The Locker Room Project is a showcase for ‘queer’ culture – – but that doesn’t mean it’s a moffie jol, writes Justin Pearce
THE River Club looks as if it will never be the same again. That’s probably a good thing. The club may be Cape Town’s most interesting music venue, but until now it’s had all the visual appeal of a railway station. Now the institutional beiges and browns are disappearing under layers of red, orange and bright blue paint, collages made from beer labels and photocopied illustrations.
At the centre of this frenzy of painting and plakking are Andrew Putter and Andre Vorster, progenitors of The Locker Room Project. It began with a name which was spread round Cape Town in June on alluring little teaser cards — Putter admits that at that stage they weren’t sure what form the project would take. It has developed into a multi-media art exhibition and multi-venue costume party. Its creators hope it will become an annual event, with The River Club being redecorated each year, the parties getting bigger and brighter until they see the century out with a millenium bash.
The theme for the first event is sport, turning a national obsession into an aesthetic: boy’s bedroom posters of Jonty Rhodes and Gabriella Sabatini become art objects; a gold statue of Nelson Mandela in boxing gloves (with a windscreen-wiper motor to make his hands move) overlooks a room decorated as a swimming pool. For Vorster, a former architect, the creation of a total artistic environment hits back at the notion of a gallery as a sterile site in which artworks are viewed in isolation.
The event is called a showcase for queer culture, but the use of “queer” is consciously ambiguous: unusual, oddball, sexually deviant — “I put it through my computer thesaurus programme and it came up with ‘nauseating’,” Vorster says. Putter and Vorster’s understanding of the word shifted as the concept for the project evolved. Putter originally wanted an exhibition, displayed in a toilet, of his own needlepoint renderings of gay graffiti (no kidding). Vorster wanted a costumed carnival similar to the annual gay mardi gras in Sydney. As the idea expanded, the word “queer” came to refer to an approach to life more than to a pattern of sexual behaviour: “not all gay people are queer, and some of the queerest people are not gay”.
They define queerness as “an off-the-wall approach to life — it questions conventions; it finds creative alternatives to things we take for granted”.
Putter sees queerness as a creative obsession with surfaces, flouting the idea that art must be profound or meaningful. He points to the film The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert as being emblematic of this approach — not particularly because of the shining sequins and satins in which that film’s characters dress up, but because of the way Adam (Guy Pearce) responds to a punch in the face by tying his bandage into a completely gratuitous pair of bunny-ears.
As Putter points out, the senses work at surface level: “There’s this constant pressure from bigots to think of the senses as shameful. And sexuality is a vital part of the sensual realm that can’t be left out. So there is a link between seeing the world in a certain way and being classified as a sexual deviant.”
A link maybe, but not a necessary connection, which is why Putter and Vorster have deliberately chosen a contested word like “queer” to describe the approach: “We don’t want people to think it’s a moffie jol.”
The Locker Room Project party is to be held on Friday December 9. Tickets cost R30 and must be booked in advance from The River Club or various other outlets. Telephone (021) 448-6117 for further details