"there's a bomb in this exhibition: kendell geers charged"

ruth kerkham, parachute, 99, 2000, pages 30 -40

 

Most of us have probably asked the following questions at some stage in our lives: Did Professor Plum do it in the library with the revolver? Did Mrs. Peacock do it in the Billiard Room with the spanner, or did Miss Scarlet do it in the Conservatory with the candlestick? The famous detective board game Cluedo was invented in the 1940s in England, its name playing on the word "ludo" (Latin for "I play"), and the word "clue", suggesting not only that I play this game, but also that I play with the clues, I play with the evidence itself. The subtlety of this name is unfortunately lost in the North American version, which is simply called Clue. Cluedo is played in over forty countries and has been adapted in various ways. The British murder victim Dr. Black, for example, is more brusquely referred to in Australia as Mr. Boddy, and has an even further touch of morbidity in the Spanish American version where he is known as Sir Caddaver.

How would one have framed these questions had the game been invented in South Africa? Did Sergeant Pretorius do it in his torture chamber with his police baton? Did Special Agent Kornelius do it from his car with his AK-47? Did Mr. Prime Minister do it in his office with & well, nothing more than his telephone? It is this line of questioning that South African artist Kendell Geers sagaciously employs as he plays his own game of Cluedo. In his version, however, nobody else is allowed to see the rules, for indeed, the original evidence of any rules has long since been destroyed. As we play his game we will begin to ask: Did Geers do it in an art gallery with a brick? Did Geers do it in his bedroom with his own dick? Very quickly we will say "Charged!" "Guilty!" but will forget exactly what it is that he is guilty of.

Kendell Geers is a contemporary South African artist whose sometimes-criminal interventions and performative situations have earned him the rather incongruous titles of "art genius" and "art fraud". Okwui Enwezor, the Commissioner of the forthcoming Documenta has, for example, referred to Geers's critical oeuvre as that which is "filled with brilliance", while many South African critics denounce his work as European folly. Is it a gesture of brilliance or fatuity to throw a brick through a gallery window, to implode a museum wall, to display an empty pedestal, to exhibit a bomb threat or to eject your semen onto a pornographic centerfold? The answer is neither, for to read such an artist in a framework of simplistic dichotomy is to play the game by the old rules, where cases were solved, murderers were charged, and where there were clearly winners and losers. Geers is neither brilliant nor asinine, his activities are not strictly legal or illegal, and his work is sometimes art, sometimes not. In this article I will attempt to transgress categorical assumptions in the reading of Geers and of art-crime, and will question whether such necessarily ambiguous readings leave any possibility for social change or social effect.

Kendell Geers's life itself is drenched in disruption and disorder, or so he would have us believe. He purportedly changed his own birth date as an artistic performance to coincide with the 1968 student uprising in Paris, the activities of the Situationalist International group founded by Guy Debord, and with the death of Marcel Duchamp. In all catalogues and articles his birth date is listed as May 1968, and the artist wears this date around his neck engraved on a dog chain that will be auctioned when he dies. He writes about himself as a rebellious Afrikaner who, as a teenager, ran away from his patriarchal, racist and staunchly religious upbringing only to be nursed by the violence of the Johannesburg streets. He changed his name from the overtly Afrikaans-sounding Jocabus Hermanus Pieter Geers to a more politically correct Kendell Geers, openly lamenting the fact that he will forever carry the cross of being a white, Afrikaans, South African male and that no matter how transgressive he might be, he will always be implicated in the atrocities of apartheid. "I am guilty!" he writes. "I cannot hide my guilt as it is written all over my face. I was born guilty without being given the option." Admittedly he does fall into to one of the world's most suspect categories of people, and it perhaps for this reason that he weaves an intricate and deliberately ambiguous web of personal mythology, unwittingly capturing numerous critics and viewers who read his personal stories as they would have read Joseph Beuys's stories thirty years ago. However, unlike Beuys, Geers heightens the artificiality of his self-portrayal, and yet the constructedness of his work and his personal story is too often missed.

