FINE ART: Dennis Mair
AT an event that took place a few weeks ago, at the Obz(scene) Cafe in Observatory, Andrew Putter set up for a work-in- progress. It was a performance piece where he invited family, friends and people off the street to pass around and fit on a set of false teeth, while he snapped away in a frenzied photographic session of note. The flash paused only for the nurse, as she cleaned the moulded overbite between mouths.
A week later, the shots are on show for all to see. It wasn’t all teeth at the opening, though, as the juxtaposition of the glitter-colourism of his Neo-modernist wall-pieces, along with the loaded aesthetic of cut-up newspaper headlines, framed the space at the Hnel Gallery amid portraits of 120 personables sharing a set of hokey gnashers.
Putter’s glitter works, made up of flat planes of dazzling colour, frolicked with the modernist ideal, updating it with an injection of the Nineties, and using it to comment on our times. The surface texture and shine could be rendered as almost meaningless, except for the adjacent works made of cut-up headlines in red and white, strapped together with black tape. The headlines read as a mixture of danger and inanimate words, with a threatening strain of tension and incoherence.
As an aesthetic, they worked as bold planes of textured colour, but beyond the attractive they thrust out at the dysfunctionality of the present. However, the meanings of the works were overshadowed by a resounding spirit of who’s who on celluloid. It was the portraits with teeth that drew the main focus.
An atmosphere of giggles, gasps and boisterous euphony enveloped the crowd, as more and more people crammed the space, gazing with morbid fascination at the warped caricatures that stared from the walls.
The works were placed carefully at the eye- level of people the same height as in real life. Children could be seen enjoying art, for a change, experiencing profiles of others their own age at kiddie eye-level. Putter’s work plays at the fun of making art, the ways in which people can be brought together through the happy medium of a creative aesthetic, subtly suggestive of a queer nation, where all types become one. Despite this, the photographs on exhibition resulted in an almost all-white experience.
Andrew Putter’s exhibition is on at the Hnel Gallery in Cape Town until the end of June, when Phillip Hunt’s show will be installed