Cameron Platter
A frenetic, three-part composition, Platter’s ‘Ba Dum Tssshhh’ is all saturated brightness and geometric abstractions drawn in colour pencil. Two words in the first panel – ‘CABARET’ and ‘JAZZ’ – lend the work a musical inflexion, its patterned surface expressive of changing time signatures and scaling solos. But perhaps the title, as writer Tim Leibbrandt suggests, is inspired less by improvisation than vaudeville convention, notating the “percussive flourish” used to emphasise a comedic overture (or ‘sting’) at another’s expense. “Snare, bass drum, and crash cymbal,” he writes – the necessary components of ba dum tssshhh – much like the rimshot, a single punctuation point for (often inept) jokes, initially served as the “more respectable forebearer to the garish kitsch of canned laughter.” Unlike canned laughter, however, such percussive intrusions on comedy acts have since assumed a more condescending and sardonic tone. Regardless, any punchline that precedes Platter’s triptych is left undescribed. Might the image and title instead recall the drumline in the artist’s head as he sets on a new idea for a work? Does the chromatic wa-wa-wa-waaaah of a muted trumpet play for those that later fail the grade?
b.1978, Johannesburg
INTERACIAL LATEX LOVE STORY flashes on-screen. On a wall, the words NEED MONEY are written in red. Beneath a phone number, the tagline ASS 4 U (followed by a friendly reminder – Life is Precious) appears on a poster. This is Cameron Platter, an artist of capital letters and slogans, garish colours and good-bad taste. Some call his work “delinquent,” others “sordid,” and one critic – more generously – “Afro-pop optimism.” Trawling the trash of life, Platter finds an image of South African society in the country’s cultural debris. Loan-shark adverts, flyers for cure-all quack doctors, litter and leftovers; everything proposes itself as subject. Asked to list his thematic concerns, he replies, “therapy, sex, craft, pornography, psychology, excess, trash, food, collage, advertising, drawing, politics, transience, landscape, history, signs, etc., etc.” In Platter’s work, butt plugs are reimagined as modernist sculptures, KFC buckets as contemporary ceramics, and a historic battle from the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 as a drunken brawl (see The Battle of Rorke’s Drift at Club Dirty Den). All are loud, outrageous, unashamed. Among Platter’s more unorthodox offerings is an animated pornographic film in the style of woodcut – Black Up That White Ass II (2010) – which is, like most of his work, something of a morality tale for twenty-first-century depravity. His recent projects, however, find a sincerer tone, turning towards friendship (as in Studio Ping-Pong, a 2023 collaborative exhibition with fellow artist Georgina Gratrix) and an appreciation for Durban’s suburban icons: plastic chairs, breeze blocks, hot tubs, pool loungers.