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Revolutionary London-based artist Carl Hopgood spoke to Garrett Bithell about his daring new exhibition, Fuck Love.
Descend the sheer, decaying steps to the decommissioned underground public conveniences in Taylor Square, and you will be confronted by an eerie, surreal scene. Prodigious London-based artist Carl Hopgood has transformed this derelict space for his solo exhibition – an art installation titled Fuck Love.
“I wanted it to become an underground museum based on my experiences of gay culture – a stereotypical world of hedonistic beauty meeting a tragic, seedy underground world,” Hopgood tells SX.
“The appropriation of a public underground toilet to become an art installation extends a space where private acts become public spectacle.
Throughout modern gay history the public toilet has been a place where difference became acceptable and celebrated in the shadow of persecution – a ‘church’ where men worshipped each other’s bodies.”
As Hopgood notes, these institutions are indeed in decline. The Taylor Square site, while being heritage listed, has been decommissioned. The advent of internet dating has revolutionised traditional methods of meeting other men, and modes such as telephone dating and lonely heart ads are becoming extinct.
“Technology has reinvented meeting practices and the role of the modern-day flaneur has ended,” Hopgood says. “The old practices still go on, however, and this exhibition is like a shrine to a lost world.”
Central to the exhibition are the ‘Hustler Frieze’ and sound piece. The ‘Hustler Frieze’ works are ceramic-tiled diptychs covering the urinal walls.
The tiles depict male prostitute classified ads. “A private act made public, immortalised,” Hopgood explains. “In the repetition of the image, their technicolour beauty seemingly becomes an abstract stained-glass window glossing over a darker underground world.”
The cubicles have their toilet bowls removed, and in their place are speakers that amplify recorded sound bites of men describing themselves from telephone dating chat lines. “In many ways it is like being in a séance,” Hopgood muses. “You’re in this world with all these spirits surrounding you.
There’s something quite emotional about it.
“The fragments have a muffled echo about them that makes them haunting, like from beyond the grave.” The sound tracks play at the same time, each voice seemingly fighting for attention, desperate. This seems similar to the way the hundreds of images in the ‘Hustler Frieze’ fight for attention too.
“In creating filmatic worlds through sound and image I recreate a timeless surreal world that we cannot escape from – everyday moments of time and make them last forever,” Hopgood says. “It’s like stolen moments of someone else’s world, someone else’s memories.”
Other works include the pool piece, which is Hopgood’s private world made public. He almost drowned in a paddling pool as a child. In ‘Stigmata (self portrait)’, a 35mm slide projection of his fists is projected onto white plaster casts of his fists. The drawing for it, titled ‘Knuckle Sandwich’, was a response to homophobic bullying he experienced as a child.
The words ‘Fuck’ and ‘Love’, seemingly tattooed on each finger, make reference to the tattoos often found on the fists of ex-cons and bikers.
“I turn something that’s kind of like stone into something that’s living,” Hopgood tells. “I’m interested in keeping things alive and projectors becoming like a life support machine – making one memory last forever in a way.”
This sense of a perpetual presence is also created in ‘Can Can Dancers’, where the images of two dancers are projected onto beer cans – almost like genies in their bottles, always trapped inside the beer cans. This is also explored in ‘Six Pack’, which is a poignant extension of the ‘Hustler Frieze’.
“I hope the exhibition inspires people to see things in a different way,” Hopgood says. “You’re confronted by quite a lot of controversial things, and I hope it can change the way people see art.
“I think what I’ve done here is very different to what other people are doing at the moment.”
Fuck Love by Carl Hopgood is a Greyspace project presented in partnership with Guidetogay.com for the 2008 Mardi Gras festival, and supported by the City of Sydney.
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