The God Look-Alike Contest

'Chodzko relies on the viewer to create rather than decipher the meaning of his work, but in a fundamentally different way from the way that most classic conceptual art operates. The art itself is not simply a concept; it has a real, sensual existence. Its usually either a real event that people took part in or even, in the case of Limbo. Land, a wholly fictional scenario that needs to be understood, at least initially, according to well-established codes. It often invokes the currently unfashionable concept of imagination as one of its central ideas. This might seem like an academic distinction, but it isnt. The procedures of conceptual art require that the art as pure idea be enough to communicate the meaning of the work. In Chodzkos situation this is no longer sufficient. The work most often starts with an open-ended question, even a material, political question, which can never be answered in its own terms; a question, sometimes apparently nave, that cant be answered without stepping outside the framework that makes it possible to ask at all. The work defines an absence of meaning that can only be filled, subjectively, by the person looking at it, in full knowledge of the fact that the predictable, banal answer has already been anticipated and cancelled by the work itself. In Chodzkos art, truth and meaning are mutable, personal ideas. More than that, the work seems to suggest that if the sublime, the infinite, is inexpressible, then our only contact with it can be through our own imagination. It all comes down to personal experience, but that experience turns out to be the most real thing we have.' (W. Bradley, Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! in Adam Chodzko Plans & Spells, London, 2002)