CAMERON PLATTER
“Inever thought I'd be one of those men with pin-ups on their wall for all to see," intones Smog's Bill Callahan in his inimitable blasé baritone on the song Strayed. "I thought that as just mechanics." Well, it would appear that it isn't only: easy spanner-wielders and self-pitying singers who share this peculiar predilection: artists can be filed under the same category. Or at least one artist can: young installateur and merry prankster Cameron Platter has even gone one up on the competition. Not satisfied with merely affixing his saucy centrefolds to a boring old wall, his specimens adorn the inside doors of the cocktail cabinet he has fashioned with his own two hands and pimped to the nines. Said cabinet also features industrial strength martini's, smutty stickers and teeth-rattling sound courtesy of its built-in car stereo that rivals anything you might find in a suspension-lowered speed machine at Blue Lagoon on a Saturday night.
In a serendipitous interstice between trashy pop-culture and contemporary art, one of the pin-ups gracing Platter's bar-cum-artwork is a full-length foldout of a stark-naked Nicole Narain, famous for being a Playboy Playmate of the Year and even more infamous for being Colin Farrell's personal playmate (her explicit escapades with the Hollywood star are available for all to eyeball on the internet). Whether by accident or design, Narain's picturesque presence in the inspired flotsam and jetsam that is Platter's installation forms a useful point of entry into the enigmatic dementia of the artist's creative philosophy - or ecstatic abandonment thereof.
The Manichean malarkey of Platter's show - indeed that of his entire oeuvre - is imbued with an infuriating immunity to the most rigorous rhetorical enquiry. Even though Platter invests extraordinary amounts of time and effort in his art, that which he creates defies anyone to define it thus by virtue of its deliberately dilettante nature. Yet his work can't be neatly posted in the "anything is art" pigeonhole of postmodernism. This would be easy enough if Platter threw together some random junk and ditched it in a gallery with a rebel-without-a-cause sneer. But the problem is that the guy spends so much tender loving care crafting his creations; a care that is only accentuated the more dissolute and random the form these creations choose to inhabit. The Studio experiment is a distinctly apposite case in point: the "opening" of the exhibition featured neither more nor less than three enormous lumps of wood and a garbled manifesto. Then, three weeks later, in radically reconstituted form, the exhibition suddenly comes to life on its "closing" night.
During the interceding days and nights that these dumb lumps of timber spent in the gallery, Platter and his silent army of helpers transformed them into a cocktail cabinet, an ice-filled coffin in which Black Label quarts lie in state, and a bizarre hybrid of sportscar-jetski-ATM. Which, cumulative contribute one way or another to the singularly contrarian role Platter occupies as an artist. Is he art's über-radical protégé or its annihilating antithesis?
Given the elasticity, duplicity and mendacity of meaning at play in Platter's disarming frivolities, when it comes to answering this question, all bets are off. On the one hand he spent three weeks of his life battering clumps of wood into, well, something. On the other, on opening/closing night he handed out stickers offering either "FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK!" or 'LIFE’S: A CASINO AND I KEEP CRAPPING OUT!" with the command to affix these to the bumper of your car. Is this a calculated prosaic anti-art statement or a genuine attempt to seek out the poetic in the calculatedly prosaic?
Alexander Sudheim
Extract from: Sudheim, Alexander. “Reviews: Cameron Platter.” Art South Africa, Vol 07, Issue 03, Summer, 2009, Page 92l
