Us and Them   (2009)

Us and Them   (2009)

Plywood with lazer cut lettering.
113cm x 80cm

Sign commissioned by Grizedale Arts for the entrance to its site at Lawson Park above Lake Coniston, Cumbria, UK.

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The text on the sign:
Laggers, gun-jumpers, loose cannons,
strategists, wit-workers, dead-panners,
soothsayers, head-in-sanders,
embellishers, sleight-of-handers,
dislocators, chaos mongers, square-
peg-round-holers, mimics, pattern
spotters, simplifiers, complicators,
retrievers, cast-away-ers, translators,
hair-splitters, sleuths, exaggerators,
banalists, sublimers, pigeon-holers,
dirtiers, fair-players, viers, extreme
economists, glass-half-fullers, glass-half-
emptiers, doubters and believers
in residence.
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Adam Chodzko intended the Us and Them sign to be a declaration of  a meeting of the diverse range of behaviours and attitudes exhibited by the artists in residence at Grizedale Arts, by way of explanation for local Lakes’ people or visiting tourists who might be passing on the footpath that ran to the side of Lawson Park. Without including the standard default collective term ‘artist‘ it positioned the temporary inhabitants of the site as a community full of  contradictory personalities with Chodzko inventing new classifications in order to expand the categories (eg: banalists and sublimers).  From whose perspective is the Us and who is the Them?   The list arose out of speculating the ways in which a non-artist might label the behaviour of various artists if art didn’t exist and their activities were simply considered to be different ways of interacting with everyday life.  Equally the different descriptions could all be applicable to the various stages of a creative process experienced over time by a single artist.
For the lettering Chodzko made each comma cut through the entire panel so that the reverse of the sign, which faces Lawson Park (and the artists in residence), is blank other than a pattern of perforations, a rainfall of pauses – breathing spaces.  (In 2013 Chodzko returned to this idea with I See Through Every Image. (A souvenir for Laarni; A planting template for Belladonna seeds), with full stops cutting all the way through a sign providing a method of dispersing belladonna seeds according to a particular arrangement of text.)

In addition to Us and Them Adam Chodzko was also commissioned by Grizedale to make a chair for their site at Lawson Park, Coniston, Cumbria: Crass Chair.

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Related works:

Better Scenery   (2000 – )
A Hostile Environment   (2019)
I See Through Every Image. (A souvenir for Laarni; A planting template for Belladonna seeds), 2013  
Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire    (1999 – ongoing)
Next meeting: Beside the TV transmitter on the highest part of Szechenyi Hill…    (2010)
Next meeting: In the entrance to the Golf-Club restaurant, past the Konak, in the Košutnjak Park…   (2011)
Next Meeting: Opposite the main entrance to the Ordzhonikidze Health Centre, the Sochi-Matzesta resort…     (2007)
Next Meeting: The car park of the plywood factory, just north of the town of Tolhóin …  (2008)
Next Meeting: The foyer of the Hagens Hotel, Måløy, Sogn og Fjordane, on the island of Vågsøy…     (2007)
Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see     (2020)
Untitled Stile (Teenage Version)   (1991)
Untitled [boundary]     (1991)