Whitstable Interiors    (2003)

Whitstable Interiors    (2003)

Artists Book: text and images by Adam Chodzko
Acid-free cover with rubber stamped red ink title.
47 stapled single-sided B&W ink-jet pages.
21cm x 30cm
Self-published in 2003
Edition 200

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Stylistically based on the low-fi appearance of early punk fanzines yet veering towards the inverse – the subject matter of Hello or an interiors magazine – Whitstable Interiors is a series of interviews with people within the community of Whitstable where the artist lives. It explores their individual attempts to harness, and transform their domestic spaces and the elements of their homes which seem to elude their control and comprehension.  The transcriptions of discussions repeatedly express confusion about the previous home owner’s decisions, unrealistic expectations, hopes, lack of time, lack of money, temporary improvisations and ‘bodge jobs’.  There is a sense of a constant amateur making and unmaking and of mystery lurking amongst the archeological excavation of the materials of home.

Adam Chodzko has incorporated late’s 1970’s/early ’80’s punk and post-punk music and references into his work as a means of creating connections of flows between current realities and value-systems as they have evolved from (his) teenage counter-cultural passions in the past.  These works explore the question; can this energy of youth still be channelled in new forms in the present?  Remixer ,  Design for a Carnival and The music from float 17…all use early A Certain Ratio music, while Crass Chair recycles a black leather jacket customised with the Crass logo to be upholstered into the seat for a 1940’s chair. With this latter work, as with Whitstable Interiors, the appropriation of a resistant music (and politics) into a present concern with a materialist domestic style appears to present youthful rebellion as becoming erased by a present focus on home-making and middle-aged family life. But there is a more complex entanglement of desires looping back and forth across time and space that subverts that linearity; despite ageing, life remains just as confusing, precarious and full of possibility.  The dialogue suggests fluidity, wonder and innocence.  In order to mimic the quick, ‘careless,’ rakish, glued cut-and-paste text of late 1970’s punk fanzines Chodzko had to carefully reproduce these effects digitally, along with blurred text and smudging.  (Similarly, Crass Chair uses a jacket bought in the late 1970s’s, handed on in the early ’80’s, customised with the Crass logo in the mid ’80’s, collected by Chodzko in the mid 1990’s, then upholstered in 2009 onto a 1940’s chair,  to be used as seating in by an arts organisation based in the Lake District.  Now becoming an ‘art object’ perhaps it finally comes to rest, through being conserved forever?).

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Related works:

A Hostile Environment   (2019)
Cleaner (a story)    (1997)
Crass Chair   (2009)
Inverter (Clearance Sale)   (1999)
Longshore drift, early Detroit techno and other processes of erosion    (2006)  
Romanov   (2002)
Settlement    (2004)
Spare Room    (2014)
The House of Beautifully Earned Trust   [Muster Station]    (2018)
Untitled [boundary]     (1991)