Calling himself, "a virus at the heart of the beast" , Geers consciously presents himself through his "portrait of the artist" and through an artwork called Title Withheld (Self-Portrait). In "portrait of the artist" he flaunts army gear, taunting the notoriously wicked South African Defence Force that never did manage to co-opt him, as he fled South Africa in 1989 to avoid compulsory military conscription. In this image he also wears a Nelson Mandela mask and provocatively poses amidst traditional African masks and carvings, flying in the face of the imperialist-motivated tourist trade that insidiously encourages foreigners to capture the "authentic essence" of the "Dark Continent" to which they have dared to travel. The irony and deliberate artificiality of this portrayal is heightened when Geers exhibits the mask on a white pedestal and hangs the jacket beside it in a group exhibition called Cross/ing at the University of South Florida Art Gallery. By placing the Mandela mask on a pedestal in a gallery, Geers uses one of the most well-known faces of the twentieth century to point a finger at the Western art world that has not only dragged the African mask through the sordid pages of Western art history, but has displayed it on museum walls as the epitome of exotic otherness.

Title Withheld (Self-Portrait) consists of a broken Heineken bottle with the words "imported from Holland" still intact. The work alludes to the artist's Dutch heritage, which is intricately intertwined with South Africa's colonial history and the history of apartheid itself. Critics have referred to the piece in terms of broken shards, an empty vessel, a potential weapon and a potential pipe for drugs, but nothing has been said about the curious addition of the words "Original destroyed on flight TWA 800" which appear after the title, as well as the other words "The Original Quality" that appear on the broken beer bottle. The work is dated as 1995 , but the fact that the TWA 800 actually went down in 1996 has strangely not sparked any curiosity. Why would the artist add these words to his piece? Surely nobody believes that this piece is indeed labeled after an "original" that was destroyed in the plane wreckage just off Long Island, especially considering the incongruity of dates. Instead, I read this piece as a parallel of the artist's life and work to the way that North American society and the media in particular reacted to the airplane crash in 1996. Newspapers sensationalized the event as tales of global and local conspiracy unraveled and continue to do so on the Internet. Some say that the streak of light seen just seconds before the explosion was a US navy missile, others say it was a bomb planted by a foreign terrorist, and still others believe it was top-secret government scientific experiment involving Einstein's Unified Field Theory and effects of electro-magnetic high frequency waves to warp into existence a rift in the space-time continuum. The "truth" of the matter, however, will never be known, just as the "original" bottle never existed, as both truth and origin have been spun into orbit in a Baudrillardian sense. What does this say about Kendell Geers who is anything but the "original quality" of Dutch blood in South Africa?

The South African media has sensationalized Geers by portraying him as the terrorist and enfant terrible of the South African art world, just as the international media has sensationalized violence in South Africa. In his book Argot Geers talks about terrorists or freedom fighters as being those people whose, "primary objective is the disruption and subversion of the social, economic, political and psychological systems of their ideological enemy. Denied a voice in mainstream politics their actions are inevitably influenced by what attracts the attention of the mass media, who in turn transform the individual action into an international crisis" . While some of Geers's actions certainly have led to crises of varying degrees, he seems to take this label of "terrorist" as a complement, and uses it in a way that mirrors Jean Baudrillard's analysis of the terrorist in his book Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard argues that terrorism is an ecstatic form of violence, a spectacle that does not oppose state violence with meaning, as terrorism only works if it exterminates the very meaning that sustains the state. Indeed, no meaning is necessary, and at times, argues Baudrillard, there is no need for the terrorist to actually do anything, as the media does it all. "Transgression and violence are less serious", he says, "because they can only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation" . Baudrillard suggests, for example, that it is impossible to simulate a bank holdup. You would not be able to convince the security guard that you were just pretending, someone in the bank would probably faint or have a heart attack and the police would actually fire at you. As such, says Baudrillard, terrorist activities are in some sense mere simulation as they are already inscribed in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media. In Baudrillard's more recent book The Perfect Crime he begins by saying, "This is the story of a crime - the murder of reality", but he adds, "Alas, the crime is never perfect" , for traces and appearances are left behind by the world, and by artists too.

