Untitled Stile (Teenage Version)   (1991)

Untitled Stile (Teenage Version)   (1991)

Wood, paint and lacquer
130.7 x 105.4 x 74 cm

Arts Council Collection,
South Bank Centre, London

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In Untitled Stile (Teenage Version) (1992) the access point along a rural boundary is fetishised for its relationship to the human body, transforming it into a slick, polished piece of teenage gym or sports equipment for domestic display (as much as use); a stile for style. Its dented eroded wooden surface, as though from years of activity by hikers, cows and crows, is now masked, covered in multiple layers of smooth turquoise paint and polish, creating a multifaceted lustrous – even hallucinatory –  surface.   What kind of movement would an agile teenager be able to perfect on this apparatus?  The work imagines a future where there is no countryside left, other than traces in urban homes of the modified forms of some of the rural’s mis-remembered basic structures. Untitled Stile (Teenage Version) (1992) also alludes to the tensions between private and public land ownership, the commons and enclosures (see also eg;  Settlement (2004)).
The artwork as object to interact with by scaling, leaping or stepping over in order to catalyse psychological change, although remaining imaginary in Untitled Stile (Teenage Version) appears more literally as a physical challenge to the gallery visitor in Untitled  [boundary]   (1991), Sowmat (2007) and  M-Path  (2006). A boundary or border to the garden as a space for imaginative and transgressive human play within the hazy edges of controlled nature occurs more recently in The Green, the Flow, the Path of the Game  (2021).  Chodzko’s interest in the surrealities of public and private space, territory and belonging, nature and culture, urban and rural, inside and outside, and identity and landscape, are all apparent in Untitled Stile (Teenage Version).

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                     Excerpt from interview with Mark Godfrey in Adam Chodzko, texts by Lisa Le Feuvre, Alex Farquharson, Mark Godfrey, Andrea Villani, Skira, Italy (2007)

“.. a series of recontextualised banal rural structures (country stiles were turned into pieces of urban teenage counter-cultural domestic sports gear, and walking staffs contained concealed phials of ecstasy). I imagined a near future which would see these heart-warming, reassuring objects previously utilised by middle-aged fell-walkers now being reappropriated by a youth culture in order to display a new form of grace guided towards a sublime release (and, with an accompanying degree of menace). They were meant to act as transition points and, strangely, they performed that function for me too…”
A.C.

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                    Andrew Wilson, excerpt from The Sacred and the Traversal of Social Space in Adam Chodzko Proxigean Tide, May 2008, Tate Publishing

“…One way of approaching this might be through those structures that contain or otherwise map a negotiation of territory. The fence or barrier marks out land in terms of property and use, restriction and safety; the countryside is formed by a lattice of such structures. Punctuating these fences, walls and hedgerows are paths that mark rights of way to those in pursuit of a supposedly natural experience; they are an indication of free time – of holidays. These paths are well trodden and their domestic nature can be registered by the thoughtful amenity that greets those whose path meets with a wall or fence: the stile. Chodzko’s Untitled Stile (Teenage Version) (1992) is a sculpture of a stile. Isolated in the gallery it is without fence or wall, it is devoid of function and divorced from its place in the symbolic order as the crossing point of a boundary separating two areas from each other that can be traversed by a pathway. The stile has been carved and then lacquered with turquoise paint. Both carving and lacquer encourage the object to be seen as removed from the realm of the everyday exchange; this is an object we walk around rather than over, its signifying function has shifted. In the countryside a stile is a useful object that provides a structure for acting out the permeability of space. Untitled Stile (Teenage Version) is a hard fetish object; it is also, true to itself, an urban or even properly suburban construct.

Its counterpart, Untitled (1991), is a knee-high box hedge that runs against the walls of the room in which it is installed and across its doorway to form a barricade against entrance which needs to be negotiated and which, once stepped over, provides a dubious sense of protection. Where the stile denotes a passage through the farmed and domesticated nature that exists as a grid of enclosures, the low box hedge is not so much a barrier or marker of property but the basis of an ornamental garden – a place of leisure, contemplation and secret messages – not so much a sacred grove but still a place bearing arcane symbolisations, an expression of interest in science, mathematics, philosophy and belief.

By isolating a stile or hedge Chodzko scrutinises them to the extent that they become other than they were. Such a ‘making strange’ might be at the heart of Chodzko’s work, but it is by no means the whole story. These are both objects that can be recognised as signs of interaction and connection but have had their functionality stripped from them, so that their social meanings – their relevance to leisure and holiday – can be apprehended in a much clearer way. The strategies that Chodzko follows in making his work find echoes in the purpose followed by the Collège de Sociologie during its short history between 1937 and 1939. In its meetings, held in the back room of a Paris bookshop, members – among them Georges Bataille, Roger Callois, Pierre Klossowski, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Leiris, Jean Paulhan and Jean Wahl – proposed a notion of sacred sociology as a way of exploring those phenomena that draw people together in voluntary communal activity…”

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‘Stick-errs‘, made by Chodzko from acrylic paints, acetate and self-adhesive tape, were designed for ‘customising’ Untitled Stile (Teenage Version)  (1991) by their user/owner, in the same way that a skateboard might be decorated with accumulated decals.  ‘Stick-errs‘ remain in a limbo state until stuck. But once stuck they’ll disintegrate if attempting to remove them to stick them somewhere else.  As with many of Chodzko’s works, the viewer, owner or participant is given agency, responsibility and a quandary around when the object becomes the artwork, and what ‘activation’ they might be required to do to complete the work.
One ‘stick-err’ is based on a wing by Albrecht Dürer from his engraving Nemesis (The Great Fortune) ca. 1501, and “Honk if you’re Jesus” is partly based on a relatively obscure car bumper sticker slogan whilst also alluding to The God Look-Alike Contest (1991-1992) which Chodzko was in the process of making in early 1991.  
“Stick-errs’  were part of the installation, with Untitled Stile (Teenage Version)  (1991), This Is It (1992) and other works, in Chodzko’s solo exhibition at Bipasha Ghosh, London 1992.

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Related works:

A Hostile Environment   (2019)
Ghost     (2010 – ongoing)
Mask Filter   (2013)
Props. For memorising the gravity of mime objects. (Flood)   (2013) & Props. For memorising the gravity of mime objects. (Fire)      (2013)  
Secretors          (1993 – )
This Is It     (1992)
The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause    (1995)
Untitled  [boundary]     (1991)