christopherhodson

[christopherhodson]

Ugo Rondinone   |   Les Innocents.

This is “still.life (Moss Green Candle) by Ugo Rondinone (Ooo -go Ron - di - no - nay). Well, it's a photograph of it that I've borrowed from his website. 

Ugo’s sculpture is made from lead, carefully controlled in its molten state to form a candle, which is then cast in bronze and painted.

He makes them in a range of colours and statures, but this one, this Moss Green one, brings to mind a pretty grim page in the history of Paris;

The story of Les Innocents, a cemetery located in what is now the Les Halles district of the city.

As the Roman Empire collapsed into the singularity that is the Vatican, centres of Christian worship sprang up all over Europe. Literally built on the foundations of their pagan predecessors.

Dark Age Parisians received the “Good News” at some point in the fourth century; most of the earliest Christian burial sites date from this period.

If you were wedged up, you could pay to be interred in the crypt, directly underneath the altar of a funerary chapel. It was like being on the sub-basement level of an express elevator to everlasting peace.

If you weren’t so fortunate, you could pay a great deal less and be buried outside on land owned, and consecrated, by the Church.

Most people were agreed that it was better to buried outside of the city walls; for the living at least. But by the 11th century the population had ballooned to a point where the thriving medieval metropolis of Paris enveloped the once remote necropolis.

By this time, the Church had got its feet well under the table, and its fingers in more pies than you could shake a piece of the True Cross at.

To ensure a monopoly, the Bishop of Paris founded a marketplace at Les Champeaux, next door to the now four-hundred year old burial ground. Where there’s tragedy, there’s trade, after all.

Wanting in on the ground floor, and to curtail the avarice of the Bishopric, His Majesty King Louis VII decreed that the market and its proceeds were now in Royal hands. To soften the blow, Louis built a new church at Les Champeaux, which was renamed “Saint Innocents”.

Their cash-cow slain, the Bishops reverted to their stock in trade; the last rights of the departed. In a last ditch attempt to claw back some of their revenue, the cemetery was opened up as a secondary marketplace; An overspill. That was, until King Philippe Auguste demanded that the site be walled and gated.

Luckily for the Church, but mostly because they were expert in persuasion, religious fervour really caught on in the 13th century.

You were a nobody unless you left a sizeable chunk of your estate to the diocese - in more ways than one; a Papal Edict decreed that those who failed to do so would be  excommunicated and null in the eyes of God.

Anybody who was anybody was clamouring to evade the fires of Hell, and the easiest way to do that was to be buried, with full rights, in consecrated ground. But it came at a price; and those prices kept climbing. The clergy saw to that.

The cemetery at Les Innocents was filling up fast. Business was booming.

The Black Death swept through the city in the summer of 1418 leaving 50,000 people dead in just five weeks. Pits that could hold up to 1500 bodies were dug as a matter of course. The modestly sized inner city cemetery was filled well beyond capacity. But still the putrid punters kept coming.

By the 1600s, grave diggers were resorting to shambolic show funerals and dismembering corpses out of sight of their blubbering relatives.

Limbs and heads hacked off and burnt, before the charred bones were carted off and piled up in makeshift Charnel Houses. The remaining torsos now merely thrown onto the increasingly gelatinous ground, in the hopes that the “flesh eating qualities” of the ooze that passed for soil would absorb yet another few pounds of flesh.

By now, the haze of putrefaction filled the air to such an extent that reports describe; being able to watch meat on butcher’s blocks dissolving into fetid piles, wine barrels souring to vinegar overnight, and tapestries being drained of all colour.  

Petitions to the King from local residents sought to call time on the Church’s lucrative lychgate racket. But they were onto a good thing. How else were they going to rake in this much cash?

Their response was to raise burial fees still further in order to deter all but the wealthiest cadavers.

Something had to give. And on the evening of Tuesday 30th May 1780, it did.

It had been a curiously wet and humid spring. The ground had been soaked for weeks on end; all of April’s showers had come at once, and May’s warm sunshine only partly visible through low broken cloud.

In a neighbouring cellar, a wall which backed up to the cemetery had begun to sweat a foul smelling liquid some weeks before. Unbeknown to the occupants, some of the masonry had bulged out of plum.

