kendell geers: aesthetic terrorist

candice breitz, June 1994

 

During the run-up to South Africa's first democratic elections, Kendell Geers was amongst several artists who were approached by a local newspaper to submit a design for the new national flag. Much to the chagrin of other participants, Geers responded by suggesting that a space should be sold to the highest-bidding advertiser on a five-yearly basis. In a South African artworld still fraught with romantic expressionism, Geers' politically-charged approach to art-making has been the catalyst of much contention.

His refusal to endorse the traditional artist-mould has earned him the accolade of enfant terrible, despite his unabashed and often-made admission to being a self-styled con-artist. In lieu of palette and beret, he dons urban combat-gear, an attire which not only suggests a far more realistic guise for the South African artist of the nineties, but is ironically appropriate for an artist who first stumbled into a fine art degree so as to avoid being conscripted into South Africa's notorious apartheid defence force. He later left South Africa to live in exile in New York for the same reason. This year was spent working as an assistant to several artists including Richard Prince.

Geers embraces the Wittgensteinian notion that "Ethics and aesthetics are one and the." He has always believed that art bears an integral relation to its society - it can either reflect the moral order of that society or subvert it. Geers has committed himself to the latter option ... In 1976, townships across South Africa erupted into angry protest in response to the government's insistence on the compulsory use of the Afrikaans language as a teaching medium in state schools. Hector Pietersen was the first of several hundred school children to be shot dead during the riot-police's attempt to quell the protests. Geers recently sent shockwaves through a South African artworld with fresh apartheid memories when he exhibited a death-register recording the details of, amongst others, Hector Pietersen's corpse; thereby instilling in his use of the ‘found object', an unnerving poignancy specific to the South African conAn electronic sign alphabetically spitting out bigotry (‘faggot..jew...kaffir..nigger..wop...') felt equally absonant in the context of the South African gallery. Geers has succeeded in recasting the gallery as one of the many settings of the South African fall from grace, rather than determining it as a space of redemption from politics. The viewer coming into the gallery to seek refuge from a politically violent society, is confronted with the implements of that violence. A brick is hung strategically at viewing-level; nearby is a shelf of enticingly beautiful liquid-filled bottles which on closer inspection are revealed as molotov cocktails. Here, there is no escape into metaphor - rather than offering refuge from the profane world, Geers harnesses the paranoia-ridden South African condition to fuel his work.

The gallery is not only denied exoneration from the perpetration of cultural violence, but accused of having failed in the upholding of superior values. Instead, it is suggested that art structures have been inclined to collude with the dominant social formation. While his work performs obtrusively in its demythologizing of the galley space, there is no attempt to institute a new, more adequate moral order.

Here there is no aesthetic alibi, no sunset-infused alternative view. Rather, he situates the viewer as culprit by implicating her in the creation of the work. In Foster's words Geers' work refuses the ‘simulation of mastery'. The only trace of style to be discerned is in his strategy.

Geers refuses to draw the line. His work is intent on demonstrating that there is no distinction between the sacrosanct space of the gallery and the everyday contingency ‘out there'. This is implicit in the titles of his first two solo exhibitions, which he called "Mediations" and "Threshhold : The Exhibition", and perhaps more explicit in the canvases wrapped defiantly in chevron-tape or the columns outside a gallery which are similarly shrouded. The meaning of these works must be sought in the physical and conceptual space that they infer, rather than in the objects themselves. Deprived of the rose-tinted spectacles so often obligatory to the gallery experience which exists between the object and herself.

Geers' work responds unashamedly to the legacy of being a white South African male. At the same time, his work can be located in an international attitude to artmaking evidenced in the work of artists like Buren, Kosuth and Haacke. His engagement with the History of Art is manifested in his constant re-invention of the icons of that history. Typical of this dialect engagement, is his appropriation of Duchamp's appropriation of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which he entitled L.H.O.O.Q. with pencil marks erased. The work deals with the political implications of the act of vandalism in contradistinction to Duchamp's more poetic Shaved L.H.O.O.Q. Eliding the aura accrued to both da Vinci's and Duchamp's work, Geers distributed his ‘rectified readymade' in the form of a post-card, thereby reflecting on the mediated manner in which South Africans receive the History of Art.

The 1993 Venice Biennale was Geers' chance to engage more directly with international artists. It was a particularly important moment for South African artists - who, due to cultural boycotts, had last participated in the Biennale in 1968. The 1968 South African contribution was met with riots and protest from other participants. In 1993 Geers exhibited a work made of bitumen and fire, with a gap violently torn out of its centre, and the word ‘RIOT' brazenly displayed across its surface. After an absence of twenty-five years, Geers felt it would be appropriate to send a "riot" back to Venice.

Rather than too eagerly situating himself as postmodern, Geers disavows the romanticism of late modernism in order to return the radicality of the early avant-garde. Whilst his position is otherwise diametrically opposed to that of Greenberg, he shares Greenberg's vituperation of art which becomes ‘arty', of style which is too ‘stylish'. As noted recently by a south African critic, art has a sell-by date, and work which exceeds this date loses its relevance. What Geers calls for, rather than a recourse to novelty, is a constant reappraisal of art and its problems. It is not surprising then, that he should operate in the very space usually designated as delimiting the supposed polarity between ‘art' and ‘life'. His work is of the threshold, refusing to fall safely either within or beyond the parameters of art: instead it operates defiantly in that Bataillesque zone which is neither.