Andrew Putter

Current Review(s)

Sketch Assembly

Andrew Putter at The University of Cape Town’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA)

The fly-by-night, two-day exhibition ‘Sketch Assembly’, held in the art gallery at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in late October was the brainchild of Andrew Putter. The project was designed expressly to fulfill an educational function, and teach aspirant artists how to develop a conceptual idea and turn it into a reality. Putter was merely the facilitator, and mock-ups of the original poster in which he solicited collaborators indicate how he recruited his team of thirty young students from art, design and fashion schools. His background as a much loved, award-winning art teacher equipped him perfectly for this task, and although always on hand with guidance and advice, he took a back seat as far as the actual art-making was concerned. ‘Sketch Assembly’  thus became a model of the collaborative ideal, producing aesthetic results that do credit to both Putter’s teaching, and his choice of gifted participants, for the show challenges our constructs of the masterpiece, genius and originality with far greater cogency than Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and other Parisian virtuosos of impenetrably opaque prose.

Masterpieces tend to conceal their origins. In the art gallery they materialize ex nihilo. Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, Turner’s Dido Building Carthage and Ingres’ Madame Moitessier at London’s National Gallery are presented so as to obliterate their history, and occlude the endless sketches, drafts, revisions and changes of heart involved in their making. The viewer is persuaded that the canvas before him corresponds to some blinding flash of inspiration, or that it is the result of an inexorable logical process which, like a Euclidean theorem, advanced, step by step towards one sole possible conclusion.

20 October 2010 - 21 October 2010

Sketch Assembly

Andrew Putter at The University of Cape Town’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA)

The fly-by-night, two-day exhibition ‘Sketch Assembly’, held in the art gallery at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in late October was the brainchild of Andrew Putter. The project was designed expressly to fulfill an educational function, and teach aspirant artists how to develop a conceptual idea and turn it into a reality. Putter was merely the facilitator, and mock-ups of the original poster in which he solicited collaborators indicate how he recruited his team of thirty young students from art, design and fashion schools. His background as a much loved, award-winning art teacher equipped him perfectly for this task, and although always on hand with guidance and advice, he took a back seat as far as the actual art-making was concerned. ‘Sketch Assembly’  thus became a model of the collaborative ideal, producing aesthetic results that do credit to both Putter’s teaching, and his choice of gifted participants, for the show challenges our constructs of the masterpiece, genius and originality with far greater cogency than Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and other Parisian virtuosos of impenetrably opaque prose.

Masterpieces tend to conceal their origins. In the art gallery they materialize ex nihilo. Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, Turner’s Dido Building Carthage and Ingres’ Madame Moitessier at London’s National Gallery are presented so as to obliterate their history, and occlude the endless sketches, drafts, revisions and changes of heart involved in their making. The viewer is persuaded that the canvas before him corresponds to some blinding flash of inspiration, or that it is the result of an inexorable logical process which, like a Euclidean theorem, advanced, step by step towards one sole possible conclusion.

20 October 2010 - 21 October 2010

Listings(s)

'ARS 11'

Mary Sibande, Pieter Hugo, Steven Cohen, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nandipha Mntambo and Andrew Putter at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

'ARS 11' is a major international art event filling Helsinki's Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art with artworks, performances, screenings, discussions and workshops, and extending to eight cities in Finland as well as to Stockholm, Sweden. Investigating Africa in contemporary art, the exhibition includes not only artists living in Africa, but also those who live outside the continent; artists of African descent as well as Western artists who address African issues in their work. The exhibition features some 300 works by a total of 30 artists, including Mary Sibande, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nandipha Mntambo, Andrew Putter, Steven Cohen and Pieter Hugo.

