The following interview was first published in Boot Print, which is available for download here. Other highlights in the magazine include an interview with the Guerilla Girls by Virginia McKenny and an with Tom Friedman. The following is an unedited version of the interview:

Robert Sloon: How did you form as a collective?

[Pause]

Ed Young: (laughs)I don’t think this is going to happen.

Andrew Lamprecht: You’ll probably find we’ll not talk in the beginning and end up Arguing. Shall I start and you can correct me? It started at café Bardeli, which was a bar that we all frequented. It was after the ABSA L’Atelier Competition. I think it was the second last year that I could enter. Cameron, Ed and I had all entered and we thought we had good work. And that year the local judges chose not to send the quota of Cape Town artists up. They sent three artists out of the twenty they could send up. And we heard about this and were all a little bitter and getting a little drunk , as one can imagine. And it wasn’t that we wanted to do a Salon De Refusé. But we saw the art world as being against us. None of us were in any way instrumental in the art world. At that stage, or now.
Cameron came up with this idea. He was living in Bridget Baker’s flat and he said, “Why don’t we just do a show in the toilet.” It had a nice big bathroom. So we decided to ask our friends, people we felt were excluded, people who didn’t normally make art, and some established artist, and also some people who weren’t working in the art world, but had worked reviously. So we invited them together, and did this show. Which was a bit of a joke, really. The works were a bit strange and off-beat. We wanted it to be a dirty show, like works about sex, alcohol. It was quite an opening.
We didn’t even have a title, we didn’t even think of having a title. Sean O Toole, when he was publicizing it gave it this title ‘Art in the Water Closet’. And that was the title, the critic has given us a title. To cut a long story short, we did this show, and lots of people came and had a good time. And it was like it really perked up the interest of what we then saw as the art mafia. The critics came, there were some reviews. And then we went to Johannesburg, which Ed can talk about, because he had been invited personally to take part in Christian Nerf’s 24/7 residency.

EY: In the beginning we tried to do this thing: to put nice work, good work, good names, young names onto a show. I think we grew a little tired of it, after all the Sunday meeting that we had, which ended up in car crashes, ho’s…terrible, bad…lots of wine. I think we realized that we couldn’t be a curatorial team. We became a facilitation process, or a performance based collective rather than a curatorial based one. Which was interesting, because I wanted to go to Jo’burg and then these guys jumped on the bandwagon and took all my limelight. And destroyed my career by going with me. Basically we went there and did the 24/7 project, which was a bit of a lame project. You got 24 hours over seven days to spend in the gallery, and we thought, “Fuck it.” And did the 24 hours straight. I spent all the money I got from my UCT scholarship and bought all the alcohol in the whole world and we finished it at about four in the morning, we got the organisers to buy us more. We got trashed, we insulted Hentie Van Der Merwe. And we had a theme song, on loop. And they kept turning it off. In the club, by 50 cent. And eventually we left, and there was a lot of trouble in the gallery, because we made a mess. They cleaned up after us, which was supposed to be Christian’s evidence, the residue he wanted from the projects. Came home.

AL: Then Cameron negotiated a show at the Durban Art Gallery, with the curator Storm Janse Van Rensburg. By this time we were fighting badly, cause Ed insisted he had bought all the alcohol, which wasn’t true. We decided the best solution was to do three solo shows. Simultaneously. In the Durban art gallery.

EY: Cause they were riding my fame.

AL: Yes. Yes. Coincidentally we named all three shows Storm. They were too cheap at the DAG… oh by the way Brenton Maart saw me at the Joburg Art Fair this year and said we still haven’t paid our bills. Which I pointed out was a very Puta thing to do. Then he said he has a lot of my work. in storage. And he’s going to hold it ransom till the bills are paid. So I did point out to him that the work was really worthless.
So we did these three solo shows coincidentally named Storm, and outraged the Durban art community, they were quite curious about these CT collectives… Durban people were very nice. Invited us to braais, looked after us, but then we did various things. We had walkabouts with Andrew Verster and Carol Brown. Carol Brown was the director of the Durban Art Gallery at the time and Andrew Verster is the old master of the Durban art scene, and they both willingly agreed to this. Andrew’s was very sweet and nice, and Carol’s was not so sweet and not so nice, she ended up destroying most of the work with Peter Machen the leading critic in Durban at the time.

EY: I threatened to sue, but I couldn’t find a pro bono lawyer.

