ANIMALS THAT ONE LOVES

Andrew Lamprecht: Where do you think the focus on animals in your art stems from?
Cameron Platter: I think, if I am looking back at stuff, I remember going to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and looking at an ancient Egyptian drawing called 'Man Training a Baboon to Pick a Coconut'. It had this man with a stick or whip or something and he was prodding this baboon and the work next to it was 'Baboon Imitating Man': there was this guy walking and this baboon behind him, impishly imitating him. Then there was the parrot [Salvador] that I had at school and my putting the parrot into human situations. It spiraled from there.
AL: Was the parrot a bit of an abused animal?
CP: I thought I might have abused it but when I sold it and took it to the vet to check it out, he said: 'This is obviously a parrot that has been well looked after.' So it ended on a good note. And the parrot - the day I sold it - said its first word. It was on a swing in its new place in Bellville and it said: 'hello!' and that was goodbye.
AL: This was during your time at Michaelis. How was that?
CP: It was good
AL: But perhaps more importantly you developed connections and friendships with other artists who have been an important influence on your life.
CP: That's the main thing.
AL: Vuyisa Nyamende comes to mind.
CP: Yes, Vuyisa is a good one to mention: the idea man. He was great. If I could make a painting like Vuyisa I would be happy.
AL: After leaving Michaelis what happened?
CP: I thought I'd be an artist. I went to live in the sticks in KZN. But I soon realised that I couldn’t make works then without having a network. I found it really hard and actually got quite sick of it; I  wanted to give it up. Then I went to Switzerland and worked with close colleague Dan Halter for a while and then decided I'd be a chef and make art when I could but found that I was thinking about art the whole time I was supposed to be a chef. But it made me think- art’s gotta be easier than this, scrubbing floors at 3am. This was a great moment for me because I realised that there was one thing I could do really well and I needed to focus and do it properly.
AL: I never really understood the chef thing...
CP: I like to eat... and I like good food. Anyway, before a short spell in Paris, I did my first show at Joao Ferreira and it was a carefully considered exhibition and set up what I'm doing now.
AL: It very much did; you could say it was a constant trajectory. In the past there were certainly links to your latest work but really it's from point that on the same characters appear and develop.
CP: Yes, they develop a life.
AL: Like the animals...
CP: An animal is a great surrogate for things and it's easier for me do... let's just say it's easier for me to draw an animal than a person.
AL: And then there is the constant of John Muafangejo. How did the interest in Mr. Muafangejo begin?
CP: When I was growing up, when I was very, very small I had a John Muafangejo print in my bedroom and I always looked at that and it was called The Love is Approaching But Too Much of Anything is Very Dangerous and I have always been fascinated by him. Subsequently I was trained by Cecil Skotnes, learning about woodcuts and so on. That has always been part of me: the graphic, the two-dimensional. But then when you get into Muafangejo you see he was a genius, he was a guy who could convey a message or these things without portraying it in a way. His work is political, but it's not; it tackles these issues, but it's not tackling them either. I think he's great. And he uses humour. Maybe they weren't always trying to be humorous but it was that inherent thing in them.
AL: A constant in you're your work is Muafangejo's lion. In Beware the Curves he alone has his words written in yellow and appears in sort of magical plane, giving advice and help. A little like the lion Aslan in [C.S. Lewis's] The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
CP: Yes, like Narnia. I have no exact recollection as such but I remember that now. Something working in the back of my brain. A lot of Contemporary art tries to directly reference everyday life, like it is a snapshot of these real things around. But for me what I find interesting are these things you can suck out of your head. I'm really interested where you can just roll with stuff... You've got to have some fun... Life is not all fun, this is my work, after all, but let's enjoy it.
AL: How do you actually come up with these ideas?
CP: Well in the first exhibition the drawings came first and then I would construct a narrative around it, thinking about this person or thing and the situation that they were in or what they got up to. Like the crocodile. He was a sort of a South African stereotype: sort of the bad good guy who pulls up in his car next to you with the sound blaring... that sort of connotation. Actually I have no idea how these narratives get constructed but what's interesting is that I do these big drawings, these almost story-board thingies - big ones - which are even more important than the video and they come before the thing; they provide a loose structure for what comes after. This is just another way to map things out.
AL: Would you say your sense of humour is a bit out of kilter with South Africa? It's very South African in a way...
CP: I'd say everything I do at the moment is rooted in South Africa.
AL: I think this is a very important point. A lot of your contemporaries and colleagues look overseas for their ultimate goals but you do not. It's almost as if you celebrate what others would see as the embarrassingly South African...
CP: Right now I doubt I could ever make work anywhere else either.
AL: So when can we expect you to direct an opera?
CP: Just done one, man.

Andrew Lamprecht

Extract from: Lamprecht, Andrew, Bell-Roberts, Brendon Bell- Roberts, ed. “Animals That One Loves.” Cameron Platter: Catalogue, Cape Town, 2006