15 April 2011 - 27 November 2011

'Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive'

Sue Williamson, Wim Botha, Athi Patra Ruga, David Koloane, Donna Kukama, James Webb, Penny Siopis, Andrew Putter, Joanne Bloch and Others at Venice, Italy

Art influences and reflects its world around us and, as the world changes, so too does its forms. In South Africa, during its turbulent twentieth century, visual art focused on political resistance and became a vehicle for insurgency against human rights abuses. After the advent of democracy it shifted towards an exploration of issues of identity, with race and gender gaining prominence. Today, contemporary South Africa is witness to a further significant movement – a renewed and invigorating focus on how and why histories continue to impact on the world today. To do this, contemporary artists are turning to the archive as the repository of these histories. This essay outlines the concept behind 'Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive', an exhibition that draws on South Africa’s key practitioners who, in very different and vibrant ways, draw on the archived record in order to make sense of our worlds today.

What is it about the record that artists find so enticing? At the simplest level, it is the rare combination of memory with ‘thing’ – a coming together of the tangible and the intangible – which makes the record such a powerful force. It allows the artist to construct new bridges between history and the contemporary, thus to create an architecture of meaning. The agency of archives has been demonstrated by their ability to both construct and destroy ideologies. Working with archives, in a creative way, therefore allows the artist to create work with the potential to change the course of our contemporary world.

A literary example from Italo Calvino (1998) complicates this question when he writes: ‘Perhaps the mistake lies in establishing that at the beginning I and a telephone are in a finite space such as my house would be, whereas what l must communicate is my situation with regard to numerous telephones that ring; these telephones are perhaps not calling me, have no relation to me, but the mere fact that I can be called to a telephone suffices to make it possible or at least conceivable that I may be called by all telephones.’

Calvino’s text is taken from In a network of lines that enlace, a chapter in his book titled 'If on a winter’s night a traveller'. These titles – hinting at the relation of one concept to another – seem to set the stage for a continuous tale. But each chapter is discrete – different in character and narrative to the one before and the one following. It is only when the characters in different chapters start demonstrating commonalities, or when the effect of relationships between characters in different stories can be seen, that the interplay between chapters becomes legible. A dynamic crossing is established between all players in a complex game of interrelationships.

In all case studies, artists appear to function partly as facilitator to release the potential energy stored within the seemingly latent records, and partly as activist in allowing the agency to do its work within societies. The most common methods used are translation (into new and evolving languages), interpretation (into new and evolving meanings), and mediation (from one medium to another), sometimes used individually, sometimes in combination, but often to startling effect.

Brenton Maart

01 June 2013 - 24 November 2013

'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive'

Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Putter, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz and Zwelethu Mthethwa at The Walther Collection Project Space

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive

A three-part exhibition series on photography from Southern Africa, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive presents rarely before seen portraits, albums, cartes de visite, and books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The exhibitions stage a dialogue between ethnographic visions and contemporary engagements with archival imagery and feature recent work African and African American artists. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the archive, reimagining its poetic and political dimensions, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The series is curated by Tamar Garb.

Exhibitions

The Walther Collection Project Space, New York Part I: Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-Cronin September 13 - November 17, 2012

The opening exhibition juxtaposes A.M. Duggan-Cronin's 'The Bantu Tribes of South Africa' with Santu Mofokeng's 'The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950.' Duggan-Cronin's eleven-volume study, published between 1928-1954, is renowned and contested for preserving an ethnographic vision of African heritage. In contrast, 'The Black Photo Album,' created in 1997 by contemporary South African artist Santu Mofokeng, is an archive of pictures - commissioned by black South Africans in the early twentieth century - and stories about the subjects, challenging fixed ideas of the "native type" most often associated with photographic representations of Africans.

Gallery Talks:

Jennifer Bajorek on Santu Mofokeng September 25, 2012 at 7pm

Jennifer Bajorek is a lecturer in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University.??John Peffer on Portraiture in South Africa ?October 23, 2012 at 7pm ?John Peffer is Associate Professor of Contemporary and Nonwestern Art History at Ramapo College.

Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations

November 30, 2012 - March 9, 2013

This exhibition centers on photography and video art by contemporary African and African American artists who engage critically with the ethnographic archive by parodying, replaying, exposing, and dialoguing with its pictorial tropes and traditions. A stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era may provide material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Addressing how the archive - broadly understood as an accumulation of representations, images and objects - figures in the practices of contemporary artists in Africa, the exhibition features recent work by Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, Samuel Fosso, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Andrew Putter, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Gallery Talk:

Awam Amkpa on Contemporary African Photography February 12, 2013 at 7pm

Awam Amkpa is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

Part III: Poetics and Politics March

22 - May 18, 2013

A presentation of vintage portraits, books, albums, postcards, and cartes de visite, this exhibition reveals the complexity of the African archive, showing works produced in the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Focusing on the pictorial languages deployed by photographers and the contexts in which images are made to circulate, both historically and today, these portraits and figure studies depict Africans predominantly through the filters of European cameras and mentalities. The images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in South Africa as well as the extraordinary skill of photographers working in the studio and the landscape.

Gallery Talks:

Tamar Garb on 'Distance and Desire' March 23, 2013 at 3pm

Tamar Garb is the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London.

Hlonipha Mokoena and Cheryl Finley in conversation on The South African Photo Album April 9, 2013 at 7pm

Hlonipha Mokoena is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Cheryl Finley is Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University.

Symposium Encounters with the African Archive

November 10, 2012, 10am - 5pm

New York University, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East

Coinciding with the exhibition series, The Walther Collection, in collaboration with New York University and University College London, will present a symposium to explore issues raised by the collection's archive of African photography. This one-day event brings together leading international scholars to exchange, debate and open up the categories often used to describe historic photographs of Africans: colonial, ethnographic, anthropological, artistic. The symposium will provide a space for rethinking the African archive in relation to the concerns of contemporary critics and artists. Participants include Elizabeth Edwards (Durham University), Tamar Garb (University College London), Christraud Geary (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Michael Godby (University of Cape Town), Erin Haney (George Washington University), Salah Hassan (Cornell University), Hlonipha Mokoena (Columbia University), Riason Naidoo (South African National Gallery), Gabi Ncobo (University of the Witswatersrand), Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University), John Peffer (Ramapo College), and Deborah Willis (New York University).

Free and open to the public. To register, email invitation@walthercollection.com.

Catalogue

The exhibition program will be accompanied by the publication of a major scholarly catalogue, 'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive', edited by Tamar Garb and Artur Walther. Released in March 2013 to coincide with the opening of "Poetics and Politics," the catalogue, co-published with Steidl, will include all exhibited visual material as well as new research generated by the symposium's debate and discussion.

Exhibition

The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive June 8, 2013 - May 18, 2014

The culmination of the exhibition series will be an expanded presentation of Parts I, II, and III of 'Distance and Desire' at The Walther Collection's museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany. For the first time the exhibition will be shown in its entirety, complete with additional contemporary works that will broaden the dialogues and juxtapositions staged in New York.

13 September 2012 - 17 May 2015

Venice Biennale

Mary Sibande, David Goldblatt, Andrew Putter, Siemon Allen, Kendell Geers and Nicholas Hlobo at Various venues around Venice

The South African contingent is strong at this year's Venice Biennale, not only in the much-discussed South African Pavilion, but also in the main curated show and several collateral exhibitions:

David Goldblatt and Nicholas Hlobo in 'ILLUMInations'
Bice Curiger (curator): 'La Biennale is one of the world’s most important forums for the dissemination and "illumination" about the current developments in international art. The title of the 54th Exhibition, "ILLUMInations" literally draws attention to the importance of such developments in a globalised world. I am particularly interested in the eagerness of many contemporary artists to establish an intense dialogue with the viewer, and to challenge the conventions through which contemporary art is viewed'.
Venue: Arsenale and Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Giardini

Mary Sibande, Siemon Allen and Lyndi Sales in 'Desire: Ideal Narratives in Contemporary South African Art' (South African Pavilion)
Curated by Thembinkosi Goniwe, this exhibition features South African artists whose work explores a range of realities, memories and fantasies. The artists produce imaginary truths or rather ideal narratives that reflect on South Africa, a country that is simultaneously adored and detested.
Venue: Torre di Porta Nuova, Arsenale Nuovissimo

