High Mash Up
Sally Rees 2009
Scot Cotterell is many things. My attempts at descriptive analogy feel rather predictable and inadequate; I want to describe him as an octopus with tentacles reaching out attempting every way to ‘make’, but an octopus has too few arms to describe him accurately.
I can however, (over)simplify Scot for easy consumption by breaking down his practice into three main headings; a musician, an artist and a curator; and by describing the approach to all he does as being borne of a do-it-yourself aesthetic and fed by a broad cultural acceptance of the ‘readymade’ object.
A natural hacker and skilled circuit-bender, Cotterell’s method is one of assemblage, adaptation and adoption of existing technologies and aesthetics. A champion of the ‘open-source’, even his paintings exist as doodled, modular units, capable of being endlessly rearranged.
Everything he produces is haunted, both by this desire to ‘tinker’ and a tremendous sense of the mortality of things; technologies, ideas and pop cultural objects in particular. Most things it seems, inevitably become obsolete but Cotterells live sound performances using recovered and rewired electronics are a Valhalla for obsolescence.
What Cotterell consistently does is repackage the already familiar for us to re-consume. For an audience he will publicly and ornamentally amass his own collection of defunct electronica (HOARD:chronology 2006), purchase and destroy a pristine Fender copy on camera (Guitar Burn 2007) or conduct a unique social experiment, copying and repeating the graffiti tag of a local vandal throughout a popular Hobart recreation area (Repeater 2008).
His recent installation The Fall, I like to call ‘high mash-up’. It was the embodiment of his modus operandi and the perfect culmination of the previous 5 years practice. A white gravel courtyard punctuated by half-buried, mirrored, disco balls that seem to have plummeted to earth like meteorites; a black monolith, not unlike Kubrick’s famous 2001 genesis-generator containing a small screen that plays a looped performance by a local doom-metal act and in the centre, a contemporary, faux-rococo garden fountain, rendered in a nauseating hot pink and spurting thin, brown streams of Coca-Cola. Like a coded message from a contemporary soothsayer, it gave timely, charismatic and oblique warning of the inevitable price of excess.
The sum of the parts is not something glib.
I could describe him as a delicious smoothie made from an electronics swap-meet thrown in a blender with a teenagers bedroom. Or a beautiful alien gas made up of familiar elements but with a whole new smell and the possibility of appearing as a solid or a liquid as easily as a mist.
But I suspect my analogies, although descriptive and entertaining to invent, are possibly impotent and defunct, because put most simply: this is how we make art now. Cotterell is a contemporary artist, like most of us, unbound by a single means of expression.
Now we communicate with a cluster, not an arrow.
Sally Rees, April 2009
Commissioned for catalogue of Medium Frequency- DF Arte Contemporaneo,
Santiago De Compostela. Supported by Inflight, Arts Tasmania and Australia Council for the Arts.