Sketch Assemby: A real Dutch Treat

South Africa Wed 03-11-2010

Sketch Assemby: A real Dutch Treat
By Lloyd Pollak

Andrew Putter’s fly-by-night, two-day, ‘Sketch Assembly’ is a revolutionary essay that confirms the death of the auteur, and challenges concepts of the masterpiece, genius and originality with far more cogency than the ink flowing from the theorizing pens of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and other Parisian virtuosos of the impenetrably opaque prose piece.

The masterpiece conceals its origins, for in the Art Gallery it materializes ex nihilo. Piero della Francesca’s ‘Baptism’, 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, dead ends and changes of heart involved in their production.

Hand up Skirt by Andrew Putter

^{Hand up Skirt}

The viewer is persuaded that what he sees corresponds to some blinding flash of inspiration, or that it is the result of an inexorable logical process that, like a Euclidean theorem, advances, step by step towards one sole possible conclusion.

Sketch Assembly reveals that there is nothing inevitable or syllogistic about making art. Creation occurs arbitrarily and haphazardly, and it is a matter of trial and error, luck, accident and chance. The exhibition is singular inasmuch as it presents what artists don’t display, and suppresses what they do display. Preparatory drafts, models and tests usurp the role of the full-blown finished piece, for the most resolved works of art, four elaborately staged, photographic tableaux, remain tentative and provisional, mere stops on the road to finality, but certainly not the journey’s end.

Two sources underpin the work. The first is the geselschapje or Merry Company, a 17th century Dutch genre developed by Buytewech, van De Velde and Dirck Hals, which revolves around elegant young swells and belles eating, drinking, dancing and pitching the woo to music. The mood can be stately and decorous, but often liquor gets the better of the party, inflaming the randy young bucks who make, often crude, advances to the similarly inebriated young ladies.

Sketch Assembly consists of pastiches of the Merry Company in which the genre is relocated at the tip of Africa, and its purely mono-racial, scenarios replaced by putative and conjectural contacts between the young DEIC gentry and Khoikhoin tribes-people.‘Sketch Assembly’, the unfinished symphony in Putter’s Hottentot’s Holland cycle, like the rest of this body of work, portrays a fictive golden age in which the interaction between the Dutch and the indigenes was benign and mutually enriching, giving rise to a hybridized culture that manifested visually in costume, jewelry, make-up and hair styling.

^{The Golizius engraving}

The second source consists of a few rare and exquisitely executed, anonymous drawings, probably by a DEIC official or Dutch traveler, from the National Library of South Africa, depicting the Khoikhoin during the late 17th century when their culture remained fairly intact.They thus provide an accurate reference on the minutiae of Khoi self-presentation.

Sketch Assembly is a self-reflexive examination of its own genesis. It pivots around four major, unfinished works which are juxtaposed with their 17th century progenitors and many variations on the eventual solution. Like a dissertation, these images are supplemented by a huge scholarly apparatus of footnotes, addenda and appendices in the form of drafts, experiments, designs for costume and décor, paint samples, diagrams, cardboard models, costumes and props.

Documentation far too copious to itemize, testifies to the rigorous methodology of this academic exercise in which every detail of costume, make-up, hair-dressing, jewelry, accessories and flora was exhaustively researched to ensure authenticity.

The space is organized so as to suggest a casual visit to a studio displaying work-in-progress. Presentation is makeshift and pro tem. Nothing is framed. The information panels are not printed, but hand-written. Cheap and flimsy postcards, Photostats, scribbled diary entries and diagrams are simply pinned or taped to the wall.

Cost-cutting and make-do was the rule. Instead of commissioning expensive costumes, textiles, ruffs, cuffs and lace were simulated in paper, cardboard and doilies. Rather than build sets, the team created small architectural models, and digitally dropped them behind the cut-out photographs of the cast. Painted textures were scanned and composited onto the set in a similar manner.

An absurdly diminutive Photostat of the 17th century Dutch engraving which first triggered off the idea of setting Merry Companies in the Cape, and populating them with DEIC employees and Khoikhoin is the first item to confront us. Mock-ups of the original poster in which Andrew solicited collaborators reveal how he recruited his team of thirty from art, design and fashion schools.

Photographs taken for purely practical reasons to resolve problems, like the photograph of the two males standing within the set, are amongst the most compelling images. Both the strapping big bruiser, dressed, like a Canadian lumberjack, in a checked, flannel shirt, and his limp-wristed side-kick, look around with incredulity as if amazed to find themselves so far from the Rockies.

The image is so weird in its incongruity, that we do not know how to read it. There are no shadows, the two figures are crudely cut out of the photograph, and although they hold hands, the hands do not convincingly touch.

Hand on Boob by Andrew Putter

^{Hand on Boob}

However by far the most authoritative and beautiful image is ‘Hand on Boob’ (all four works are given crudely practical working titles) which updates a 17th century engraving of a Merry Company work. The Dutch lady is played by a colored stand-in, while the amorous swain is replaced by a white male model impersonating a Khoikhoin man. An ostrich egg substitutes for the mirror, and many other changes indigenize the Dutch original.

The composition is dominated by a young woman of a decisive majesty denied her coquettish counterpart in the original engraving. The lady mulls over the proposition that her would-be seductor whispers into her ear, and the spot-lit egg, the single most brightly-lit and salient element, supplies a context for her thoughts.

The egg - an ancient Christian symbol of creation, resurrection and the Virgin birth – becomes emblematic of inter-racial and cultural cross-pollination and its rich future possibilities. It is obvious that the damsel with the grave reflective gaze is fully conscious of her potential role as an agent of momentous historical change. She is portrayed in the act of deciding whether or not she should assume this responsibility, and her reluctance reminds us of the Virgin Mary in many an Annunciation.

The image is unresolved. The bosky setting and the beach are not integrated: two rival systems of lighting coexist and the rich colours of the garments are applied to a silvery grisaille background. Is this a shortcoming, or do the fissures and contradictions serve to underline the patently confected character of this luscious piece of artifice?

Is this art, or is it a palimpsest, a mere tissue of quotations from previous paintings and engravings cobbled together by the ‘artist’ who is reduced to a mere découpagiste?

Lloyd Pollak has worked as an art critic, lecturer and journalist and lives in Cape Town.

Posted By: Maggie Otieno

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Your Comments

tamara: beautiful images. but why cant 'hand on boob' subjects both be MODELS. why does one have to be a 'coloured stand in' and the other a white male model???

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