AL: Ed was on the phone after the thing, “[makes wookie noises]”. But we did this question and answer session which we are still getting emails of complaint about. We insulted all the people that asked us question. And behaved in a very Puta way.

RS: What is the ethos of Puta?

AL: Hard Living. Hard living people.

EY: But it started off quite civil. We used to have these lunches where we would plan all the projects. Every Sunday we’d have a lunch and Andrew would cook a braised steak according to his mother’s recipe. I’d take a few bottles left over from previous exhibitions. Actually a lot of bottles. Eventually, we’d end up beating each other up.

AL: Crashing cars.

EY: It didn’t really work out, the civil environment that we had Puta meetings. So we realized this is probably something we should work with. And then we tried to work with it and that didn’t work either.

AL: After that, things either fell apart or didn’t. We started doing more self-motivated projects. It’s a problem with a lot of collectives. They seem to always end up fighting quite badly. I don’t know how all collectives work, but from my experience of collectives, vicariously or what I’ve been involved in people tend to fight terribly. We actually came up with what I think was quite a good solution, which was that people would do almost self-motivated projects which they would then ask the other members of the collective to contribute as much or as little as they wanted to. Ed for example ran a project the International Association of Happy Artists.

EY: It’s still going but I can’t find anyone that’s actually happy.

AL: And we launched that at a braai at Sue Williamsons.

EY: It was raining and everyone was miserable.

AL: You’ll notice that we are always trying to get people who are players in the art world. We latch onto them somehow. Or we exploit them someway.

RS: Isn’t that what you did with Ed in the first place.

AL: Exactly, I have just exploited his career the whole time. I still am. I did a show, a three night thing around Tretchikoff and a lap dancing extravaganza. And people contributed to that.

RS: Why would you, as an individual artist choose to work in a collective if you are basically doing all the work alone? Why would you use the umbrella name?

AL: The point is it is a collective but it is also a gallery, the gallery of the prostitutes. I think there is space. Its something a lot of collectives don’t realize. They feel that they must always be completely collaborative, they must always take complete ownership, which is not really the only way. We also have a thing of veto, if there’s something that one member of the collective really didn’t like. I proposed a project about Brenda Fassie, and there wasn’t interest in that. Which is fine. That was shelved.

EY: But also Cameron’s idea for swimming to Robben Island never happened because I wanted to do the Happy Artists thing.

RS: Cameron wanted to swim to Robben Island?

AL: Interestingly, enough we are often quite drunk, and talking about these ideas quite freely. You may notice some of these ideas that were abandoned have strangely surfaced with other people. Nkuli’s []with Cape 09, oddly enough is doing a show at Langa High with the pupils about Brenda Fassie. Which is virtually identical to the project I mentioned to her, and which Puta didn’t do.

EY: There was one work, which I really enjoyed. Unfortunately we don’t have the originals anymore. We were asked onto some stupid show curated at JAG, and it was curated by a couple of young artists and they didn’t know what they were doing. And they headlined us for the last show.

AL: It was called Emergence. They wanted us to do a panel discussion, remember?

EY: No. They wanted us to do a performance. So we did a performance. So I spoke to them on the phone, and said obviously we need flights. So they sent us three grand.

AL: Which was their entire budget.

EY: Apparently their entire budget, that’s excluding their salaries. To help us with air tickets not the project. We gave the money to Bruce Gordon , a well-known bar owner in Cape Town, and we apologized. We listed all the apologies like random beatings, stealing drinks.

AL: Insulting his wife.

RS: Repeatedly.

AL: Disabusing his space.

EY: Constantly talking about Hegel. Anyway, we gave him the cash, and he gave us a letter back saying, thank you very much, but this will not be enough. But that he would use it on his gambling habit. Which increased over the years and almost ruined him. We couriered the letters over to the curators, and asked them to be put up on the walls. And they still insult Andrew to this day whenever they see him.