In 1997 UCLA organized an exhibition at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Centre called Scene of the Crime. In the introduction to the catalogue the curator Ralph Rugoff makes similar connections between crime, traces and the role of the media. "Criminalistics," he says, "is defined as the analysis of traces. Thanks in part to such highly publicized disasters such as the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building and the crash of TWA Flight 800, this once-arcane field has become a familiar one in the popular imagination" . He goes on to suggest that as we unravel the clues of art-crime, or as he calls it, forensic aesthetics, reality itself becomes suspect. While we are left with a few fragments and traces, there is no longer any way of tracing these events back to the original event, for indeed, there is, in a sense, no original event. The viewers, who become the investigators, piece together the various traces into constructed stories and myths that are theatrically presented to the public through the media. As Rugoff points out, the word forensic actually derives from the word "forum" which implies public discussion and debate rather than proof of any kind.

A delightful example of Geers as a Baudrillardian terrorist, who plants forensic traces (read in the light of "forum") for everyday viewers, art critics and the media alike, is his intervention or situation called Guilty. In January 1998 the Afrikaans community of Pretoria planned to celebrate the centenary of a fort that was opened by President Paul Kruger in 1898. Fort Klapperkop, one of four forts in the area, was built to protect Pretoria from the British. One year later the Anglo-Boer War broke out and the fort now stands as a symbol of Afrikanerdom and, to the Afrikaners themselves, as a symbol of their suffering. It is interesting to note that in October 1999, the centennial of the Anglo-Boer war, the South African government officially changed the title of the war to The South African War in order to dispel the monopolization of suffering that the Afrikaners made claim to and to honor the thousands of Africans who fought in the war without any recognition from either the British or the Dutch. Being an Afrikaner himself, Geers attempted to subvert the celebratory hail to Afrikanerdom, by appropriating the entire function as his artwork, which he called Guilty. According to his press release Geers would present a series of performances, lectures and cultural events that "critique the significance and meaning of Fort Klapperkop, the Boer War and most importantly Afrikaans culture in the New South Africa." The activities would include a church service, the firing of cannons, traditional Afrikaans dancing called "Sakkie-Sakkie" as well as traditional Afrikaans food. Of course, none of these events were actually arranged by Geers himself, but by the festival organizer Major Doep Martin whose enraged response was, "We are in no way part of his art. He is playing with my integrity if he thinks I'm going to be his ball to kick around. It's enough to make me furious & But I must stress that this is not a political thing-it is about cultural history."

On the second day of celebrations Geers had planned to occupy the fort, to have himself locked up in the name of art. This action would have suggested a reversal of the opening of the fort one hundred years ago, as well as a shutting down of a certain portrayal of Afrikaner culture and history. The other way that Geers planned to insert himself into their activities was to raise his own flags bearing anarchist signs and to hang up a large banner displaying the word "Guilty". Needless to say, when the community caught wind of Geers's intended sabotage, pandemonium occurred. The French Institute for South Africa that had originally invited the artist to present an exhibition or performance received enormous pressure from the Afrikaans community as well as the German embassy to cancel the artist's participation. The German Embassy was offended because the photograph that Geers used as his invitation represented the German police force and it assumed that the force was somehow implicated in the title "Guilty". The photograph had originally been taken in Berlin where Nelson Mandela opened an exhibition of South African artists and the police presence was ostensibly for Mandela's protection. The flags in the background of the photograph were part of Geers's artwork called Title Withheld (AK), which in short reads as T-W-A-K, or "twak", slang in Afrikaans for "Bullshit".

The French Institute decided to withdraw the intervention on the grounds that it provoked controversy beyond the parameters of art. By this stage, the Pretoria City Council's director for museums was receiving hate mail and the Goodman Gallery that represents Geers, was receiving threatening phone calls. Geers's response was that he had never intended the word "Guilty" to be directed at Afrikaners alone, but that the word simply summed up the current climate in South Africa where everybody is dealing with different types of guilt in different ways. (Perhaps in a similar way he tried to complicate a sense of guilt in a German context). In a published statement he announced the following: "In this past week the rightwing have been extremely vain in assuming that they are the only people in this country who may be guilty. While my artwork included everything that took place at Fort Klapperkop & the piece is far broader than that and includes all the banners and posters erected around and in between Johannesburg and Pretoria, all the press coverage, urban legends & as well as all the discussions, arguments and controversy surrounding the work" . (So, presumably, this article is part of Guilty as well). In response to the organizers of the festival he humorously noted, "Now they are trying to unart themselves. You know you're making confrontational art when the artworks rise up against the artist" .

Forbidden to even appear at the celebrations, Geers devised an alternative plan. He claims to have flown a plane over the fort and over other Afrikaner sanctuaries such as the Voortrekker Monument, Paul Kruger's House, the Loftus Versveld Rugby Stadium and the Pretoria Central prison. Trailing behind the plane was a banner displaying the words "GUILTY SKULDING MOLATO NETYALO" ("Guilty" in English, Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa). While everyone on the ground was wondering whether Geers would appear or not, art critic Lorna Ferguson claims that his appearance in the sky went by unnoticed. She describes the situation as follows: "The aircraft appeared two-and-a-half house late as a speck on the horizon, not approaching close enough even to take documentation photographs before it flew back to Grand Central Airport. Only a four-letter word could describe the occasion - flop! " Brenda Atkinson wrote a review in the Mail and Guardian called "Guilty of over-hype". "Was it a punchline without a joke?" she asked. "An olive without a Martini? A vetkoek without a filling? & It was an exhibition by Kendell Geers, called Guilty, that took place (or not, depending on your perspective)&" . According to her version, &the misguided pilot circled a few times, unfortunately over the wrong fort, and then disappeared. Guilty has left a tangled trail of attacks, and questions in its wake. Media hype has led to speculations that Geers himself engineered the publicity, from right-wing outrage, to death threats, to the French Institute's withdrawal. Such conspiracy theories credits Geers with an absurd amount of power and ignore the issue of whether Guilty works as what it is: an exhibition that aims to explore the pervasive presence of, and silence around, the semantics of guilt in South Africa. Atkinson implies that this intervention, taking place within the space of public hostility, did not successfully effect notable political change.

In my reading of this work it is irrelevant whether Geers actually flew over the fort or not, and it is significant that there was a media surge relating such different versions of the event. An irate Mrs. Coetzee, for example, wrote a letter complaining bitterly about Geers's attempt to desecrate the "fallen of South Africa" (the "fallen" being Afrikaners) , whereas the Sunday Independent accredited the situation with the impact of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. However, the beauty of the dissonant traces of this event, lies in the fact that they acerbically point to the glaringly different constructions of social mythology and narrative in South Africa's precarious history, or rather histories, and to the staunchness attached to these stories that many are willing to risk their lives for. As Baudrillard suggests, "History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth" . I disagree with Brenda Atkinson that this enormously encompassing intervention gives Geers too much power, as the intervention, if it exists at all, goes way beyond Geers himself. As it turns out no crime was committed that January weekend in 1998, but numerous unsolved and indeed, suspiciously unattended to crimes were churned to the surface of South African mythology. As such, I submit that Geers did succeed in a certain amount of cultural-political subversion, as he invited his viewers/investigators to follow the clues of his forensic aesthetics, which as some might have noticed, pointed to reality and history as being suspect.

There was one more aspect to this intervention that I invite you, the readers, to participate in, seeing as, according to Geers, we are now part of his intervention. Soon after that infamous weekend in 1998, Geers opened a bank account at Nedbank in the name of "Guilty". The sole signatory to the account is Dr. Lydia de Waal, Director of Museums and Culture Development for the Pretoria Council within whose department Fort Klapperkop resides, and any funds deposited into the account will be used for the restoration and development of the fort and its museum. Geers has already challenged the French and German Embassies to make healthy donations, as well as all those who have been involved through the press, the writing of letters, and by taking part in discussions. Together with the Goodman Gallery he made the first donation. I now ask you, as participants of this intervention, to make a donation in the name of "Guilty". The account number is 295-85-73-184. Together, we can restore culture. Together we can reclaim history as we reconstruct the scene of the crime.

The problem with reconstructing the scene of the crime in South Africa is that the surfeit of spectacular crime so easily takes precedence over the deviously buried crimes of the country's colonial history. However, even the act of stealing becomes more complicated when looked at in the light of an imbalance of power. As Mzwandile Kamang suggests,

It was an honourable thing to steal from your employer, to repossess what you believed was originally stolen from you in the form of land and freedom, and to redistribute it through the "back-door" market to your fellow oppressed. The most respectable members of the community bought "back-door" items such as clothing, furniture and electronic gadgets from workers who had repossessed them& .

As such, the concepts of good and bad, protector and protected, perpetrator and victim become radically embroiled, rendering systems of authority as ultimately ineffective. This comes close to Baudrillard's warning that eventually law and order itself is perceived as mere simulation.

The ambivalence of security and security forces are alluded to in two installations by Geers, Cry Wolf and Title Withheld (Untitled). In Cry Wolf a lame pile of disengaged emergency lights furiously flash to no avail. Determined to fulfill their duty to save peoples' lives they persist even though they are exhausted and ultimately reckoned useless in their pathetic entanglement. The lights, which may have been stolen from vandalized ambulances or police vehicles, imply an unavailing system of authority and protection that no longer just ignores the cries of "Wolf!" out of insensitivity, but out of utter inability. However, one is reminded that even when able, these public systems are conspicuously selective as to when and how quickly they respond. Safety itself has been reduced to privilege.

This crime of discriminatory action is further alluded to in Title Withheld (Untitled). Two registration plates are suspended mid-air, on which are inscribed the letters N-T-T-L-D. As pointed out by Olu Oguibe, who curated this piece in the group exhibition Cross/ing, these letters could be read either as "untitled" or "entitled", thus suggesting advantage based on race, status and power. In many of Geers's works he uses the term "title withheld" instead of "untitled" as an attempt to politicize the modernist retraction of meaning where supposedly the fewer the references the purer the work. Title Withheld (Untitled) could be read as a play on the fact that so many artists are unable to make this leap into vacuity, and still put a pseudo-title in parentheses after the title "untitled". On a more serious note, this work also points to a double absence, both in title and in form. The ghostly absence of the vehicle is emphasized by the tape on the ground, which cordons off a specific space, as in a crime scene or an art gallery where one knows that this sacred space must not be entered for fear of desecrating the traces that are believed to provide access to truth. In a South African context the absence of the car is ominous on two levels. It alludes to the fact that only a privileged few own cars due to appalling levels of poverty, and that public transportation in the form of minivan taxis is a dangerous alternative, as the taxis are usually as overcrowded as they are under-serviced and under-regulated. Many taxi drivers are unwillingly dragged into taxi wars, where competition for lucrative routes usually leads to death. It is not uncommon for a taxi to be peppered with bullets, as most drivers carry guns, often provided by crooked police. Taxi drivers hire hit men who earn up to R10 000 or who receive their own taxi for executing a competitor. The fact that hundreds of people die each year in these taxi wars makes the absence between the registration plates all the more foreboding.

As Ruggof suggests, this emphasis on absence and irresolute traces demands a reading on behalf of the viewer that goes beyond the traditional response to an art object, and forces the viewer to see more than what is before their eyes. "Taken as a whole", he asserts, "this art puts us in a position akin to that of the forensic anthropologist or scientist, forcing us to speculatively piece together histories that remain largely invisible to the eye" .

It is such forensic reconstruction that Geers demands in his piece Title Withheld (Stolen) where the viewer is left to piece together an implied crime. In a South African context, the suggestion that an artwork has been stolen leaving behind an empty pedestal is quite plausible. After all, when Eugene Terre'Blanche, the leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (the extreme rightwing and militant party in South Africa) found out that a far from laudatory representation of him was exhibited in the South African National Gallery, he commanded his men to destroy the work. Garbed in army boots and reverse swastikas, they did, indeed, knock the rather phallic-looking Terre'Blanche off his pedestal.

However, Title Withheld (Stolen) works on further levels than simply alluding to rampant crime in South Africa, and raises questions about the art object in the museum or gallery. Geers, who avoids the use of traditional art objects, seems to question the validity of the museum itself, and turns a traditionally innocent space into the scene of a crime. While the clues are few and far between, one cannot help but see Geers as the miscreant of art history itself and relate this piece to the 1974 performance by Chris Burden Sculpture in Three Parts. For forty-three hours Burden sat on a pedestal in the Hansen Fuller Gallery in San Francisco, until he eventually dropped from exhaustion and had a chalk outline drawn around his collapsed body. While Burden attempted to knock a certain perception of the artist off its pedestal, Geers attempts to go one step further - instead of drawing a trace around the artist's body, his metaphorical chalk outline is far more encompassing, throwing the question of exactly who or what died, into serious doubt. For Ralph Rugoff, this is the epitome of forensic aesthetics, where "Doubt, not belief, characterizes our present age", and "the forensic laboratory is no longer seen as a laboratory of truth" . He asks,

Does the forensic mode then, comprise a postmortem investigation of modernism itself? Certainly the viewer's role as investigator seems an apt one for probing the leftovers of modernist experience, the contradictory fragments and patchwork of a "reality" in which pieces of the puzzle are consistently missing or seem to radically change meaning when viewed from another angle .

It is an ideological and historical postmortem that Geers enacts in his piece called Untitled (1976), dated 1976-1994 where he displays an old death register as a found object. Amongst the names recorded in the book is Hector Pieterson, one of the youths who was shot by the South African police on 16 July 1976, in what is known as the Soweto Shooting. The youths were protesting against the government and education board that forced them to use Afrikaans at school, a language that was not only a third language to them, but also the language of their oppressors. When the police were ordered to fire, the youths turned and ran, but were still shot from behind. While many people were killed and injured, the name Hector Pieterson is particularly well known due to a now famous photograph seen worldwide of his sister running away with his bleeding body in her arms. Just before the 1994 elections in South Africa, the old government attempted to destroy numerous documents that might be used as incriminating evidence by the new government. It was for this reason that Geers was able to "steal" the death register. By displaying the book Geers attempts to dig deeper than a media portrayal, which, through tireless repetition eventually becomes distanced from the event itself. Attempting to go beyond a sensationalized view of violence, the death register points to the fact that some of the bodies remained nameless, and that even when they were named the causes of death were at times ruthlessly made up so as to avoid culpability on behalf of the government. Postmortems were often faked, miscarrying the entire system of justice, but here Geers dissects the systems of power themselves, revealing a multiplicity of crimes beyond the actual Soweto shooting. The fact, however, that this event is so utterly chilling, makes the act of viewing the death register ominously voyeuristic, and, I submit, the further removed the viewer is from the event, the more voyeuristic the viewing potentially becomes.

One of the difficulties that South African artists face is the different hermeneutical responses to their work depending on whether it is viewed in South Africa or somewhere in the "center" of the so-called international art world. Geers has suggested that internationally his work is considered too African as it deals with violence, vandalism and revolution, whereas the South African art world criticizes him for toying with the western art world in a way that betrays his Africanicity. By comparing Untitled (1976) exhibited in South Africa with a video installation Title Withheld (Shoot) exhibited in Texas, I will point to this hermeneutical discrepancy, suggesting that these two pieces, which both deal with shootings, would be read quite differently were they exhibited in different contexts. As such, I want to point to the potential violence of museum and gallery spaces.

Title Withheld (Shoot) was originally commissioned by Art Pace, a Foundation for Contemporary Art San Antonio and was made during the artist's residency in Texas. The piece exists as an installation where a darkened room is filled with twelve television monitors hung at different heights and angles . A fifteen minute loop of mainstream Hollywood films such as "Terminator" by James Cameron, "A Bullet in the Head" by John Woo and "Scarface" by Brian de Palma, are played on the screens, deliberately out of sync with each other. The movies have been edited to only show the shooting scenes, thus extracting them from their narrative context.

When escaping military conscription, Geers traveled to North America where he came across the perfomative works of artists such as Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Nikki de St. Phalle. The title of this video installation makes an obvious connection to Chris Burden's performance "Shoot" in 1971 at FSpace in California, where he asked a friend to shoot him in the arm in an empty gallery. As such, Burden brought an overt form of violence into the consecrated space of the museum, blurring the borders between life and art, but perhaps also pointing to the less literal violence that already existed, and I submit, has always existed inside museums and galleries. However, by refusing an audience, Burden imposed a mediated layer onto his work. As Ruggof writes, "Viewers were thus rendered voyeurs at one remove - a distanced relationship to violence that many Americans had already experienced thanks to the pervasive and graphic television coverage of atrocities in Vietnam" . As Brian O'Doherty suggests in his book Inside the White Cube, "perhaps the best avant-garde act would be to invite an audience and shoot it." While Geers's avant-gardism falls thankfully short, his video installation does, in a certain sense take aim at the audience itself. As viewers walk around the darkened room they are inevitably placed in the crossfire, as if in a game of Laser Quest, but without anything to hide behind. The monotony of the sound soon reaches a level of banality that would, I submit, play itself out differently in Texas than it would in Johannesburg. The fact that the viewers are not watching someone else being shot, but are themselves being shot at (by guns and the media), helps to reverse the voyeurism that is very evident in the work Untitled (1976).

If, however, these two works switched locations, their effects would not be exactly the same. For one, the impact of the Soweto Shooting would be diminished, if not lost in Texas, and it would, I submit, be reduced to sensationalism as its already mediated voyeurism would be heightened. It is important, as such, to be acutely aware of the potential violation maintained in an exhibition space, which is not simply a white cube in a zero-referential sphere. Similarly, it is extremely important to be very weary of the dominant art world's desire to curate the rest of the world, as if checking off a list of accomplishments in a surreptitiously imperialist way.

In another installation called Title Withheld (Deported), 1993-1997, Geers points to such potential museuological violence by actually putting his audience at risk. He exhibited an activated 6 000 volt electric fence inside the Pretoria Art Museum in a group show called Purple and Green curated by Abrie Fourie. The sign on the fence reads "DANGER, GEVAAR, INGOZI". While this work alludes to numerous socio-political ideas related to borders, nationalism and extradition, it also speaks volumes about the museum itself. An electric fence is inevitably interpreted differently depending on whether you are the one being kept out or the one being protected on the inside. In this case, the viewer is already inside the museum, inside the privileged space, but is then faced with this menacing structure. While viewers are generally forbidden to touch works in an art gallery or museum and are hounded by security guards if they step too close, the strong desire to touch this piece is quite unnerving. As an artwork, many would inevitably question whether or not it were really activated, and yet the sense of risk remains enormous.

A similar effect was created when Geers exhibited a bomb threat in a London gallery, London being a city fairly familiar with bombings. The artwork, in the form of a text hung on the wall, was titled "By Any Means Necessary" and an abridged version reads as follows:

A bomb has been hidden, somewhere in this exhibition, set to explode at a time known to the artist alone. While it is not my intention to kill anyone, that risk does exist. I apologise in advance for any injuries, fatalities, damage or other inconvenience that my work will cause. In this matter I have no choice, being as much a victim of the course of Art History and contemporary politics as those who are hurt in this process. I take consolation in the fact that chance will be entirely responsible for the final statistics& The bomb will cause serious, if not structural damage tot he Virginal White Cube of the space as well as totally destroy any works of art in the immediate vicinity of the explosion. The debris and shrapnel will later be mounted and sold as individual sculptures&

A police investigation will follow and a warrant issued for my arrest. Being guilty I will not resist, accepting full responsibility for my actions and implications thereof& Art Historians, Critics, Philosophers and Sociologists will be called upon to explain why my actions constitute a relevant work of art at this point in time. History will later debate and decide of the merits of the piece& This text will be presented as evidence of fair warning of the existence of the bomb as well as my intentions... The form of the piece (being what amounts to a terrorist attack) is simply a contemporary African artist's response to the world he lives in and the histories he has inherited.
Aluta Continua.
KENDELL GEERS.

 

Again, such a work would obviously illicit very different responses in different contexts, but as a South African myself, an initial thought of a bomb actually exploding would certainly enter my mind. Geers uses this sense of danger, admittedly more brief to some viewers than others, to raise questions about the dangerous categorizations in the art world and particularly in the museum and gallery space, that so desperately need to be transgressed. Geers is extremely critical of the art world and is very vocal about his thoughts. Considering some of the things that he has said in interviews, it is not surprising that he is South Africa's most wanted by critics and writers. When asked if he had ever been tempted to give up his career in the art world, Geers replied, "Every day. I love art but hate the art world. It's a small incestuous nepotistic quagmire of mediocrity& the gems are very well hidden in an enormous pile of bullshit."

The twist, however, is that Kendell Geers's work, that has so quickly gained international success (such as his inclusion in the Carnegie International 1999/2000), has to be examined by his own set of questions. For viewers, writers, critics and curators to take Geers seriously, they have to transgress simplistic readings of his work that dichotomously characterize him and his work as either African or European, cleverly conceptual or deceptively ineffectual, brilliant or fatuous, good or bad. For example, Okwui Enwezor, a man with an enormous amount of power in the international art world, has, I submit, mistakenly defended what I consider to be one of Geers's mediocre works in his eagerness to defend "an artist of quite some note" who occupies, "a central axis in the mercurial South African art world".

In 1994 Geers produced a piece called "Title Withheld (Hustler)" which consists of a Hustler Magazine centerfold that has been stained by the artist's own semen. On the one hand one could argue that Geers has simply responded to the Hustler Honey in precisely the way it was intended to be used. However, when printed as an already defiled centerfold and inserted as a separate sheet into his book Argot, there is potential for some level of subversion to occur. A careful analysis of this piece would have to take into consideration the money shot and its role in pornography. Linda Williams, who discusses the money shot at length in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible" suggests that the money shot, being "undeniably spectacular" yet "hopelessly specular", ultimately serves a phallic visual economy. Laura Kipnis's essay "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler" would also make an astute contribution to a reading of the piece as she attempts to dislodge a dichotomous "feminist anti-porn" versus "feminist pro-porn" discussion. Unfortunately though Enwezor's reading of "Title Withheld (Hustler)" is obliquely masculinist and over-simplistic. According to him "&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." He adds that the piece is "& 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)." Suggesting that Geers's use of the ready-made employs a Duchampian hyperbolism, Okwui Enwezor asserts that, "This sensibility also says more than being an ironist, he also wants to have fun as an artist&"Title Withheld (Hustler)" is art as fun house&"

Such a reading does little justice to any successful subversion that might exist in the piece. Instead, I see it as an example of a critic who unequivocally embraces Kendell Geers's work, thus risking a complete misunderstanding of the way Geers demands to be read. A more helpful way to read Geers would be to apply the title of the book Argot that he published on his work. Argot means slang, a vernacular language or a patois, that emphasizes a shift from the so-called origin. As Geers himself says, "No language is static, but is constantly mutating in relation to changing cultural and ideological needs. Argot particularly is one of the greatest threats to the survival of any historical language because of its sensitivity to shifts and changes." In order for there to be any successful subversion in art and the art world the hermeneutical responses to the work and those who produce this work have to constantly change and shift in relation to ideological and cultural needs. The work of Kendell Geers, then, has to be read with argot, otherwise he will sooner or later display the postmortem of the art itself, and viewers, critics, writers and curators will gleefully claps their hands, oblivious to their own unseemly death.