Product Recall (1994)
2 x 8 minute single screen videos with sound, exhibited on monitors
fly-posted A4 off-set lithographic posters
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Product Recall is a process; a search and an event involving a problematic object. It began with Adam Chodzko placing ‘recall’ advertisements in a number of fashion and youth culture magazines (eg: i-D and G-Spot) and pasting fly-posters on walls in the streets of Soho, London. He designed this quest to be directed towards owners of a particular Vivienne Westwood jacket, with the announcement’s wording and imagery referencing the style of a religious meeting or a cult’s ritual gathering. The conjunction between the names within Chodzko’s advert perhaps allude to a grand global mythical event; [Vivienne] Westood and [Clint] Eastwood. Yet, also the forlorn banality of a failed, flawed item spoiling the smooth flow of consumer culture is made clear in Chodzko’s Product Recall announcement; something’s gone wrong!
After frantic cost-benefit analysis companies can be forced to issue an urgent “product recall” to retrieve a faulty product as quickly as possible, limiting any damage to customers and corporate reputation. Through negligent quality control, or lack of imagination, a car has been made with faulty brakes, or a food product contains broken glass, or furniture has begun to crush its owners.
‘Recall’ refers to the process of remembering as well as a literal, physical ‘calling back in’ of a dodgy product. Both are a form of drawing into the present. Whether as memory or marketplace mishap something has gone awry and needs to be regrouped in order to rectify an instability, a wrong turn.
400 of the jackets were produced in 1984 and Chodzko issued his recall 10 years later, having always wanted to own a Clint Eastwood jacket himself, but failing to afford one. This ‘lack’ gradually grew into the incentive to search for an excess of these elusive garments, across the city. As people began encountering the advertisements Clint Eastwood jacket owners (or their friends) began contacting Chodzko. He then staged a convention with eight participants wearing their jackets; a small assembly party in an old ballroom under a spotlight. After 10 years some of the jackets had clearly become worn and deteriorated; a sense that the attempt to return this jacket to the present had been left a little too late.
The finished work in exhibition includes the posters, and a two screen installation one monitors. One screen – ‘assembly‘ – shows an edited version of the reunion of the jackets, and on the other a video – ‘I remember everything’ – plays showing a ‘super’ version of the jacket, spinning and gesticulating, speeded up 400% as though urgently trying to tell us something important. Drawing a ten year old fashion item back into the present (for an ambiguous purpose) suggests an attempt to slow down time, in order to reflect, to look back and reconsider. The poster announces that “it has been discovered that this design was based on an early scheme for a memory jacket.” But it doesn’t clarify whether this quality is incidental, an extra bit of marketing, or, could this text be explaining this clothing’s danger, the reason for the urgency of this particular Product Recall? This ‘discovery’ suggests (as does the ‘aura’ shown in the visual imagery for the announcements) that the jacket might possess powers, even inadvertently. Is it this jacket actually a magical item derived from a fairy tale, ancient myth or science fiction? (Although, not aware of this coincidence when Chodzko initiated this work, Vivienne Westwood designed the Clint Eastwood jacket based on a suit of armour and was, apparently, researching the Ars Memoria at the time).
The jacket is proposed as a node or juncture, around which people gather socially. There are already plenty of assemblies in existence – from the Catholic Church and Labour Party members to neighbourhood watch schemes and people who spot Eddie Stobart lorries. Chodzko’s groups always differ from these in that he invents ones that are fragile, even ephemeral, existing only for the duration of a gathering.
Simon Pope, ‘Art for Networks’, Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, 2002
The majority of Chodzko’s artworks share a common characteristic of inhabiting a social arena, but initially in the form of a message board or contact magazine, with the responses being imagery, or imaginary, as in The God Look-Alike Contest (1991-1992), Transmitters (1991 – ), Shadow Inhaler (1994), Slow Down Skin Shed (1994). But Product Recall (1994) was the first time that Chodzko worked with an an initial audience invited to participate in person through the form of a casual meeting, with the documentation of that meeting becoming what the second audience experience later in the exhibition space.
Clothing and costume also appears in Chodzko’s White Magic (2005), White Magic (2023), M-path (2006), One day’s work/wear worn through (2018), and Borrowed Cold Lodge (2008) amongst other works.
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Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (2015)
In culo alla balena! [“Into the ass of a whale!” ] (2012)
Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire (1999 – ongoing)
Nightvision (1998)
Runners (2013)
We love you here, even though you are there (2012)
The God Look-Alike Contest (1991-1992)
The Pickers (2009)
Transmitters (1991 – )
From Beyond (1995)
Reunion; Salò (1998)