Andrew Putter in 'Personal Structures'
The exhibition brings together an extraordinary combination of established artists next to artists whose oeuvre is less known. What they have in common is a dedication to the concepts of Time, Space and Existence.
Venue: Palazzo Bembo (by Rialto Bridge, Grand Canal)

Kendell Geers in 'Glasstress 2011'
This exhibition, devoted entirely to glass, features international artists, designers and architects, and includes indoor and outdoor. Brutality and beauty characterize Kendell Geers' object arrangements and material camouflages. Violence, risk, danger, and perpetration carve themselves into the work through poetic language and the unambiguous shaping of the material. Kendell Geers actively pushes the borders and isn't afraid to address banality, kitsch, or sexism. The shift in context and intensification of Geers' work is a result of both the site (Venice) and his focus on working with a specific material.

04 June 2011 - 27 November 2011

'Native Work'

Andrew Putter at STEVENSON in Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present an exhibition of Andrew Putter's 'Native Work'.

This new installation comprises 21 black-and-white photographs of contemporary black Capetonians, in 'tribal' or 'traditional' costume in the genre of the iconic ethnographic photographer Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin. These are displayed in a grid alongside the same subjects photographed in colour, where the sitters chose what they wished to wear based on how they see themselves.

'Cognizant of the dangers inherent in Duggan-Cronin's colonial, ethnographic approach to making images, Native Work nevertheless recognises an impulse of tenderness running through his project,' writes Putter in an article about his project published recently in the journal Kronos: Southern African Histories. 'By trusting this impulse in Duggan-Cronin's photographs, Native Work attempts to provoke another way of reading these images, and to use them in the making of new work motivated by the desire for social solidarity, a desire which emerges as a particular kind of historical possibility in the aftermath of apartheid.'

By exploring his own complex feelings towards an ideologically tainted but aesthetically compelling visual archive, Putter enters the fraught terrain of ethnographic representation to wrestle with himself about his own complicity, as an artist and a white South African, in this troubled visual legacy. Art critic Alex Dodd writes that this new work 'constitutes one of those rare instances in which it becomes unmistakably clear to the viewer that the primacy of authorial intention has everything to do with the subtle alchemy that determines the meaning and affective power of images. In this case, the immense respect and tenderness that went into the making of the photographs registers visually as a kind of auratic quality of dignity that shines through each and every portrait.'

28 February 2013 - 06 April 2013

'Sketch Assembly'

Andrew Putter and Various Participants at The University of Cape Town’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA)

'Sketch Assembly' is a new educational project designed by Andrew Putter which focuses on what artists rarely exhibit: the tests, versions and sketches made on the way towards producing finished products.  In this new project in the 'Hottentots Holland' cycle, Putter and a group of 30 young artists and designers – called the 'Sketch Assembly' - spent four months playfully re-imagining early contacts between ‘Hottentot’ and Dutch youth at the Cape in the 1600s.  No final products were made: only increasingly ambitious sketches, often in the form of elaborately staged photographs.  The 'Sketch Assembly’s' work is carefully based on Dutch merry company prints and paintings from the 1600s, and on the few, rare drawings of the Cape Khoikhoin (‘Hottentots’) that still exist today.  The exhibition shows the many sketches and exploratory processes made by the group, including photographs, drawings, diagrams, costumes, and props.

Artists and designers included: Paul Ward, Swain Hoogervorst, Penny Youngleson, Angela Nemov, Katryn Beaurain, Jen Bam, Leigh Bishop, Anine Kirsten, Jeanne Fourie, Claudio Massenz, Christiaan Conradie, Warren Papier, Karin Williams, Noël Platts, Claire Watling, Pieter Janse van Rensburg, Alessandro Betti, Morne Visagie, Mbongeni Dlamini, Andrew McNally, Leah Hawker, Inge Jansen, Jody Paulsen, Mikkie-dene Le Roux, Melissa Haiden, Joshua McLean,  Dylanne Powell, Chad Petersen, and Seemaa Allie.

Open only Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 October at the Michaelis Gallery

20 October 2010 - 21 October 2010