Without warning, and with incredible ferocity, the whole lot imploded with the force of a thousand years of internments behind it; Sending an avalanche of corporeal sludge through the entire space.

The building was evacuated, and attempts were made to shore up the damage but it was too little, too late. Burials at Les Innocents had to cease.

But, hang on … what’s this got to do with candles?

The whole area had become such a loathsome mess that there was nothing else to do but clear it.

Hundreds of impoverished and strong stomached men, women and children mucked in to remove and transpose the bones an estimated six million people. Pay and conditions were inhuman, but there was a profitable sideline;

The byproduct of this process was the greasy human soup in which the bones were suspended.

Tonnes of the gangrenous gunge was sold to candle makers and rendered into human tallow. Across the city, the residents of Paris lit their hovels, houses, hospitals and palaces by the light of their forebears.

It took almost 30 years to exhume what remained and lay it all to rest within the now famous Catacombs. Some of the most tumultuous years in the history of France.  

UGO RONDINONE, “STILL.LIFE. (MOSS GREEN CANDLE)”, 2013. CAST BRONZE, LEAD, PAINT. 10 CM × 11 CM × 8 CM

Watch the IGTV video: @studio_chrishodson 

[christopherhodson]

Create your own Universe. And share it with the people that you respect, and love.

André Leon Talley. “The Gospel According to André.”

[christopherhodson]

Oof! (Lightbox), 2020. Powder-coated aluminium (RAL 3005, Wine Red), LEDs, transformer, ink on OPAL diffuse acrylic. 76.2 x 101.6 cm (30 x 40”)*

I’ve been meaning to get this one made for a couple of years now - ever since I accidentally took the photograph. It’s got a sort of AbEx vibe. I’d somehow managed to capture it as I was putting my phone away, waiting for curtain up at the Oxford Playhouse; waiting for John Shuttleworth. The thing is, it’s still not quite right. I’m thinking of this version as a ‘dress rehearsal’.

*30 x 40 inches being the standard size of movie posters.

[christopherhodson]

Puff (Lightbox), 2020. Plywood, primed MDF boards, epoxy resin, Plastikote spray enamel (Night Blue), Rustoleum Universal brush on enamel, PVC profile, 4 x 3/8” screws, M4 nuts & bolts, bearings, Opal diffuse Perspex, Duratrans print, museum Plexiglass, acrylic tubes, clear PVC, vinyl tape, 3D printed PLA components, JGY-370 DC motor, LED strips, wiring, 12V power supply. 58.5 x 33 x 10 cm.

Have you ever seen those animated waterfall pictures? There’s one in a Chinese takeaway near us. They’re all at once a lamp, a strangely static motion picture, and they’re as kitsch AF.  

The image is a virtual photograph generated as CGI in Blender, printed as a Duratran, sandwiched in-between two pieces of Perspex and mounted as a light-box. I made it initially as the cover for something else I’m working on. It can be in two places at once. Stay tuned.

Inside’s where the action is; a motor rotates a pair of acrylic tubes at 25rpm, which in turn revolves a looped belt of clear PVC covered in evenly spaced 10° diagonal vinyl strips. As the vinyl rolls just below the surface, their translucent shadows are rear projected by the LEDs and the still waters seem to ripple. The dollar store illusion broken only by a mechanical drone.

[christopherhodson]

Don’t lie. Say what you think and smile. Be ruthless and affectionate. Let them think you’re being ironic. Speak the truth and beam.

Glenn O’Brien

[christopherhodson]

Toby, 2019, nylon ripstop / cotton organdie, fabric ink, polyester thread.

“Toby” is British market slang for a pitch holder’s rent and also the name given to the person who collects the market rents from stallholders. The original bags are ubiquitous and found in marketplaces across the world. The material has been upgraded, no longer a flimsy polythene, although an effort has been made to retain some of the throwaway charm of the original bags. Red stripe, light blue stripe and plain blue. Each in an edition of 15.

[christopherhodson]

[Untitled] American Flag (Desaturated), 2019, Polyurethane leather, polyester thread, steel eyelets, safety pins. 55 x 73 x 23 cm.

[christopherhodson]

We could fail nobly, even in style. But we were headed upstream.

Like Art - Glenn O’Brien on Advertising. p.12. Published by Karma, New York. 

