Better Scenery   (2002)

Better Scenery   (2002)

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 (2000).

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Better Scenery   2002

[Text on sign in Islington, London, UK:]

Better Scenery
Go North down 10th St and turn west onto 12th Avenue. Continue west on 12th out of Fargo until you see the big Supervalu warehouse on your right. Take that exit onto Interstate 29, heading North towards Grand Forks and Canada. After about 30 minutes (maybe 28 miles) you want to look out for the Gardner exit, which comes soon after you see four big silver grain bins on the right hand side of the road. Turn east and go about a quarter of a mile until you see a stop sign. Then turn left going north – you’re now in Kinyon Township – for maybe three miles. That would get you to a crossroads. Then turn east again. (In the distance you’ll see a tree line running along the horizon. The Red River runs behind it). One half a mile further on you’ll come to a farmstead on the south side of the road. This is the Pratt farm. Come into the yard, pass by the machine shed and at the shelter belt turn left into the soybean field. Standing facing you is a sign. It describes the location of the sign you have just finished reading.

[Text on sign in Fargo, North Dakota, USA:]

Better Scenery
Turning left immediately outside the entrance to Angel tube station you need to go down the hill a bit until you reach the traffic lights at this big, chaotic cross roads. There’s a Co-op bank on the other side of the road – but still on the Islington side – so cross over towards that, then pass it, walking along Pentonville Road. Maybe 15 yards along this in the middle of the pavement is a large shrub right in front of the Family Planning Association, which is in the dark glass and bronze-coloured rectangular block of a building on your right. A brown railing runs across the pavement at the point where Angel Mews begins. Stand in the entrance of this little street with Whittles House to your left. Following the line of black bollards which run along the pavement of the mews you’ll see, facing you, in a corner next to a broken concrete lamp post a single ash tree. In its branches about 8ft off the ground you’ll see a sign. It describes the location of the sign you have just finished reading.

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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)