Cameron Platter's Studio at KZNSA Gallery
by Peter Machen
Visiting artists often remark on what a great space the KZNSA Gallery is in which to exhibit. And while it really is a world-class contemporary gallery space, it has a fundamental flaw. Designed as a green building before the phrase became popular, the very things that make it environmentally friendly - its partially open-plan design, the absence of temperature control - prevent it from being a space in which something like the Timbuktu manuscripts could be exhibited.
But this deficiency is also something of an advantage. The same things which prevent the gallery from being an archivally sound building also provide a huge degree of freedom for artists and curators. Over the last decade the gallery's floor has been covered with soil (for a performance choreographed by Jay Pather), its walls have been clad with the triangulated writing of Aryan Kaganof, Steven Cohen has shat one of his delicately wrought enemas onto the gallery's floor (the stain took months to disappear), and now Cameron Platter has been piling the gallery high with sawdust, wood shavings and the sweet, sweet sound of a chainsaw.
The occasion was 'Studio', Platter's latest exploration of his highly idiosyncratic post-apocalyptic world. For three weeks, the artist, together with master wood carver Manuel Casper Mangue from Mozambique, took over the main gallery space, creating a working sculpture studio in which they put the finishing touches to life-size renditions of number of real world objects. These included a car, a jetski-cum-coffin-cum-coolerbox and a minibar-cum-soundsystem, as well as a number of smaller objects, all faithfully carved from local wood, and presided over by a beautifully rendered (and already complete) giant alien spaceship.
'Studio' is nominally an extension of Platter's previous exhibition in the KZNSA's Electric Gallery this year, in which he showed a series of darkly manic cartoons held together by a melange of extreme sex, ultraviolence, alien invasions and anthropomorphic crocodiles. Many of the objects in production on the gallery floor were extruded from these cartoons but the graphic hyperkineticism has been replaced by a strange, almost Buddhist calm, even as the chainsaw goes into overdrive.
The car, which occupied the centre of the gallery, was by far the most simplified of the various works on display, looking much like an extrusion of a child's drawing. Most of the other objects had been replicated with only slightly corrupted precision. These objects, which included a beer crate, an oil drum, a municipal refuse bin and an individual breeze block were deftly beautiful, their appeal magnified by the mundane nature of these real world counterparts. It was if Platter had inserted a little William Carlos Williams poem into the objects' wooden skins. 'So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow' and so on.
And in this subtle, moving beauty lies much of the work's significance. The link between the hand-made (read human-made) and the organic is an important if quietly stated element of the work. 'We are organic. We are organic. We are organic', whispered quietly. It's significant that Platter has been working in a studio in a forest in Shaka's Rock, a section of the North Coast that has not as yet been overtaken by Tuscan or Balinese architecture (although one can see it coming). Platter's world is in fact not so much post-apocalyptic as it is post-capitalist. Whether this is deluded fantasy or not, we shall perhaps come to see. But there are many who share his feelings. And many others who remain intent on enjoying what is seen as the last days rollercoaster.
Perhaps this is all to obvious for some, too populist for other, but such obvious - and important - sentiments lie at the heart of 'Studio'. And while Platter is clearly well liked by the local and international art world, there's little sense that he's working for an audience.
I'm a solid fan of his bizarre world reality, although it's easy to see how more reactionary types might find it all a bit much. Platter, of course, while maintaining a perpetual gentleness in his madness, isn't interested in the old world from which such reactions stem. He's careering towards a new world. The collective title of his sculptural installation Sculpture for New Living, is apt, but I only felt its true resonance at the closing night gig - super-pretentiously referred to as a finissage party - where the sculptures, now complete and functional, came into their own and truly provided a context for new living.
They occupied the room as if they were alive, the usual barrier between object and viewer dissolving, and not just because of the quarts of beers being dispensed from the jetski-coffin-coolerbox. The party was great - and if you stepped back just about two inches, the whole event was clearly and truly fine art, without the slightest hint of masturbation often associated with event-based art. Children and adults draped all over the work. No preciousness at all. It felt like a new world.
Opens: October 14
Closes: November 9
The KZNSA Gallery
166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban
Tel: (031) 202 3686
Fax: (031) 201 8051
Email: curator@kznsagallery.co.za
www.kznsagallery.co.za
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