[christopherhodson]

Yeehaw, 2014, Household emulsion paint on canvas with pine frame. 76 x 101 x 3 cm.

A painting from a few years ago, still as fresh as a daisy. A lot of work changes with age,  but this doesn’t seem to. It’s still got it. Attitude. “Join the fun Pardner, and also the dots by connecting them with straight lines.” Incidentally, I made the frame myself on a tiny drop-leaf dining table at our first apartment. 

[christopherhodson]

You can only go with a first feeling.

Richard Wentworth

[christopherhodson]

[No Title], 2018, Polyurethane leather, polyester thread, steel eyelets, nylon cord, plastic toggles. 95 x 54 x 7 cm.

So, this is new. Turns out I’ve gone and made a sort of political work, without trying to. We’ll give it a small ‘p’. Although I recently became a Swiss Citizen courtesy of @tomsachs and his studio team, trying to obtain a Green Card has never been totally out of the question.

I saw a fair few of this type of swagged banner over the summer. I like the form of them. Which was the simple motivation to make some. Here, I’ve stitched one together from strips of PU leather {Vinyl}, with appliquéd stars. Vinyl is a curious material. Part fabric, part plastic; it’s as malleable as other sorts of cloth, with a little something extra. Something artificial. I’ve made a couple of smaller ones in red, white and blue but I decided to desaturate this one. In removing the colour it begins to speak (to me at least) of another America, perhaps a more romantic one. One of covered wagons, skyscrapers, and progress; as if extracted from black and white images of another era? The notion of America and it’s ideals. It could now just as easily have been seen draped across the Presidential Box at Ford’s Theatre, or spotted just out of shot in a Dallas newsreel. At least that’s what it makes me think of.

[christopherhodson]

... we overlap, but ultimately we're our own islands.

Tom Sachs in conversation with Virgil Abloh - http://www.essentialhommemag.com/conversations-virgil-abloh-tom-sachs/

[christopherhodson]

Untitled (Degraded Wool), 2018, Dove and Slate grey household enamel on stretched canvas. 90 x 90 x 3cm.

Here’s something I’ve made recently from one of those photos I never do anything with. An image of a Christopher Wool painting, probably from a book like “Vitamin P”; snapped on the phone, cropped, digitally half-toned from which a vinyl stencil is cut, paint applied and voila! The more acute viewer will spot the stencil was made in two halves and the paint has bled through the joint. I didn’t try to stop it, paint’s gonna do, what paint’s gonna do.

[christopherhodson]

Everybody's talking and no one says a word ... Always something happening and nothing going on, There's always something cooking and nothing in the pot, They're starving back in China so finish what you got.

Lyrics from Nobody Told Me by John Lennon, from his posthumous album Milk and Honey, released in 1984.

[christopherhodson]

Untitled (Large Flowers), 2018, synthetic polymer paint on raw, roughly torn canvas, eyelets. 107 x 143 cm.

Here’s something I’ve made this week; I’ve been trying to find a use for photographs I take on my phone and never do anything with. I use a photo editor to create a halftone version of the image, which then gets traced as a vector image in Inkscape and sent to the vinyl cutter to make a stencil. After painstakingly weeding all the tiny dots (by hand) the stencil is applied to the raw canvas and paint passed through the holes. The resulting artefact sits somewhere between a painting and photograph - maybe neither. Hard to say. Not keen on the idea of stretching it, two simple steel eyelets are placed in the top corners allowing it to drape over the wall.

[christopherhodson]

Shit from Clay, 2018. Some know the difference, others make it. Music: “Waiting”, performed by the Columbia Saxophone Sextette. Circa. 1920

The classic BBC potter’s wheel Interlude, reversed, with added smoke effect and a revamped soundtrack.

“... who don’t know shit from clay ...”. I’ve always liked that phrase. I remember hearing Noel Gallagher of Oasis use it on a documentary once; he was talking about how inept people in the Music Industry are. Plenty of people out there don’t know shit from clay; what’s worrying is they don’t actually know, that they don’t know. And neither do the people around them.

[christopherhodson]

If my art career really goes down the tubes, I've got the best secondhand store.

Douglas Gordon, interviewed by Berlin Art Link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7pal9qb01M