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© Whatiftheworld 2014 © galerie hussenot 2014 © Images and works: Cameron Platter
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Leaves 2001
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Tombstone I 2013 carved jacaranda wood, oil 250cm x 200cm x 30cm
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Tombstone III 2014 carved jacaranda wood, stain, polish 250cm x 200cm x 30cm
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The Plattertudes of Materialism Matthew Blackman
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The Call of the Bluegums Chad Rossouw
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The (Not So) Sublime Objects of Our Post-Ideology James Duminy
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End 2011
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Cameron arrives in Miami wilted and jetlagged from South Africa. He takes the can of PBR we offer him, smokes and sweats with us in the dark jungle heat before politely retreating into exhaustion. I learn later that Cameron’s slightly bewildered expression will persist, as if he’s always the startled witness to an embarrassing and inevitable calamity flailing before his eyes and threatening to grope him into its violence. With this same nervous curiosity he is a pilgrim to American ego and excess. Cameron’s research project in Miami is to be infused with the irresistible morbidity of the American commercial empire that has taken over the world. I declare myself his ambassador to this scene of disaster.
Wait 2003
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E n voy t o t h e Re p u b l i c o f B i g G u l p © C a i t l i n B e r r i ga n a n d i s p u b l i s h e d w i t h t h e p e r m i s s i o n o f t h e a u t h o r. T h e Plattertudes of Materialism © Matthew Blackman and is p u b l i s h e d w i t h t h e p e r m i s s i o n o f t h e a u t h o r. T h e C a l l o f t h e B l u e g u m s © C h a d Ro s s o u w a n d i s p u b l i s h e d w i t h t h e p e r m i s s i o n o f t h e a u t h o r. T h e ( N o t S o) S u b l i m e O b j e c t s o f O u r Po s t- I d e o l o g y © J a m e s D u m i n y a n d i s p u b l i s h e d w i t h t h e p e r m i s s i o n o f t h e a u t h o r.
Our shared residency and studio is a one-story house in Morningside with jalousie louvered windows and a purple neon sign that advertises Prophities 1 to the quiet street out front. At night we can hear rats jumping like monkeys through the sharp leaves, and an owl lives in a decapitated palm tree out back. In the afternoons the sky blackens with flocks of vultures flying from the fish markets to the courthouse tower where they roost. I am told their settlement on the roof dates from when prisoners were locked in the upper floors and fed their gruel to the birds through the bars. The prisoners are gone, but the hungry memory is bred through generations of vultures. This historic mid-century neighborhood is bordered on one side by Miami Bay. The water is expected to rise at least 7 feet by the end of the century, drowning everything around us. Everyone is informed. No one is building stilts. Instead, we are hopelessly trying to fix the central air conditioner, which is broken. We peel ourselves off of our chairs, leaving deliciously
dark thigh clouds of precipitation, and step outside to smoke and stare at the wheezing electric mammoth. Cameron fixates on its form. He threatens to carve it out of wood like a sexy appliance in drag that promises to deliver cooling, cleaning and comfort – identical in form and identical in its (f)utility. Like Cameron’s enormous hand-carved butt plugs, there is always a big enough asshole who will want to take it. When our brains are cooked, we stumble across the street to our hosts’ house and jump into the mineral pool, fully clothed. The other border of Morningside is the long Biscayne Boulevard, which runs parallel to the train tracks. Biscayne is full of fast cars and big SUVs, careening downtown where they park in elevated car lots built into the highrises, never making contact with the street. Across the tracks is Little Haiti. Such drastic shifts of racial and economic segregation are familiar to Cameron. We travel in a fleet of used bicycles that rattle with a strange music of industrial steel chains, which we must use to guard against their theft. Cameron is not out of place when he rides through the rainstorms in his underwear. When riding alone I am sometimes followed by men on bikes who call out to me in different languages of lust and longing. With Cameron, I can ride my bike in heels.
