Slow Down Skin Shed     (1994)

Slow Down Skin Shed     (1994)

Shown alongside Secretingspace.
Part of the ‘British Art Special’, The Face, no.68, May 1994, pp.56–72

The Face magazine commissioned Adam Chodzko to create two ‘project pages’ for a feature on British Art.

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In Slow Down Skin Shed Adam Chodzko worked with youth culture magazine The Face to create a visual speculative fiction – about surface, time, bodies and ground – across two of its pages. To explore the fantasies of rapid fluidity, change and transformation marketed as part of consumer culture’s mediation of fashion Slow Down Skin Shed was an attempt to drag things to a crawl, in the hope of seeing them more clearly.  Hoping to mess with fashion’s illusion of constant evolution by bringing it into relation with the realities of its inertia and conservatism driven by consumerism, Chodzko requested that the photographer of a fashion shoot from the The Face’s previous month’s issue (p.37, no.67, April 1994) create an additional photograph working with the same models within the same setting.  Still wearing the same Vivienne Westwood clothing, but now performing a bored and irritated expression, the models aim a confrontational gaze directly towards the camera lens (and viewer).  This image was then published, as part of Chodzko’s project pages, in the next issue (no.68, May) of The Face, as though time (or at least fashion) had stood still. The clothes remained identical to the month before (a sacrilegious act for a fashion magazine) as if the models had been stuck, suspended in a limbo state between the two issues.  However, their imagery had now developed (a ‘growth’) through being modified with collaged circular fragments of Rubberist, a fetish magazine devoted to a specific form of clothing and its associated sensual and psychological experiences.

Chodzko’s caption for this page of this artwork reads;
Page 37, FACE 67, regenerated by mutation with backgrounds from “mudlarking” sections of Rubberist magazine.

In Secretingspace, Chodzko’s second page for The Face, he appropriated (with permission) a portrait image from a ‘mudlarking’ feature in Rubberist, (showing a person wearing a gas-mask, hood, rubber mac, gloves and wader boots, sitting in a muddy ditch at night).
Chodzko’s caption for this page of this artwork reads;
Background chewed with best sections of sky from FACE 67, then swallowed and regurgitated. Shot on location on page 11, Rubberist 13.

Both Slow Down Skin Shed and Secretingspace are concerned with shifting perception through slowing down time, sustaining attention, using a complex series of ‘folds’ between different forms of subcultural groups. One mediating consumerism for an expensive designer youth fashion and the other a more obscure community, also concerned with skin coverings, that could perhaps be perceived as deviant or perverse by others beyond its niche group.  But of course in another reality the latter might be considered ‘normal’, and the peculiar belief systems and values of the former could be deemed ‘strange’.  Between the two communities and these two images there’s the presence of mud (an abject matter).  Within their different forms of play both situate mud as having a desirable and even erotic relationship to the body. Paralleling this is Chodzko’s action of playing with the materiality of the image. Partly indexical and reflexive; the picture is considered a space, but also a thing, a page, an object, that can be brought inside the body.  There’s a reference to a work by John Latham, Still and Chew: Art and Culture 1966–1967, which involved the ingesting of Clement Greenberg’s book Art and Culture as a critique of its orthodoxy.  Both Slow Down Skin Shed and Secretingspace share a preoccupation with overlooking the foreground and engaging with the peripheral, the background. This ‘over-looking’ also occurs in works such as From Beyond (1995), and Reunion; Salò (1998) etc.  There is a sense of the unpicking , unpacking, archiving or extraction of an image, as well as some confusion as to what exactly we should be looking at.  What is the limit of the thing, and what is its representation (see also Inverter (Clearance Sale) (1999))?  There’s also an exploration of how these processes might gradually influence a viewer’s perception, shaping their vision, that appears in many of Chodzko’s works eg: Nightvision, The Pickers, Settlement, O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix,  and Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see  etc. The negotiation with a magazine to repeat its imagery from a previous issue can also been seen in Chodzko’s front cover image for Frieze magazine ( (No. 31, Nov-Dec 1996), (apparently, slowing time, sustaining engagement, delaying the inevitable removal of the Kara Walker cover from the previous issue).  The idea of time, and a cycling or looping over time, in relation to clothing (as ‘costume’), and this forming part of a ritual extension of our bodies, and transforming their possible relationships to the world, also appears in works such as Product Recall (1994), Baseball Hat Pyre   (2003), White Magic (2005),  M-path (2006),  Borrowed Cold Lodge (2008),  One day’s work/wear worn through (2018) etc.