny, Issue 31, April 2008
           ‘By setting up both contrast and dialogue with between these physical and spiritual opposites, Chodzko nearly introduces the viewer to the question of the Western as an integral part of our collective psyche.’

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Better Scenery  (2000) is used by the Tate Collection to represent the genre of ‘Site Specific’ art.

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Related works:

Flashers       (1996-)
Ghost     (2010 – ongoing)
Involva         (1995)
Nightvision    (1998)
Night Shift       (2004)
Runners  (2013)
We love you here, even though you are there        (2012)
Secretors          (1993 – )
The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause    (1995)
Too Soon, Too Late. (The delivery of KCommerzbank stationery to Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn, Ambleside, Cumbria, in anticipation of the eventual relocation of the bank’s Head Office).     (2013)  
You’ll see; this time it’ll be different (2013)  
Ants Choose Position for Sequins – 2 Seconds Interval   (2003)
Settlement    (2004)
Slip. A Flying Prison     (2011)
Sowmat    (2007)
Untitled Stile (Teenage Version)   (1991)