Caitlin Berrigan
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Envoy to the Republic of Big Gulp Caitlin Berrigan
We arrive at Churchill’s, a dive bar that once housed a thriving punk scene and now flickers ubiquitous sports matches through a screen of smoke. Among the clicking of billiards and rapidly melting whiskey on the rocks, we have plenty of time to pelt each other with our insecurities and tragedies. Sad stories 1 Prophities by Alexandra Hopf, 2012 installed at The Fountainhead, Miami
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As Jean Baudrillard writes in America , “If Utopia has already been achieved, then unhappiness does not exist, the poor are no longer credible.” I keep threatening to kidnap Cameron in the middle of the night and take him to Denny’s to lubricate him with Grand Slam pancakes. Here the enterprise of 24-hour breakfasts absorbs the poorest detritus of this desert of the real. Cameron resolutely refuses. Instead we embark on a 10-mile bicycle journey with my confused GPS-enabled phone to find a 7-11 where he can obtain a Big Gulp. Both Cameron and
We find our joy illegally packing too many bodies into a car2go and driving to Miami Beach at night. We skinny-dip under glittering lights in the unusually rough waves brought on by Hurricane Sandy, while up the coast New York City is being eaten by the ocean. We misplace our clothes and car keys and run along the length of the beach in a naked panic. Cameron finds a damp discarded towel from a private club, and for a moment we plot how to wrap our three naked bodies in the same towel, make our way to the street and flag a cab home to our hosts, whose phone number we don’t even know. Finally we manage to track down and recover our clothes from a homeless man in the dark, who is trying on our shorts for size. As if disappointed by our success, I decide to drive home topless, paying the lascivious tollbooth collectors with winking nipples. We celebrate our brush with catastrophe too exuberantly, but wake at the crack of dawn to go to church. It is my duty as ambassador to expose Cameron to televised Mega Church, the ultimate American innovation. What better match for monumental sin than jumbo religion? We munch pancakes in a greasy old nostalgic diner – not Denny’s – and drive a rental car up to Fort Lauderdale. Calvary Chapel is the tenth largest mega church in the United States, greeting 20,000 sinners every Sunday and broadcasting to hundreds of thousands more on a dedicated television channel and live online streaming. “Praise Jesus,” I say to Cameron as I lock the car in the mega car lot. He shoots me a homicidal look. The nave of Calvary is an enormous television sound stage with stabilized camera cranes that swoop over the congregation as they take their seats in their Sunday best – or in flip-flops and shorts. The service begins with a massive multi-cultural, multi-harmony Christian rock concert against a shimmering velvet curtain, convincingly rear-projected on the flat, white studio wall. The drum set is isolated behind a crystal-clear polycarbonate shield, and the electric instruments are as perfectly in sync as all the brown and cream colors of skin on stage. Utopia achieved. They could all be singing, “Call now !!!!!! Eternal happiness / 1-800-877-WORD / You’re next
Caitlin Berrigan
Cameron’s seedy comfort zone is not the clean, speculative wealth of America, where the ecstatic manufacture of indistinguishable slick architectures make it effortless to wipe up the mess of bewitched bodies dissolving into a hologram of youth every night. This is not where Zaha Hadid designs a car park (yet). This is not the hospitable art collector’s customized sea turtle rescue yacht or the sustainable ceramic UV-finished flooring in the penthouse atop a Herzog & de Meuron parking garage, nor the cascading infinity pool where Cameron and I plot to vomit so as to maximize our images as edgy artists and thereby our monetary potential. This is not another club on Miami Beach, where the silver server, tits glistening, refuses to pour me a dirty martini because I can only have shots here (and where it costs $30 for a drink that some over-gelled and over-sexed tech consultant will slosh across my arm while he deposits an anxious hand on the spandexed hip of a woman who may or may not be dancing of her own free will).
myself – a child of California hippies – are virgins to its taste. We each take a sip of the neon green poison and toss it. Cameron packs the lid in his suitcase as forensic evidence for the carving of Cut for Freedom , a monument to desperation.
Envoy to the Republic of Big Gulp
of violence, misfires, fucking up and fucking over are more at home on this side of the tracks. Here the lowlying architecture is subsumed by hand-painted signs that take over the façades, appealing to our most basic needs and outsized egomaniacal fantasies and everything else in between. These are the living walls from which Cameron draws for his Eternal Happiness and Need Money wall paintings, and for his pencil drawings that endlessly layer unsophisticated advertising. He shares with this neighborhood the aesthetic of the handmade – an anachronistic force against mass production. Cameron’s work embodies a monumentality of desperation. But it is not Paul McCarthy’s injection-molded Santa with Butt Plug , or Jeff Koons’s impossibly shiny event-horizon poodles. Rather, it is the craftsman’s revenge upon viral American capitalism that has infected every last abject busted capillary of Earth, literally carving out a territory where suffering is still allowed to exist.
