The God Look-Alike Contest (1991-1992)

13 framed works, of various dimensions and media; Black & white photographs, colour photographs, colour photocopy, ink on paper drawing and page from the Loot newspaper.

External dimensions of each: 22.1/2 x 17.1/2in. (57 x 44.5cm.).

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Between early 1991 through to 1992 Adam Chodzko repeatedly placed a search in Loot, a classified advertisements newspaper stating “..artist seeks people who think that they look like God…”, giving his home phone number for the public to call if they wanted to find out more.  After discussion with the diverse participants who responded, explaining the project as artwork and how their self-portraits would be presented in exhibition, a series of images were then posted to Chodzko. All the material was accepted in the exact form it was offered in.  The project was completed once twelve images had been received. The thirteenth ‘portrait’ (representing a ‘self-portrait of the artist’) is the advertisement itself.

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The God Look-Alike Contest can be seen as an early analogue precursor to the digital social media that proliferated at the start of the 21st C.  Chodzko repeatedly circulated his request via a classified advertisements paper, Loot, at a time when this form of print communication was slowly disappearing, whilst the ownership of home computers and access to the internet was beginning to become more widespread.  Loot had become popular during a time of economic recession and high unemployment as a method of ‘making ends meet’: finding work, somewhere to live, someone to love or simply a site to buying cheap second-hand goods direct from the previous owner.  It was this process of exchange that also was Loot’s hidden and inadvertent attraction. It evolved a social network, catalysing dialogue and agreements between apparently random others; travelling to a home in another part of a city to collect a kettle bought from a stranger who you’d had a quick chat on the ‘phone to beforehand.  Using it felt resistant to big consumer capitalism, cutting out the big retail companies, recycling commodities, getting a bargain discarded by another.
Chodzko’s The God Look-Alike Contest is trying, from this apparently banal and ‘poor’ context, to make something very special emerge into visibility. It is a search for a spiritual subject that has no image. Although a stereotypical image of God does exist in the Western popular imagination: He’s white, male, old, bearded etc, despite this contradicting the notion that god is an entity beyond tangibility and visual perception.
As with Chodzko’s Transmitters (1991 –) series, made in parallel with The God Look-Alike Contest, making this artwork was cheap and ‘post-studio’. The advertisements were free and other than the cost of a few telephone calls it appears to be a simple, highly economic method of producing something fantastic; the ultimate image.   It also meant that at least part of the artwork was already circulating accessibly within the public sphere as people perhaps stumbled across Chodzko’s advert whilst looking for a cheap fridge.  Gallery viewers could only ever access the staged terminal report of this process, missing its immediacy as ephemeral intervention at the local newsagents.  Yet, through this apparently ‘second-hand’ vision, the viewer of this work when seeing it in exhibition form are guided to imagine its encounter beyond the gallery, chanced upon by Loot readers; a conceptual space alluding to wider publics, access, loss, and the sacred within the everyday.
Its status is perhaps as ‘an artwork made by others,’ but it can also be read as a sociological experiment.  What appears as image(s), in response to Chodzko’s particular request, also seems to bypass, mistranslate, or frustrate the question. Perhaps then the resulting work fails to satisfy the question about an image of god?  This ‘failure’ is not surprising when, surely, the request has been placed in such an insalubrious place?
None of the images received seem to correspond to the hackneyed models of how god is ‘meant’ to look.  These portraits are simultaneously both too ‘ordinary’ and too ‘unique’.  Their mix of gender and ethnicity is striking as is the other kinds of ‘look-alike’ that decided that, despite the specificity of the question, would submit their portraits; ‘Diana Ross’, ‘John Travolta’ etc.
Chodzko intended The God Look-Alike Contest to look as though there was only minimal intervention by the artist.  However, all the resulting images he received and then presented were, in fact, twice duplicated, exactly, by the artist using the original submissions as source material, meticulously copying their individual sizes, their particular mediums, the dog-eared corners, stains and creases.  This (hidden) creative act of authorship in The God Look-Alike Contest was a form of ‘genesis’, a cell-division to produce two ‘identical’ clones, twins (with the original ‘authentic’ material remaining hidden); Playing god.

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A second ‘international’ version of this work was made in 1996: The International God Look-Alike Contest.

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The work was reproduced & discussed in publications, including:
• 1993 : High Fidelity, Kohji Ogura Gallery, Nagoya, Japan, text by James Roberts (exhibition catalogue)           pp41-43
• 1994:  Kaori Makabe, ‘London Strikes Back’, Bijutsu Techo, Tokyo, vol. 46, no.688, pp.53–55
• 1995:  Simon Grant, ‘Playing God’, Art Monthly, issue no.189, September, pp.28, 29
• 1995: General Release, British Council selection for Venice Biennale, Scoula San Pasquale, Venice.  The British Council.      P.63
• 1996: James Roberts, ‘Adult Fun’, Frieze, issue 31, pp.62–67    p.64
• 1996: Brilliant Catalogue, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis
• 1997: Sensation catalogue (Royal Academy, London, touring to Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin and Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York)
• 1999: Adam Chodzko, texts by Jennifer Higgie and Michael Bracewell,   August Publications,   p.11-13
• 2006: Belief and Doubt, The Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
• 2008: Proxigean Tide, essays by Martin Herbert, Lisa Le Feuvre, Andrew Wilson, Tate Publishing   p114-117.