Knots (2013)
Single screen video with 5.1 sound
8 mins 6 secs.
Part of Chodzko’s installation Because…
[originally at Tate Britain, 2013, as part of the Schwitters in Britain exhibition]
Knots (and Because... the larger installation Knots was set within) evolved through Chodzko’s attempt to empathise with the remote but important relationship between the artist Kurt Schwitters, in the final years of his life in the late 1940’s, living in poverty and exile in England’s Lake District, and J. Edgar Kaufmann, the wealthy owner of the Kaufman Department Store in Pittsburgh, USA.
This research into the international, psychological and material contexts for Schwitters’s Lake District work and the individuals and institutions who became drawn into his projects there led Chodzko to an office designed in 1937 by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright for Edgar J. Kaufmann within his Pittsburgh department store. It was Kaufmann who arranged a grant of $1000 that MoMA, NY wired to Schwitters while he was living in poverty in Ambleside so that he could continue being an artist and create the Merz Barn. The office was later donated to the V&A and Chodzko reconfigured it at Tate Britain in the manner of Schwitters’s Merz structures in order to house the video work, Knots.