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I am feeling more and more ill. The silence grows between us. I no longer think my nausea is religioninduced and begin to wonder how Cameron will react if I explode all over the Fiat 500. There is nothing I can do but keep driving on this shoulderless freeway. I suggest to Cameron that we get off to find a bathroom and he gives me an all-too-hearty approval. But there is no correlation between the address for the Cuban sandwich shop on my phone and the smooth monotony of uninhabited buildings in which we have lost ourselves. Where where where is Cameron’s hand-carved, ceramic dildo-bedecked wooden toilet house that seamlessly converts fried chicken obsession into scatological liberation?
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Finally we see the ragged yellow sign of a restaurant on the corner. “Caitlin, do you mind if I…” Cameron blurts as he bursts out of the still-moving car. I still have to find a parking spot. I’m like a NASA engineer expertly trained to perform all mundane functions in perfect order before the multi-billion dollar rocket shoots off into space under a cloud of fire. It is an obscene miracle that we both have synchronously-timed, pancake-induced food poisoning, and that we both reach the toilet before we are resigned to sitting side-by-side in shit-logged underwear. “Praise Jesus,” I shout as we drive on in an inexhaustible spasm of laughter and relief.
It will be seven hours before the tow truck arrives. Our boredom and starvation are complete. I suggest to Cameron that he go check out what’s behind the tinted windows of the 24-hour sex shop, but even he is too demoralized for ‘research’. There is no break in the smooth texture of this non-place. By accident, I have led Cameron into the monotonous dimension of the society of the spectacle – an inescapable and indescribable pallor. Our blank stares into the dust belie the rage we gather for later. We follow the wisdom of Guy Debord, who writes, “the search for critical truth about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies of the spectacle, and admit that it is nothing without them… A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait. ”
Caitlin Berrigan
Pastor Bob’s bronzed enthusiasm expertly weaves together his recent family vacation with theories of intelligent design into an allegory from Luke and shoebox-sized proselytizing care packages for black children in Africa. Cameron tries to compress his growing hangover between his hands. The rearprojection is now a riverbed of round pebbles arranged into scripture from the Bible. I marvel that Pastor Bob is wearing a baby blue collared shirt under hot studio lights in front of thousands and not a drop of sweat darkens the pits of his gesticulating arms. Today, at another Mega Church in Texas, a man rams his car into the chapel and beats the pastor to death with an electric guitar in front of the shocked Sunday worshippers. Cameron looks sick. I begin to wonder if this is all making me sick. We begin our drive to the Everglades to see some alligators.
Fleeing the scene of our salvation we drive towards the marshes, where escaped housepet pythons have grown to prehistoric dimensions of 17 feet long and are eating all the endangered birds even before the rising sea levels can drown them. But shortly into our ecstatic flight from excrement, the Fiat 500 Turbo begins to quit on the fast-moving freeway. At 65 miles per hour the tachometer is at zero and the gas pedal will not respond. I borrow all of Cameron’s virtuosic expletives to color my feelings about this life-threatening situation. I manage to steer us off the freeway and pull over into a half-abandoned strip mall, where the car completely gives up the ghost. I desperately try to describe where we are to the rental agency who will send a tow truck, but we are on a street that extends the length of Florida, and the only landmarks in sight are a litany of identical franchises that could be anywhere at all in America. “We’re in front of the Benjamin Moore paint store across from Goodyear Tire and Kentucky Fried Chick–“ is all I can say before the phone dies.
Envoy to the Republic of Big Gulp
/ Please please kill us / Please don’t kill us / Please kill us…” . Everyone is so sincere it makes me want to laugh. I think about George Bataille’s story of the fleshy Toulouse Lautrec-like prostitute, Madame Edwarda, whose bestial pleasure and anguish is the embodiment of GOD. He says, “Listen to me: if you laugh, it’s because you are afraid.”
The alligators with their innocent ferocity are swimming in the last days of their natural habitat. We sit on a dirty curb under the sun and wait for deliverance.
Caitlin Berrigan is a visual artist who works liminally between sculpture, video and performance. She lives in Berlin and Los Angeles.
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In fact, my thoughts were only finally made clear by a comment Robert Hughes made in his book The Shock of the New , when Hughes suggested that artists are under the greatest of all self-delusions if they think that their art can make a fundamental political change in society.
