Exit music: a lake and a stand of trees.
Entering George Popperwell’s installation Exit music: a lake and a stand of trees, I’m faced with a space filled with objects that exert a magnetic pull but resist interpretation. This sense of different systems of knowledge operating brings Jorge Luis Borges fantastical story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius immediately to mind.1
In Borge’s story, the author, finding an encyclopaedia of unknown origin, discovers an entry on Tlön, a country that he does not know but accepts on the encyclopaedia’s authority. Tlön is a country where knowledge, language and time are all conceived differently, so that the fabric of Tlön itself operates outside of what we would call reality but the encyclopaedia reports it blandly as fact.
Our narrator writes, ‘For the people of Tlön, the world is not an amalgam of objects in space, it is a heterogenous series of independent acts, the world is successive, temporal but not spatial’.
Perhaps we are in Tlön rather than Oz.
There is a collection of book-like, ledger-like forms on a set of shelves: seven shelves with seven groups of these blank forms with seven colours in each grouping; a table holds seven plywood houses, anthropomorphic, with curved mouths and photographs of a forest behind their slit eyes; what looks like a measuring tool hangs on the wall, made of a wipe-clean laminate. There is a system operating here, a particular complex code. I fall to counting things. If there is a base number it is three, four or seven; seven shelves, houses, four pictures of wildflowers, images taken on the 7 July 2007.
The objects are new, freshly made, not genuine. There is a sense that these are objects standing