Andrew Putter's new work Hottentot's Holland: Flora Capensis is on show at Michael Stevenson till the 10th of January.

Robert: I thought we could chat generally about your new work and see where we end up.

Andrew: Sounds good.

Robert: Your new series of flower photographs takes its aesthetic cue from 17th Century Dutch painting. How did you end up becoming interested in that form?

Andrew: There is a very beautiful example of a 17th Century Dutch flower painting in the Old Townhouse Museum on Greenmarket Square. It's by one of the masters of the genre - Willem van Aelst. I saw it when I was researching costume for the Dutch woman in my Spier work last year, and fell head over heels in love. It's so finely painted that your eye can hardly resolve the brushstrokes. It's worth a visit - and the museum doesn't charge at the door - a bonus!

Robert: I was there earlier this year. They put on a curated show where they paired the Dutch still lives with contemporary still lives. It was amazing.

Andrew: Yes, that show - called Is there still life was put together by Michael Godby, professor of art history at UCT. It was an extraordinary show, focusing on a genre of painting that is rarely taken seriously. I love what Michael did, bringing the marginal into view and showing all its richness.

Robert: There is a lot of richness in still life, but it can become quite hard to unlock. For example, the Dutch stuff has a complex language of symbols. Did you find that a challenge in your own work? Communicating through inanimate objects?

Andrew: No, I decided not to approach the content in my flower works allegorically. As I see it, there are a number of ways one could work with allegory. Either one could have a particular thing (let's say a clivia, or a lily) representing an idea (immodesty, or death, perhaps). If one took this route, the problem one faces is how viewers access the work. Allegorical references were reasonably clear in the17th Century, but not anymore - we don't have that tradition anymore - so as an artist, one would have to make up the links between the object and the idea. This kind of 'personal mythology' stuff was happening a lot in the 80s when I was studying art at university. I loved it then, but am not so interested in it now: it feels too much like a concern typifying the particular kinds of individualistic subjectivities that have flourished in the milieu of late capitalism... self-involved, interior-oriented, romantic in a blind sort of way.

Robert: Although the work is clearly allegorical, or at least metaphoric.

Andrew: What do you mean by that?

Robert: In the text you wrote accompanying the exhibition, you talk about the Khoekhoe. It seems the still lives are a Momento Mori for that culture. A metaphor then, between the endangered local flowers and a vanished people.

Andrew: Yes, that makes a kind of sense - although it is a kind of loose, poetic relation, rather than too strict a metaphor. On has to be quite careful when talking about the Khoekhoe. Although most Khoekhoe were wiped out by the Dutch, some survived, and many people today in Cape Town carry forms of genetic and cultural heritage from those times.

Robert: How would you describe the Poetic relation?

Andrew: What I mean by 'poetic' is that I want to avoid readings that are too literal, too fixed, too 'univocal'. It's a problem with this kind of work, which has a very carefully developed conceptual side. When an artist (me!) writes about their work, there is the danger that others will simply see the work through the lens the artist has constructed in that writing (in this case, a catalogue essay) and not allow themselves to make other readings of the work. Gilles Deleuze said that great literature is characterized by the fact that all misreadings of it are beautiful.

Robert: I agree. But was the accompanying text necessary to illuminate some of your conceptual framework? Without it does the work read as beautiful flowers?

Andrew: Yes! Exactly. The point is that these are beautiful flowers on the one hand - but also more than that. One of my acquaintances said yesterday that he would have wanted to own one of the works if “they had contained the kinds of flowers" he liked. By this I imagined he meant non-indigenous flowers like roses, peonies and tulips. These works that I have made are about showing how beautiful local flowers are. This is one of the things that makes them political. Liking indigenous flowers has effects in the real world: how agricultural resources are used, what gets imported and exported, etc. But then of course, foregrounding the beauty of these flowers is only one thing amongst others that are taking place in the work. The works also refer to a terrible cultural tragedy: the genocide of the Khoekhoe.

Robert: The work is a huge collaboration. Collaboration has become a huge trend in contemporary art, especially, in performative media, but not that often in photography. How important was the actual act of collaborating to the work?

Andrew: Collaboration has always been an important part of my production in the city. I started collaborating in earnest in the early 90s - with artists like Tracy Payne and Leonard Shapiro - and then eventually on much more ambitious collaborations with people like Andre Voster and Peet Pienaar. Then came the big collaborative projects I ran at the SA National Gallery, like Ydetag. But by far the most important for me were the Suburbanist projects, in which a group of about 15 of us met regularly to make new work in the public spaces of the suburb where we live. It's where I really came to develop a deep praxis around collaboration. We had various 'game-rules' - we could steal any other person's idea on the project, as long as we asked first; we tried to always work on each other's work (more than one pair of hands per work); we shared sketchbooks; we installed work in front of audiences (pedestrians, property owners, police, etc.), and actively gathered input from them to feed back into the conception and production of new work. These new flower works are collaborative in a different sense. The idea was mine - but implementing them meant having to work with experts that brought their own ideas and solutions to the technical problems posed by the work. Tony Meintjies - who photographed and composited the work - made an enormous impact on the final look of the work - as did Christopher Peter, who arranged the flowers. But a real collaboration for me is when EVERY part of the work is made with someone else - where every decision - inception, research, idea generation, and production - is made between two or more people - where it's impossible for anyone in the project to say who thought up what first.

Robert: This work and the "Secretly, I will love you more" piece, then, are both more individual in nature. What sparked this move into a more individual approach to art making?

Andrew: By 'individual' I'm assuming you mean rather than collaborative? Well, there are probably a number of answers to that question. One is financial. It's almost impossible to make collaborative work and make a profit -at least here in Cape Town. When I turned 40 a few years ago, I realized that I would have to take money-earning seriously. All of the work I'd made in my 20s and 30s wasn't made with selling in mind: it was experimental, collaborative, resisting, often made of cheap, found materials, fugitive... As a teacher (I taught design at a high school for 12 years), I came out with about R8000 a month, which is not a lot - and I'd never bought property or anything. My savings amounted to about R30 000 - which is more or less what I spent making the Spier work! So this new phase of 'individual' production is an experiment to see if art-making might be a better way of making a living than teaching. Collaboration isn't off the cards though: I can feel a collaborative project building up in me somewhere in the next year or two. And nor is teaching - in some form or other...I'm missing it a bit. Another reason for this turn to 'individual' production is that it's great fun to develop an idea in the luxuriousness of your own time, and then produce it. And, as I'm sure is clear, both the Spier work and these flower photographs meant a lot of quite intense work with others - which I really love - so they're much, much less 'individual' than many other artist's production would be.