FUCK LOVE is a solo exhibition by London based artist Carl Hopgood transforming the decommissioned Public Conveniences in Taylor Sq.

Carl Hopgood: Fuck Love addresses themes based on and around the body and sexual politics. I wanted the Taylor Square Pubic Conveniences to become an underground museum based on my experiences of gay culture: a stereotypical world of hedonistic beauty meets a tragic seedy underground world.

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 is a place where difference became acceptable and celebrated in the shadow of persecution and retribution.  A ‘church’ where men worshiped other men’s bodies.

However, these institutions are in decline (this site whilst being heritage listed has been ‘de-commissioned’), and since the advent of internet date sites and web cam, traditional methods of meeting other men (cottaging, telephone dating and lonely heart ads) have in some ways been lost. Technology has reinvented meeting practices and the role of the modern day ‘flaneur’ has ended. The old practices still go on, however, and this exhibition is like a shrine to a lost world re-contextualised in the modern: celebrating a moment in time that is becoming extinct.

Claire Taylor: I think of the Hustler Frieze and the sound piece as the central works in the exhibition, can you describe these?

CH: The Hustler Frieze works are ceramic tiled diptychs covering the urinal walls. The tiles depict male prostitute classified adverts found in the back of gay magazines, mostly headless torsos protecting their identities. A private act made public, immortalised. The portraits are reminiscent of classical Greek statues with broken off body parts, and in the repetition of the image, their technicolour beauty seemingly becomes an abstract stained glass window glossing over a darker underground world.

The idea for this work originally came from a series of cigarette cards. They were collected by men and seen very much as heroes of the day. I liked this idea of collecting your heroes that you could keep discretely in your pocket. Something private like a picture in a locket of a loved one. A kind of private love.

The empty toilet cubicles have their toilet bowls removed and in their place will be speakers that will amplify recorded sound-bites of men describing themselves from telephone dating chat lines. This sound installation is almost like experiencing a séance. 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 like an information overload, each voice fighting for attention, making the voices sound quite desperate in many ways.

CT: So this is similar to the way the hundreds of images in the Hustler Frieze fight for attention too?

CH: Yes, and I was interested to touch on this in a visual and audio way. I liked the idea of art that you can’t see. It’s a contradiction.

CT: How does your use of sound in this piece relate to the way that your video works play with time?

CH: It’s all in real time there are no edits as such, so it’s like you’re on the phone for ever, like time going round and round in circles. It’s not staged in any way, but it becomes a performance: like a real life performance. In creating filmatic worlds through sound and image I recreate a timeless surreal world that we can not escape from: every day moments of time and make them last forever. It’s like stolen moments of somebody else’s world, someone else’s memories.

CT: With the pool piece though, this seems like something very private from you, it relates to a very powerful memory of your own.

CH: My private world made public. I almost drowned in a paddling pool as a child and from an early age I came to realise that the most beautiful seductive things can be the most deadly. I remember the incredible desire that I had to live while I was under water, even as a six year old, but there was something seemingly stronger pulling me down. Ultimately my will to live was stronger and I survived. Something so beautiful could at the same time be so sinister. The death of a child is every mother’s worst fear, then the love of that child becomes worthless.

The piece is really hypnotic and quite torturous for me, and is about how people are disturbed by objects or memories from their childhood.

CT: This overlapping in your work between memory and the kind of perpetual present you create is very evident in the Can Can Dancers. In this work the dancers have a very hypnotic quality as well, but the woman in particular looks very bored in the way she moves and dances - completely disinterested and disengaged from what she is doing. What were your motivations in making this piece?

CH: A visit to Cuba and the dancers at the Tropicana together with my time spent as a nightclub photographer (a dark seedy world with a veneer of perceived beauty) were great inspiration for this piece. The Can Can Dancers are trapped in their own celluloid world, oblivious to our gaze. Here too I was interested in how their seemingly private world becomes public. I’m interested in the idea of them being trapped in the beer can, like in Superman when the 3 evil forces are banished into outer space trapped inside a shard of glass...

The other beer can piece, Six Pack, is an idea that came from Hustler Frieze. I was thinking about drunk love: a kind of fantasy like a genie in a bottle. The tabloid title plays on the PVC cuffed pack of beers called a six pack which is also a term used to describe toned stomach muscles. The men are very much a stereotype of male beauty. I remember a piece by Robert Maplethorpe where he stuck a photograph of a penis onto a beer can: it was both grotesque and beautiful. I was also thinking of shooting galleries or tin can alley that I played with as a kid. We would stack beer cans on top of each other and shoot at them with my dad’s air rifle.

In Stigmata (self portrait) a 35mm slide projection of my fists is projected back onto white plaster casts of the same fists. This work, and the drawing for it, titled Knuckle Sandwich, was a response to homophobic bullying that I experienced as a child and the obscenity and violence that I associated with fists. The words ‘Fuck’ and ‘Love’ seemingly tattooed on each finger make reference to ‘Love’ ‘Hate’ tattoos often found on ex-cons’ and bikers’ fists. This piece also unmasks guilty secrets from the perverse pleasure of tough love from violent relationships and the fetishism of the fist. It is with our complicity that the image gives flesh to illusion. The fists stand alone, dismembered from their body: in the Islamic world a man’s hands are cut off as punishment for stealing.

Fuck Love by Carl Hopgood is a Greyspace project presented in partnership with Guidetogay.com for the 2008 Sydney Mardi Gras festival and supported by the City of Sydney.