In Knots Chodzko presents the interior spaces that Schwitters and Kaufmann worked within in the late 1940’s, as being unstable, flowing and melding together, as though becoming a Merz themselves. In trying to identify with Schwitters and Kaufmann, Chodzko imagines these transformations as being caused by a vacuum, sucking in thoughts, desires, pleasure and matter, all caught up in the vortex of a dream-like surreality. This psychic space is created by the emptiness of the Merz Barn, full of significance yet lacking its interior Merz work, itself displaced, removed to a Newcastle Museum in 1965. Knots draws in the furthest edges of the Schwitter’s story in a performed attempt, through video, to conclude it, tie up its multiple ‘loose ends’ (ie; knots, also a reference to the RD Laing’s, Knots, which diagrammatises the dynamics of psychological entanglements between people), bring them ‘home’ to Chodzko’s own personal present and with all these elements in place attempt to make an ‘ending’.
Knots begins with a homage to the credits which introduce Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Uccellacci e uccellini (The Hawks and the Sparrows) (1966) in which Ennio Morricone’s opening theme music comically features Domenico Modugno singing the movie’s credits in mock-operatic fashion. The song in Knots similarly celebrates and debunks the complex relationships between people and places that helped realise the installation Because… The sense of playful irreverence is further manifested in the credits which are full of misspellings and confusions, and utilise a form of lorem ipsum placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation by removing the distraction of meaningful content. The singer too seems to be improvising from these credits in their premature state. The idea of something existing as ‘too late’ and yet simultaneously ‘not ready’ runs through Knots and the rest of the Because… installation: Beginnings and endings in endless flux, functioning reflexively in order to subvert an audience’s expectations about how we normally engage with the order, status and place of a narrative.
