A conversation with anton hart and george popperwell
When Anton Hart and George Popperwell showed their collaborative installation The Cloak Room at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide recently, the audience was 'floored', not only by the way the artists had exercised their polymorphic imaginations on a grand scale, but also by the almost hermetic inscrutability of the work. Of course, that was to be expected. Both artists are known for making intensely felt, multi-layered work which makes corresponding demands of its audience. 'Our thing', as Popperwell puts it, 'is slow. And nagging. And irritating.' The product of months of intense collaboration, The Cloak Room projected a dense overlay of desires and anxieties onto a series of architecturally scaled objects. Two huge platforms surfaced with cardboard blocks filled the gallery floor, each broken by a strip of black industrial rubber sheeting. Skewers projected from large cardboard 'hooks' which themselves projected menacingly from the walls, and a comically oversized galvanised iron stool upturned in the corner of the gallery inexplicably bore a trapdoor at its centre. In the opposite corner, a projector concealed inside the corner of a platform threw a video of a two computer-modelled office blocks onto the wall. Shown horizontally, one of the buildings collapsed to its base, then rose out of its rubble, repeating the lateral action over and over as the video looped. Reluctant to give too much away, Popperwell and Hart nevertheless agreed to speak about the work and to offer us a few hints for its possible interpretations. Or perhaps to lead us astray. 'The other thing', Hart warned us at one stage, 'is that we might be lying to you.' We kept that in mind when we talked to them as ... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline