"Altered States: Die Kunst des Kendell Geers"

Okwui Enwezor, Inklusion Exklusion, Dumont, Koln 1997, pgs 202 - 205

 

Much recommends the majority of art being made by a particular cadre of young artists working today in the off centres of the international art arena. However very little admits the consequence nor utilises anything of use-value in that work as to propose a new orientation towards the global economy of signs that circumscribe contemporary art today. And insofar as the work of artists in question fails to find admittance into those zones where consequential questions art are being asked in broadly foregrounded categories, "context" becomes the overarching theme of admittance. As such critics, perhaps finding this a useful radar or tool, quarrel much over context, particularly its place in the enunciative reading of any cultural text or corpus and the universe that cradles their fragile forms. Of course such quarrels emerge clearly from the irradiation of the totalising absolutism one usually ascribes to western modernism, as well as a recognition which posits that ideas and cultures always mutate, and thus remain to be reinscribed fresh whenever they hit new soil. In pondering and puzzling over the meaning of context, especially how artists, artworks, cultural and intellectual ideas perform within its locus, the critic is forced to think about what happens when artistic initiative , or as it were the freedom that drives such initiative breaches, complicates, challenges and frustrates the very grounds of a given curatorial framework or prescription. To input the context governs all cultural ideas not only delimits, it also disallows the subjective resonance of dissent as a form of artistic intervention within contemporary (sic postmodern) art. Increasingly, as artists move away from their practices being bound up in the manufacture of forms and objects, and begin to enter disproportionately into the terrain of conceptualism and cerebral thinking, what happens to context? Consider then a scenario in which an artist - invited to participate in an "international exhibition" - who rather than make this make this work available as an illustrative material for a rather skewed curatorial and ideological grid in which the work of other artists have been emplaced, chooses instead to contest - via his contribution - the curator's ontological emphasis on difference and cultural permissibility . In a recent exhibition of South African art in Berlin, a work by Kendell Geers was excluded by the curators for the above reason. Geers, a white artist, had chosen to present a work ("Title Withheld (Score)", 1995-96, in which by simple mathematical formulae he transforms both the context and content of the exhibition, by toying with the stereotypes of ethnic differences that are usually gathered to make an all inclusive, politically correct, but nonetheless imbalanced exhibition that does not trample upon people's feelings about identity. By refusing to admit this work into the exhibition, the curators opened up a deep oppositional chasm about the limits of what is permissible for African artists of all hues, regardless of their politics, in the cultural sphere. Of course the putative considerations of difference as predicative of context has many obvious problems. From experience, it usually does not redress the notorious imbalances (which many today view to be postmodernism's achilles heel) emblematic of most international art exhibitions in which for the sake of representation the wrong artists are almost always chosen as representatives of their cultures or local geographies. Thus rather than elucidate such simplemindedness not only undermines, but obscures the larger issue if qualitative conversations - across cultural and contextual borders - necessary to open up artistic production to new probings and insights; to lead such probings and insights into new

-2- territories of contemporary African cultural production, in its widest possible terms, for Geers' work however strident and disruptive it may have seemed, said that self-criticality within the space of intellectual debate is always a bonus rather than a diminishment or obstruction. Censorship or not, this incident revealed the faultlines around which issues of race touch on the swollen nodes and sensitive nerves in Germany and South Africa; two countries which carry the heavy burden (deservedly so) of historical guilt. The irony of the incident was that Geers presented another work; "Title Withheld (Kunst Kapital Kultur, Kitsch)" 1996, a postcard which depicted a group of naked and half naked Ndebele women and children; postcards which are usually sold in tourist shops and manufactured in abundance in South Africa to replicate the assumed authenticity of its "native" inhabitants. Geers obviously intended to mock the curators assumed sensitiveness toward racial categories and the stereotypes that illuminate their degenerate contours. Were the curators wake to this work's obvious sarcasm and invidious implications; its very raising of the spectre of the demeaning of the black body as no longer possessive of any hint of subjective initiative, and how the selfsame body has been used as a synecdoche of cultural artificiality, as both object and touristic product in the voyeuristic and pornographic image repertoire that aids the "evil eye" of the occidentalist imagination, fantasy and pleasure, they would have recognised its very basic and fundamental meaning. This work which Geers so brazenly recontextualised revealed further the curatorial shortcomings evident in working simplistically with ethnicity as the prime basis of any cultural project. Geers' gesture also played conveniently into another work (a video documentary of naked African women, who stripped down to the waist to protest the bulldozing of their homes to city officials) by Sheila Meintjies and Company which slipped into the exhibition a pseudo-liberal, humanist document masquerading as art. To contend with this quandary in which the work of a young artist like Geers, with its complex and deep political implications can be so caverlierly chopped off at the knees, or is allowed limited sanction to speak or to transgress and transform the boundaries of cultural and artistic permissibility, one must remain cognisant of the limited space available to African artists as they negotiate their way in the bottomless nadir of the Western metropolis. Part of this examination is how critics are tuned to the compulsion by western curators to overprotect those perceived to be severely commodified and marginalised artists languishing at the frayed edges of modern popular memory. One must also think carefully around the kind of global ideology in which western institutions remain intent on curating the rest of the globe. It is for these very reasons that Craig Owens, following Gilles Deleuze's acute distillation of Foucault's project, noted how Foucault had taught us about "the indignity of speaking for others". Perhaps, that is the vital lesson to be learned by those, who by mere assignation arrogate, indeed confer upon themselves the right to speak for others. Here, political expediency, in classical liberal humanist pose, asserts that "Title Withheld (Score)" is simply dangerous to admit into the wide discussions which South Africa, following the deliberations of the "Truth and Reconciliation" panel, is beginning to open itself up to. If I have dwelled immeasurably on these questions, rather than the artist (who remains the core subject of this deliberation) it is only a measure of the necessity to reconsider and thus remain vexed by the challenges of the many unsettled questions relating to contemporary art, between intentionality and purpose, and how the figure of the African artist in inserted within it. It is Geers' paradoxical positions as a White, Afrikaner, African and above all South

-3- African artist that excites this moment. The work of Kendell Geers offers up two possibilities; one a visceral setting which gives the viewer a kind of adrenaline rush of excitement; an aesthetic experience that places one at a site of recognition, yet giving off the aura of impenetrability. The other possibility is one of extreme coldness, a mnemonic disruption that borders on repulsion. In fact Geers would have it no other way. Purposefully inviting misreadings, his work concedes nothing, neither to the institutional structure towards which (in a classic conceptual fashion of dematerialisation) it remains aloof and antagonistic, nor to his audience from whom he maintains a cool, ironic distance. Geers like many young people of his generation, views himself and the purview of his work as unique products of the failed apartheid experiment, in its truculency and suspicion for innovation and critical thinking. As such he has fashioned his critical and cultural disposition on that discontinuous and fragmentary plain in which everything (authority, allegiance to race and nation and their icons and symbology) are forever put at risk. Though artists have been working with those oppositional strategies for decades, it bears remarking that South Africa pre 1994 like those countries of Eastern Europe before the fall of Berlin Wall, was like no other place in the world. It is still important to remember what kinds of environment South Africa and Germany fostered during the bleak days of their different histories in this century. Without question, they were environments where mind, psyche and reality incessantly warred with unceasing reflection of images; and how those images turn into crusades filtered through smokescreens ruled by political conceits and power, social engineering and simulacrums. And behind it all, beyond the lit, glowing proscenium hangs the heavy , furrowed curtains knit of heavy shadows that still insist from beneath the demolished walls of fear, ignorance and hate. It is in that space, in the lonely small hours of the mind (even for a young white artist who through an inherited past carries the spectre of being oppressor) that freedom of expression, however beset it is by contradictions, could emerge to buckle the face of repression and cultural prescription. From such autobiographical detail emerges a conscientious practice within South Africa (for both African and Caucasian artists) in which cultural signs encountered as differential and connotative aspects of the signifier and signified take on the quality of text, or as Roland Barthes would have it ecriture; more inscription than writing. It is out of this fulcrum that Geers has emerged in little less than a decade as an artist of quite some note to occupy a central axis in the mercurial South African art world. Between apostacy and stridency, he has ranged widely, both formally and conceptually, across the fissures of high modernist deliquescence and lust for firm and object, as well as in the ambient light of postmodernist thought processes, to built a critical oeuvre that is filled with brilliance, uncanny moments, and yet is difficult to classify. He has made paintings, installations and what many would call non-art as in the case of an empty room in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which he contributed to the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale. In a rather astute and magisterial style, the critic Colin Richards attempts a deconstruction of this work ("Title Withheld (Boycott)" 1995) which he, on the one hand claims is not "inconsequential" yet he overwrites this commentary by insisting that what gives the work an aesthetic lack is the absence of "that work of labour". Richards critique of this work is

-4- however not without its own programmatic deficiency. For what he sees as the lack of artistic labour returns and reinscribed in his critique in the mode of a recapitulation to the very system which Geers' seemingly empty room deauthorises; which is the modernist hunger for art objects, which must have in them codes of meaning that is occupied by narrative. Clearly and for many reasons Geers' artistic practice hinges on the questioning of the problematic relationship between narrative and art; that less than satisfying communication between the observer's stupefied gaze and object's redundant silence. Hence his allegedly empty room contests culture on its own grounds; the museum as the authorising and sanctioning body of artistic value and cultural worth. The work, thus becomes a means of interrogating a process whereby culture and art are liquified and miniaturised as both essence and presence. By far Geers' work does not and could not counteract the powerful glare of the institutional framework which fixes the measures of value and exchange of which cultural material and art play as artefacts and articles of a strange trade. Rather than an emptying out or expurgation, as Richards contended, "Title Withheld (Boycott)" serves as a counter measure; it returns us back into the vault of the museum, into its storage rooms and its holding docks; in its invisible and submerged contours, there where art and cultural objects await their dispensation in the myriad networks of institutional recontextualisation and validation. It is precisely what has been cleared and evacuated from the Gallery's walls that is the subject of this intensely aware intervention. In a way there can be nothing more beneficial to the South African art world than a work which places the institution at the heart of debates that has now begun to take place after the dissolution of apartheid. For it is within this questioning that the official versions of much contemporary South African art can no longer evade their own problematic grounding in narrative; in the object/form tradition. But perhaps, more than the works he has made, it is the artists personality as an enfant terrible, and his allegedly "artistic bad manners" that accrue the greatest interest. This attribute in no way diminishes nor demeans his work. Indeed it should be viewed as an integral aspect of the performative nature of his practice, part of which is tied to his altering of his birthday to coincide with the 1968 student rebellion in Paris and the utopian activities of the Situationist International founded by Guy Debord. This some would cynically refer to as the Warhol effect. Yet, to examine his work without acknowledging his connection is to miss the importance of the one vital element (performativity) which animates his entire career.. How, for instance may one read "Title Withheld (Hustler)" 1993-94 in which Geers raids the quintessential cabinet of exhibitionism (the pornographic magazine) by ripping out the centerfold image of a young Caucasian model, legs splayed, puckering pussy and all, which he then decorated with thick dollops of sperm? This work which in its obviousness and banality should not at all be seen as shock tactics, but rather as merely noting the comic presence of a defaced icon; the graffitied wall (imagine the number of sperm-encrusted Marilyn Monroes; the classical image of young Caucasian juvenile desire in the fifties). In a different manner it also relates to how certain sexual activities are perceived, within the rigid standards of conservative morality, as being indicative of a dysfunction, especially how sexual desire in the case of pornography is displaced through props and simulation to an object or scenes of imagining. This displacement according to Craig Owens, partly forms the basis of what he describes in psychoanalysis as anaclisis or

-5- "propping". Owens wrote quoting Freud's analysis that "sexual activity attaches itself (props itself upon) functions serving the purposes of self-preservation". In this regard pornographic memory thus also serves as a process of self-preservation, on whose optical mirror the body of the object of desire is framed and frozen. In its various aspects as a photographic index placed in circulation as a fetishised, fantasy object, the work clearly intones and evinces distance, the quintessential attenuation of physical consummation. "Title Withheld (Hustler)" tells of repressed truths, embarrassingly so for those who would rather see another kind of nude (obviously different from Courbet's sublimely carnal "Origin of the World") fixed in the fictional imagination of the transcendental mode. The work invites eviction from the arena of the public gaze; an element which photography in its dumb and reductive attributes promotes incessantly almost innocently one would think. There is another element which this work evokes, which is Geers' use of the copy and the ready-made, a not so unconscious Duchampian hyperbolism. This sensibility also says that more than being an ironist, he also wants to have fun as an artist. his penchant for appropriating the methods, and sometimes remaking other artists works - On Kawara, Mel Bochner, Gabriel Orozco, Richard Prince and of course Duchamp - altering them ever so slightly to suit his purposes. It is almost as if he employs the work of these artists for semantic effect, neither homage nor mockery; instead pointing to their archaism and the fallibility of the notion of originality. Like Jeff Koons' kitsch "pornographic" sculptures of himself and his ersatz wife Cicciolina, "Title Withheld(Hustler)" is art as fun house. It is sites not so much where the furtive glances of desire slip from the gallery wall to reveal a bulge in one's pants. It does exactly the opposite; it deflates desire and robs the image of its scopophilic value for the artist had claimed that spot first stripped it bare by dousing the image with the expurgated content of his engorged member, and in so doing marked the image with such abject vehemence, reinscribing its artificiality while displacing the intended object of desire. Continuing on this performative ken (since gesture has been effectively deposited on the slagheap f a failed modernist project) Geers began another Johannesburg exhibition by hauling a brick through the gallery's glass window (later reenacted at De Appel in Amsterdam) . The resultant work "Title Withheld (Brick)" 1994 and 1996 registers as sanctioned vandalism which in its causality and effect remain too mediated and lacked spontaneity. Another reading might impute into the brick and the shards of broken glass that accompanied its impact as a kind of mannerist expressionism. I am of the opinion that thinks of the brick as having more firmly secured its place as performance first, while everything else around it is merely additive. The split-second action of throwing the brick changes the nature of the work; it becomes more than "flinging mud on canvas" as John Ruskin had intoned against Whistler during their infamous legal quarrel. Geers' brick in not acceding to the conservative proscription of formalist art, deopticalises the object and places it outside the confident structure of the museum or gallery. The work thus signifies less the materiality of the art object as factual evidence of an action, as it signifies the altered states of the performance. It also places itself, whenever it is performed in the position of reduplicating itself as a supplement, an act of doubling which potentially could produce as many copies as possible without there ever being an original in existence. Moving away from Geers' longstanding relationship with the traditions of the modernist