AL: At places like KKNK, at Oudtshoorn where they have moved onto now. They’ve really moved on in terms of their level of engagement with the art world. And insist on me buying them endless amounts of tequila to make up for this. Probably more than three thousand Rands worth by now. And then write nasty things on their blog about how I made them so drunk that they ended up vomiting in some sweet Afrikaans ladies house. As if that’s my fault. And we did other things. Part of what we do is outreach. There is a serious part to our work. I was invited to do a guest lecture at WITS, and coincidentally everyone else from Puta was there. And we all came together, and I did my lecture. It became an almost cathartic experience for the students at WITS, because there was a chap there who clearly hated Colin Richards the head theorist, kept on arguing with him at the question time. I insisted that they hugged and made up. Which they did. Apparently Colin doesn’t really like touching people that much but he did. Little did we know that a few weeks later that student would end up trying to stab somebody at a grand opening. I’m not sure if that had anything to do with it. And there were other things, various lectures and presentation. We went to the South African Association of Artist a watercolorists society, mostly 70+ old people and we presented the work of Galerie Puta to these people that paint very careful watercolors and we felt that was a very important moment in their lives. It was a major outreach and I like to think we educated them a little about contemporary art.

EY: We also tried to something with school kids. Primary school kids but the funding never came through.

AL: We’d still do a project on or with school kids if we got funding. That was a problem, funding was a problem. We often looked at those National Arts Council applications, but those things are hard. They’re not really suited to a gallery like us. That’s why I think we do have some bitchiness with the art world, they just don’t understand our mode of production.

EY: Our last triumph was basically when we had a wrestling match. Before we died.

RS: Do you consider the collective dead?

EY: We’re resting, on sabbatical.

AL: I met with Cameron at the Art Fair, and he’s very keen to start up again. I spoke to Storm and he’s maybe prepared to guest curate a Puta show, which would be very nice. Given the enormous amount of productivity pushed into a short amount of time, I don’t think it’s a problem to rest occasionally. We’ve had to focus on our individual careers.

RS: Has Puta done anything for your individual careers?

EY: No. It’s pretty much ruined all our careers.

AL: I think has ruined all our careers, which is why we maybe want to start doing project again. I feel there’s an enormous space for ruin still.

EY: We can only go down. Harder.

RS: Didn’t Cameron get thrown out recently.

AL: There was talk about it.

EY: Cameron resigned in a weird way. He was basically getting married and sent a resignation letter. Dan got thrown out. When he tried to murder us.

AL: There have been many people at various stages who have been instrumental in Puta. We are very happy to collaborate. We are a gallery after all, people come and go. Even core curatorial members. I don’t think there is a singe one of us that hasn’t resigned, thrown a hissy fit, stormed out at some stage. There have been various people who have been important, like Vuyisa Nyamende in the early stages, Bruce Gordon have all been instrumental members. Even Cameron’s Spanish girlfriend at one stage.

EY: Reggie

AL: We even considered making her a full member to access funds which required us to have a woman member.

RS: Do you think that drinking and fighting is more important than making the work?

AL: But drinking and fighting is work.

EY: Some of the work was much stronger, some of it led to drinking and fighting. The work was just a catalyst. What’s interesting is to see how Puta operated in that kind of climate and how it will fair with new projects in a new climate.

RS: Do you not think your mode of working is a little dated?

EY: I don’t think dated, it was very specific to a specific context. I think if you look at other collectives such as Avant Car Guard and Daddy Buy Me a Bitch… what’re they called?

AL: I’m Not Your Pony.

EY: The lesbian collective, that tries to operate very specifically within the market today. What Puta tried to do at that time was walk away from the market.

AL: I don’t want to sound like sour grapes. Actually, it’s not sour grapes, it’s a blatant fact. These collectives have clearly stolen our model. And done a really bad job with it. I think its time the big boys stepped back in and show them a thing or two. Do you agree?

EY: Remember what happened when they tried to arm wrestle us?

AL: Yes, the only one who lost was… you? But she was a big rough lesbian.

EY: Huge

AL: We’ve always been an organic collective, which responds to the spirit of the time. And we don’t, I hope, get stuck in a particular modality of production which is set up at the beginning. The fact that we do fight so much, that we do hate each other, and there is an incredible amount of tension, means that only strong ideas can come through that filter. Hence the long rest. Now the filter is demanding something new.

EY: And we can’t even steal the ideas from the other collectives because they are so lame. I was so desperate for this interview I even waxed my shoulders.

RS: Do you think it is easier to take a position of dissent from within a collective?

AL: Clearly. But we’ve never taken a position of dissent. What we do is massage the art world, massage the whole world. We love the art world. We embrace it and celebrate all that is good and true and pure in it.

EY: The only problem is like certain members getting married and stuff. When you get older and can’t really shag editors of magazines anymore…

AL: That’s just because you are not that attractive.

EY: I am. I shaved. Aren’t you supposed to be asking questions?

AL: Isn’t this an interview?

EY: Ask an interesting question.