The question is, though, has this kind of art changed us? That is to say, can art have an instrumental function within society? As the last six years of South African history have shown us, the answer to that must be an unequivocal ‘no’. For we are after all – despite all the resistance- and identitypolitics-inspired art that has filled our galleries – still as intolerant, as prone to violence and as facilely farcical as ever. All that has changed are the words: racism has been renamed xenophobia, Sharpeville has become Marikana and the bald-faced public lie of Verwoerd’s ‘policy of good neighbourliness’ has been transposed into the word ‘firepool’. On speaking, a few months ago, to Cameron Platter over lunch about the problems South Africa is facing, I asked him how his art was a response to our sociopolitical problems. ‘Matthew,’ he said, ‘I make giant wooden butt plugs, do you know what I mean?’ I nodded in reply.
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I have been thinking about giant wooden butt plugs ever since, a little more so than usual. And I have been thinking about how these kinds of objects in Platter’s work go some way to defining what art is,
It seems to me more and more that art is an act of resignation rather than of action; it is reactive rather than proactive. It is not, as Seamus Heaney said about his poetry, that: ‘Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.’ Far more truthful is Heaney’s pronouncement in his poem ‘Punishment’:
Matthew Blackman
Nietzsche said ‘we have art in order not to die of the truth’. I have always taken this to mean that the beauty of art is like an opiate keeping us from our inescapable anxieties and struggles. If so, it was a strange comment to make in the latter half of the 19th century. For art, or certainly the art of the last 200 years, has all too often tried to remind us of – rather that keep us from – our disquieting existence. And nowhere was this truer than in the socio-political art of South Africa of the last forty years.
I have to a degree always held a contrary view to this, or at least hoped that art could fulfill some sociopolitical end. And I have argued elsewhere that Platter’s work is a form of political protest. But the question is: just because something is political, is it going to necessarily change anything? And does it even set out to do so?
The Plattertudes of Materialism
or at least what art has become. At first I wanted to see them as something more than what they are. I took to reading texts on the morality of art, but could not find a thread or line of thought that would follow from morality to the large black, almost abstract, sculptures of butt plugs and anal beads that I had seen in Platter’s studio before we had lunch.
I almost love you, but would have cast, I know, The stones of silence, I am the artful voyeur
Certainly Platter’s latest works, huge distorted sculptures of sex toys and quick line drawings of strippers, are merely glimpses of what troubles our age. That is to say they are not in any sense didactic or moralising. They are merely representations taken from what have become the quotidian objects of millions (if not billions) of people’s lives; they are, to many people, as banal and functional as a toothbrush or disposable razor. In this sense, art in general and Platter’s latest work in particular are mirrored reflections of the everyday world that we encounter. But I do not mean that it mirrors nature in the Wordsworthian sense; art is not mimetic in the way that term is usually used. Instead it is little more than a barometer of the times, rather than a reflection of beauty.
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Like Orwell, Platter makes similar pronouncements. Butt plugs, dildos, anal beads, chickens, penises, bucket-sized soft drinks, strippers and bucket-sized buttholes are all there to pacify. And one almost gets the feeling in Platter’s work that one should rejoice in these chattels – perhaps they are the only ‘manna from heaven’ that we are ever likely to receive.
That I might drink and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget what thou amongst the trees has never known the weariness, the fever, and the fret.
Matthew Blackman
As Keats suggested, the appeal of a life of drunkenness is strong:
The Plattertudes of Materialism
What I find most interesting is that Platter’s work is not an attempt to change anybody’s mind about the way we live. It delivers instead the cynically mirthful truth of the state of 21st-century materialism. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, the everyday reality of the general ‘prol’ in Orwell’s 1984 was not pacified by the terrors of room 101; they were given cheap gin and pornography while lotteries and films were staged for their amusement.
But no matter how blissful these states might be they are – as Keats, Aldous Huxley, Orwell and many others have warned – a state of slavery (sex slavery in the case of Platter). Platter joins these three in a form of only quasi-condemnation of this hedonistic world. This is to say that although Platter’s work does protest against the current conspicuous waste of the contemporary era, it would be a mistake to suggest that he does not also celebrate it. And perhaps butt plugs and some forms of art are there to save us from dying of the truth. After all, the ‘prols’ of 1984 at times did seem to have more appealing lives than the morally troubled and anxietyridden existence of the middle-class Winston Smith, who remained conscious of freedom and a better life while at the same time nursing a festering ulcer above his ankle.