-6- avantgarde we return to his positionality via postmodernist language as it neatly converges on the question of identity. In "Untitled (ANC, AVF, AWB, CP, DP, IFP, NP, PAC, SACP)" 1993-94 a work whose gensis is directly linked to the political chaos and violence that ravaged South Africa in the months leading up to the country's first democratic elections, Geers staged an elaborate act of political subterfuge in the wake of the killing of a member of the Inkathas Freedom Party. Beginning on July 19, 1993 on the day of the actual killing, and using the occasion of this killing as a base in an extended performance, he decided to join all the political parties of South Africa, in a way to interrogate the regime of killings and counter killings that were part of the internecine strife that still echo across the lines of political party affiliations and on the other hand to query how the fetishisation of identity continues to burden his country with violence. By joining all these parties (culminating on February 7, 1994 when the ultra-rightwing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) issued him an ID card) Geers sought not only to claim all their identities, but also to mark them bogus and suspect beyond measure. Joining the ranks of despised groups, since most political parties viewed each other not only as adversaries but "ideological enemies" he exposed himself to violence by placing his performance act at the centre of a risky political venture. To justify his actions, he would comment that his art reflected the moment where "Objects, images, situations and documents are "recycled" from reality and inserted into the context of art with only minor aesthetic intervention". He further notes that the objects or moments or situations he selects are "Selected for their ideological and ethical values [and how] they function as a "Reality Principle" challenging the passive relationship art has come to have with its audience. At its most successful art is no longer immune from life". This "Reality Principle" must however, not be taken at face value. For in its clearest manifestation it functions as a tool of subversion. Indeed reality becomes quite like a virus, to both infiltrate and to disarm, to destabilise conventional institutional and societal orders. Furthermore, this principle plays on how reality could both be decoded but also recoded, so as to yield a more complex meaning and purpose. Thus "Untitled (ANC, AVF, AWB, CP, DP, IFP, NP, PAC, SACP)" encounters another form of "reality" which takes the form of the photographic index; the portrait on an ID card thus purports to tell all the invisible truths about the individual who possess it. Of course the photograph in this instance is perceived as the mirror of an observable reality, and thus could be used in the South African context to both amplify and dissolve differences. Conversely the photograph image reveals the disturbance that occurs within its associative character when employed to serve the function of a bureaucratic apparatus. It also exposes how the image of the self is deployed across the distorted screen of representation, just as the symbolic investment of political and even perhaps cultural enmity is staged via the artificial grid of an ID card. in conclusion one must also return to retrace one's steps in the vanishing sands of apartheid political and cultural hegemony, particularly how cultural workers (artists, writers, performers, musicians) were victimised due to international isolation occasioned by the cultural boycott. In the despairing, surging ambivalence that inflicts the complex values and meanings of these intensely lived moments, what happens after the light of collective political triumph dims? What role does identity (both in its construction and its masking) play in the riven space informed by so many contingencies and improvisations, most of which could be read as dress rehearsals for utterly self-defeating ideals, and out of which identity finds its various enunciations in South Africa? Julia Kristeva's words echo chillingly in this regard. Kristeva in her classical examination of abjection writes towards the books conclusion of a moment of

-7- intense and epiphanic solitude, "throughout a night without images but buffeted by black sounds; amidst a throng of forsaken bodies beset with no longing but to last against all odds and for nothing ... those who in transference presented me with their gift of the void...." It is this void that gears most magnificently plumbs while placing his work at every conceptual turn that desubstantialises the art object. Geers' work aptly rediscovers and redefines that moment of transference, there were what is most valuable to our subjective individual agency and sense of history is perennially contested, negotiated and debased.