Mixxxed Purple ,2020
Provenance : Private collection, Cape Town.
Exhibited : OPEN 24 HRS, Cape Town, 'Cameron Platter: 7 Eleven', 12 February to 15 December 2020.
Literature :
Notes : Life Solutions International, Cherry’s The Bomb.Com, Mango Loco – some of the titles for the works in this collection – are clear indicators as to the kind of artist we’re dealing with. Cameron Platter is a mirthless prankster, someone wholly locked into the tinsel that is Pop Art, who, nevertheless, also understands that Pop Art and Pop Culture have metastasised, and now that it is a global virus, impossible to ignore.
Platter’s mantra – ORIGINAL GREEN OOEY GOOEY YUM YUM BLOOP RAZZLEDAZZLE LO CARB SPORTY RED MIXXED PURPLE MANGO LOCO CHERRYSTHEBOMB.COM PEELIN’ OUT ORANGE DEEP SEA REEF QUAKE ENERGY BERRY BLAST HEAVY METAL – sums up the infantilism, glee, mania, illiterate bliss of our current age. As Lindsey Raymond notes, with regard to Platter’s work – ours is an “unethical capitalist frenzy” which Platter, in his own peculiar way, performs.[1]
Ours is “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future,” the futurist writer Alvin Tofler notes in his book Future Shock (1970).[2] In South Africa, we have a phrase for this time warp – Now Now. Platter works inside this warp. His bling breeze blocks – used for RDP housing – now appear as riddled lozenges, in Mango Loco, Mixxxed Purple, Original Green and Cherry’s The Bomb.Com (lots 9, 10, 11 & 12). His vision of autocracy - Gold Prince Barrack Hussein (lot 20) – is gold plated, puffed up, infused with a metastasized arrogance and narcissism - the defining grotesquery of our age. As for Life Solutions International (lot 23)? It’s a monochromatic pencil crayon work on paper which evokes the age-old wood cut. It is a sum of bird-people – a hybrid morphing world – intercut with a crowd of faces with yellow eyes like distant headlights. There is something spooky in this primal forest, but also a wry spoof of Africa as a necropolitical zone of psychic fuckery.
All in all, despite the works’ undertow, Cameron Platter gives us what we want – just the right dosage to entertain us in this end-time.
Ashraf Jamal
[1] Raymond, L. (2020) as cited in Jamal, A. (2021). Strange Cargo. Milan: SKIRA. p.335.
[2] Tofler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House. p.10.
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