Matthew Blackman is a Cape Town based writer. 184
He is the editor of online arts magazine ArtThrob.
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Photographs struggle to be funny – except for photos of cats, which are always funny. It’s not that they can’t do it, but humour in photographs has to be ribald, visible and direct. The photobomb, the slapstick, the silly face are the realm of photographic humour, with maybe the odd innuendo. There is a quirkiness to Platter’s photographs that resembles his humour, but it’s not the same. To a large degree then, his photographs remove one of the major conceptual hooks of his work. And yet they are not devoid of interest. Most of the photos have a simple snapshot aesthetic that is at odds with the content: a pile of rubbish in a puddle left by tires, an abstract composition of bright stickers against a black rubbish bin, the back door of a KFC, the faux African styling of a casino. The commonality is the product of contemporary capitalism with its distinctive colours (happy blues, enticing reds, lively oranges, workaday black) against a tableau of its fall-out (dust, trash, abandoned humans, bleak landscapes, motels, fried chicken restaurants, surveillance).
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They reminded me of a trip I took with my brother to a suburb we lived in as children. Richwood is wedged between the Caltex oil refinery and a large swathe of Port Jackson bushes in Cape Town’s
One of my favourite horror novels is Lunar Park by Brett Easton Ellis. It’s a little postmodern and poncey (the main character is Ellis himself, etc), but at its heart it is about how Ellis’s house is transformed from its deeply suburban normalness into the house of his father. It’s terrifying, not only because of the strangeness that is juxtaposed against the everyday (his wife calls in the painter to figure out why their walls seem to be changing to pink stucco), but also because of the idea that underneath the banal lurk terrible and unstoppable forces. In truth this is a pitiful metaphor, because the kind of ‘everydayness’ that Platter evokes is a far cry from the upper middle class burbs of the US East Coast, nor is the underlying force the silly relationship between contemporary males and their fathers. But it functions to describe the kind of photographs Platter is taking, wherein the descriptive accuracy of the photograph belies the undertow of meaning. The philosopher Graham Harman reaches for something similar in his book on HP Lovecraft, the recently canonised 20s pulp horror writer. He writes how Lovecraft’s descriptions of his God-Monster in the short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ are simultaneously literal and allusive to something indescribable. Lovecraft accentuates this by continuously using reliable narrators (scientists, academics) who find the rational power of descriptiveness eluding them. Harman says, ‘No other author is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.’
The Call of the Bluegums Chad Rossouw
On a recent visit to Cameron Platter’s studio he showed me a series of photographs he had been putting together. They weren’t in his usual register, which is pretty far from photography in tone. They definitely had the same sensibility, yet the shift in media added a different dimension that could well shed an insight into all of Platter’s work.
northern suburbs. All the houses are ugly and were built in the 80s. When we were kids the park was a mat of devil thorns that would pierce the hardiest of flip-flops (we checked, it still is). The prospects from the edges of the neighbourhood are still of white, arid sandy plains with shards of tough grass gripping on, all overlaid with the whiff of hydrocarbons. The only sound is of the relentless south-easter that buffets your ear-holes. My brother, who has a way with words, described the feeling of the neighbourhood as the distilled essence of a clump of bluegum trees (the Australian invader that is well represented in Richwood). Nonetheless, we felt a sense of something resembling pleasure on our visit. In part it must have been due to nostalgia, and probably a good dose of pride – because, you know, we turned out to have refined aesthetic senses and decent incomes – but there was also an experience that I can only describe as anti-sublime.
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the coolness there lay a bubbling, repressed sense of moral outrage. I wouldn’t call Platter a moralist, nor does he have the pop coldness. But the photographs, stripped of the humour, reveal more than an ambiguity to the world; a sense that this shit is wrong. There is a shiny veneer on the modern world, but underneath the surface the bluegums lurk.
