Commentary on  Fr. Lettuce (2003)
a solo exhibition by George Popperwell.

I admit it. There is something about work made by retired art teachers that appeals to me. Perhaps years of exposure to students’ struggles ensures that the work they make for themselves will have a pleasing coherence, resulting in an easy-seeming professionalism. One can get an echo of a movement in vogue during the teacher’s younger days, honed.  

Until I visited Fr. Lettuce, I had no idea that George Popperwell has acted as mentor and teacher to two decades of students at the South Australian School of Art, encouraging the propagation of inscrutable conceptual works by young Adelaide artists, spawning a movement sometimes affectionately called ‘Popperwellian’ (by Chris Chapman George Popperwell Decoding GP Broadsheet 2000:27)  Such was his influence that his work Region (2000) was the centrepiece of Chemistry, a previous Art Gallery of South Australia exhibition of local contemporary art (Adelaide’s answer to Sensation). Region told appalling stories of the Holocaust elusively conveyed by holes riddled through plywood.

This exhibition, Fr. Lettuce, at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia,  seems a Popperwellian continuation, with bland materials like plywood used as the writing surface for discretely encoded depraved, wanton and reckless tales.

Fr. Lettuce offers pleasant experiences for the naive viewer. The smell of cedar from the blocks of wood in Incident on Zutique Street was agreeable, as was the detail of the complex arrangement of elements in Complete poems of François Villon.
Yes, the materials were interesting. Two French Men were coming off the wall in approved Minimalist fashion, with two stacked books sitting on a wooden shelf of two components snugly fitting together. Popperwell’s indexical use of materials was not altogether obscure: fresh fluffy towels lying on bare wooden slats and bathhouse tiles in Two English Ladies.

Mercifully, Popperwell is not just into materials and their associations, but the deeper Popperwell isn’t easy. He prefers what the Pointer sisters referred to as a slow hand, a tender licking gently awakening the sensibilities, and all is not quite what it seems. Once one realises what the two Frenchmen are probably up to, and that Rimb is nothing but an overstimulated anal ring, and so on, it is difficult not to be amused by the bizarre lengths to which Popperwell goes to screen his unsavoury messages from cursory inspection. This is after all the 21^st century, when Tracey Emin, for example, strives for the exact opposite. There is of course a long precedent to using obscure signs in art, and, for example, the Italian Arte Provera movement was pre-eminent at disguising nasty truths behind bland materials.

Except, of course, that Popperwell’s ‘real’ subject matter is a very poorly kept secret. A secret which ‘everybody’ knows or can readily discover (though one might never publicly admit to any familiarity). Popperwell leads us to reflect on interesting territory about human behaviour, which normally occupies the mind of forensic sociologists.

To understand Popperwell’s strategy it may be helpful to remember his European indoctrination as a young man, especially the view that plain depiction, making things too obvious, was the handmaiden of popular rather than serious art.

And, of course, that painting had failed. I note that High Art is necessarily elitist and exclusive, and almost inevitably paints itself into a corner as political and economic circumstances change. Pruning High Art is a task faced by each generation of art students if they are to succeed in gaining the lucrative attention of the movers and shakers. Otherwise their art slips from gaze of the rich and powerful. It may be that current globalized multicultural collaborative Art, commoditized through the internet, can escape this history, but I doubt that.

So far so good. But there is more, and this is by way of a technical note about the process of making art.

Where I find Popperwell’s great strength is in his use of coding as a method of constraining what he makes. This is a key part of his method of providing the viewer with a worthwhile visual, haptic and olfactory experience (mediated by some conceptual-contextual allure). Bear with me.

It is apparent that the detailed arrangement of signs in work such as Incident on Zutique Street and Complete poems of François Villon is dependant on the fall of letters in the original texts. This direct mapping is a crucial component for the work’s effectiveness, principally its affect for the viewer. Such encoding of text provides each work with an aesthetic effect which derives from the text’s inherent rhythm and structure.

This device is part of what gives the exhibition its coherence and gravity. Encoding takes care of part of the process of making art, and focuses Popperwell’s creative juices. The actual instantiation into which the text is mapped is different for each of these works, and that is where Popperwell allows himself some freedom. No more than the gist of the message itself is of consequence, and to suppose otherwise would require unusually anal behaviour from the viewer (rather like assuming that art students claiming some continuity of thought from Plato or Spinoza would actually have read the original).

The wise use of materials in which to encode a message is where I found and enjoyed Popperwell’s skill as an artist.