The artist Robert Smithson wrote a fantastic essay in 1967 called ‘A Tour of The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, which might help us to grasp further this sense of bluegumness. Smithson describes in detail a walk he took around Passaic, New Jersey and all the ‘new monuments’ he encountered, by which he meant the concrete bollards, excavators, buildings and bridges that are the commonalities of industrial cities. He describes these monuments as ruins in reverse in that they are the opposite of Romantic ruins, which function as objects for the melancholic contemplation of the past. Instead these are allegories of the future. They rise into ruin before they are built and point not to the inevitability of time’s passing, but to the inexorable presence of future development. And it’s anti-romantic: it’s not pretty but it is economically rational. Platter’s photos seem remarkably similar to Smithson’s illustrations to his essay: the same bright light, the same amateur style, the same fascination with the banal. Yet there is very little that is monumental in Platter’s photos. While Smithson is interested in the big, Platter is more interested in fragments of material culture, ruins without the Object. In this sense it could be archaeology in reverse, in which rather than trying to piece together a culture from its remains, the remains point to entropy and decay of the culture.
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Looking at both Smithson’s and Platter’s photos one can’t quite shake the feeling that while this is the opposite of the Romantic sublime, it’s born from the same place. It’s the aesthetic of disappointed romance: the world should be beautiful, and that beauty is a moral quality. And yet there is also an enjoyment, a pleasure, in the anti-sublime. It reminds me a bit of the cognitive dissonance of Andy Warhol, who was obsessed with the dispassionate reproduction of the contemporary and the pleasure of the shallow, but underneath
Chad Rossouw is an artist, critic and lecturer.
The Call of the Bluegums Chad Rossouw
Platter’s work is not horror by any means, but this correlative failure seems to effectively describe the actions of his photographs – not horrifically, but in the sense that there is an opening of a gap between the language of the photograph and its meaning. The literal representation both creates the meaning but cannot fully contain it. In essence, the banality of a photograph of a port-a-loo next to a half-built highway describes a certain piece of the world and even a deep sense of its ugliness, and yet evokes a feeling larger than those parts that can only be described as bluegums.
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The current age is also one that is increasingly fascinated by the nature and agency of ‘things’ – the objects that outnumber us and perplex us. In philosophy this is partially represented by the ‘object-oriented’ thought of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant, among others. Objectoriented thinkers reject the privileging of human experiences over those of all other things that exist. They argue that nothing – humans, tetrapak milk cartons, platinum catalysts, circuit boards, Teflon-coated woks, a Castle Milk Stout bottle, James Bond – has special status in our thinking about the nature of existence and the world around us. They argue that objects are more than their relations to humans and society, that they exist on their own terms and deserve to be talked about as such. Object-oriented thinkers believe that we can better understand ourselves and our objective contexts if we give due recognition to the role that objects great and small play in shaping our subjective desires and choices, as well as the very material or physical basis of life at any scale.
The (Not So) Sublime Objects of Our Post-Ideology James Duminy
The current era is one tantalisingly obsessed with newness . We strive for novelty and invention in everything – in architecture and urban planning, in philosophy and art, in our food, grooming and diet. We pit novelty above tradition and a sense of continuity with history and context. As such, what is or is not authentic is constantly at stake. As the circulation of new things and images accelerates around us in a hyperreality of ‘authentic reproductions’ and ‘genuine fakes’, what counts as original and real? Where do we find authentic points of traction for culture, politics and ethics?
Objected-oriented thought is partly driven by a recognition of the power that objects exert over us. This operates in various ways. In a very material sense, capsicum-based sprays make you choke and cry, metal clasps restrict body movement, heavy boots make your bones go crunch and bullets slice and tear at visceral flesh. On a psychological level, objects are involved in the production of desire by their very existence, and by the messages they carry about modern subjectivity. For example, many objects speak of the desire for self-improvement and self-management; of the need to constantly remake and reinvent oneself, to record, archive and discipline every waking moment and act (through social media, digital photography or whatever). Objects are imagined as devices to help us to realise and speak the truth about ourselves. But objects are also worthy of attention for the opportunities they provide for escape – the ‘lines of flight’ that they allow us to squeeze from the overbearing press of modern banality. Objects are great enablers. They allow appropriation and resistance just as they are complicit in domination. They can unsettle meanings and relations that may appear solid and certain.
Ass, Mask, Hungry Lion, Anal beads, Powerdrill In light of this turn to objects, ontography (the description of beings and their nature and essence) has become of renewed interest to philosophers and artists. Things are things are things, but they are also so much more. The question is, how do we capture this ‘more’? How do we develop an appropriate ‘catalogue’ of being? How do we go about accounting for all the things that, in the words of Ian Bogost, ‘litter our world unseen’? How do we describe the nature of the world in a way that rejects simplicity and instead embraces messiness? Of particular interest to me, however, is how we can describe the nature and essence of ‘the urban’ as a set of relations and a mode of existence, particularly in the context of Africa. What ontographic vocabulary can we use to account for African urban spaces as collections of objects, bodies and desires in constant agonistic interaction? How do we document and conceptualise the density of these spaces of uncertainty and mobility?
Chicken, Shitting, Dildo, Solutions, Slave, Totem This is one of the areas in which I am drawn to Cameron Platter’s work. His is a practice that exposes
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and juxtaposes things in everyday life that are usually overlooked. Things that, when assembled in space and time, reveal the weird multitude of realism – the density of contemporary life that fluctuates between scales and types of being. Cameron’s ‘travelling murals’ are object devices that gather and explode meanings and relations as they pass through time and space. They offer a set of registers and a kind of methodology for talking and thinking about cities and urbanisms in a way that transcends standard definitions of class, gender and race. Of course, with this task of accounting and exploding, a general question concerns what we choose to acknowledge and remember – and what we choose to ignore and forget – about cities and ‘cityness’. Reading the city is as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. So what do we make of the sex, drugs, gluttony and violence in the city of sin? Cameron’s work reveals the blind spots in our memories and spatial imaginations: the cheap-abortion posters, mystical healers, sex shops and brothels that we barely notice, but that stand alongside the cars, hairstyles, fast food joints, gated developments and iPhones that we do. He reminds us that a fundamental task of urban life is to squeeze oneself through a densifying foam of objects, signs and relations.
This descriptive exploration – this ‘ethicography’ – is far from normative or judgemental. Cameron’s work has no formalistic moral structure and no epic heroic narrative of liberation. It entails, as I see it, a playful ambivalence towards that which unfolds in the shadows, and to that which is seen as ‘deviant’. But after seeing Cameron’s work I am always left wondering: do we, as purportedly self-managing individuals, have the courage and conviction to sail through the inevitable tempests to come, to embark on an uncertain journey, where the dice toss ceaselessly upon the deck? Can we leave our old tablets of values broken behind us and fend our way through a world that acknowledges and accepts radical sexuality and insatiable consumerist desire? Do we have the stomach to eat and shit at the same time? Bear in mind that the long knives are always waiting to stab you in the back. This is the choice that is not yours to make. And it is around every corner. Please don’t kill me, not just yet. And when you do, spare a thought for this helpless coward. At 22:46 on August 14, 2001, a bacterium flagellates aboard a cooling thighpiece of poultry, before plummeting down an oesophageal abyss in a Point Road apartment. On the other side of the room, a black legging rasps as it ratchets on keratin.
Fantasy, Money, Shemale, Eternal Happiness, Studs This leads to a second significant aspect of Cameron’s work. It amounts to a vicarious exploration of ethics and values in a contemporary world, in which authority and authenticity fade rapidly before us and where, in the famous words of Marx and Engels, ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Where we had the certainty and assuredness of tradition, the continuity of history, and grand political ideology, we now have an acceleration of messages and promises of salvation. Now we have the healing power of money, sex, charismatic preachers, fried chicken and highly caffeinated energy drinks. Eternal happiness is a hung black stud, a 100% shemale, a Super Big Gulp and bucket of Hungry Lion. An interminable list of choices growing with every day, with every advertisement, with every refresh of the smartphone screen. The world hums with hollow choices. And here the onus is on YOU: the subject of power, but also an individual with the freedom to choose and act. You choose to live a certain way. You must know and speak the truth about yourself through your choices – which organic vegetable garden, which NGO, which charismatic church, which Streetwise meal. These are the new values for a post-ideological world. 192
Meanwhile, 50 m above ground level an antenna emits a pulse of electromagentic radiation, which causes a distant phone to vibrate noisily against a carefully packed buttplug, calculus textbook and sachet of paracetamol. Meanwhile, the leg of a white plastic chair snaps beneath an intoxicated weight. The stock price would only start to drop the following business day. And meanwhile, a car pulls away from a decrepit shopping centre, home to Prof. Olujimi’s healing and makeshift abortion clinic, and stops outside a liquor store. A stretch of tube lighting hangs in the breeze, tapping at the rusted Black Label sign. The engine clunks over one last time, and dies.
James Duminy was born in Durban but now lives in Cape Town, working as an academic researcher at the African Centre for Cities. He is interested in emerging ways of understanding African urbanisms and histories.
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