interview with peta krost

Saturday Star, January 24 1998

 

He has sold sperm-stained Hustler centrefolds, towels covered in semen and a handful or coins tossed on the ground as "works of art". Kendell Geers is the enfant terrible of the South African art world at the age of 30. His name is denigrated around town, especially among artists. Doing a little research on this fellow, I was astounded to hear so many swear words and derogatory names. Just how bad can one person be? I expected a pretentious, poncy, societal reject - someone arrogant and rude because they have a God-given talent. But blow me down, I landed up liking the dreaded Geers. He appeared sincere and passionate, and has a boyish charm about him. Dressed in black with his freckled complexion, light cropped hair and baby blue eyes, he looks more like a prankish teenager than a devil. When I told him I expected him to be horribly arrogant, he was quite defensive, saying: "But I am!" Sitting in a Rosebank coffee shop, Geers attributes his being so despised to his "not playing the game according to anybody's rules but his own". He describes his art as "scratching where it does not itch", which upsets people because it usually entails shocking them. "I don't go out to be controversial for the sake of it; in fact only one in lO of my works shocks," he says. Just last weekend, Geers made headlines with his so-called Guilty exhibition set to take place at Fort Klapperkop. Geers had planned a solo "occupation" of the fort (opened 100 years ago by Paul Kruger) "in the name of art". Geers sparked an outcry and the French Institute of South Africa withdrew its sponsorship shortly before the Pretoria City Council withdrew its invitation to him. He still intended to get there but, he says, the police stopped him from entering the grounds. So he flew over the fort in a plane on Sunday with the word "Guilty" in four languages suspended behind it. He claims all the media coverage he received was all part of his work of art. Last weekend's venture has taken Geers full circle: 15 years ago he ran away from what Afrikaans culture represented to him. Geers, who sounds the furthest thing from an Afrikaner, is just that. He was born Jacobus Hermanus Pieter Geers on the wrong side of Germiston to a working class family. "I was white trash" he says. His father was an abusive alcoholic mechanic and many members of his extended family were policemen. His mother ran away from his father when Geers was just a boy and thereafter he had "many temporary mothers". At 15, he ran away from his father and family, never to have anything more to do with them. "I ran away from their bigotry and intolerance and within the last week I returned to that point through this Guilty debacle" Since he ran away, he has refused to speak Afrikaans and set about inventing the Kendell Geers we see today. "I was completely ignorant of anything in arts and culture and I saw naked women with tits and arse as art," he says. "I believed that art was something made by moffies and crazies." Being an artist was the furthest thing from his mind. I almost fell over when be said he had planned to become a doctor or a mathematician. He saw this as a way out of his awful background. Between Standard 8 and matric, his dread of his inevitable conscription into the army grew "The idea of having some arsehole having the right to tell me what to do because of the virtue of the stripes on his shoulders sickened me." Geers is obviously not into being told what to do. To ensure he stayed out of the army he planned to go to university. He applied for medicine at Wits but on the application form he had to give a second choice, which peeved him. So he went for the other extreme, something ridiculous. He chose fine art. He sat in on a class on Dada in the art department, where he heard that these artists did the irrational opposite of what happened around them. He immediately related to them and his career path was set. To pay for university he took and sold photographs of people in restaurants. "As an artist, one's social standing is almost non-existent but, in all honesty I love what I do." He may love it but his competitors don't. "The art world is a tiny cesspool and while I while I may criticise the art of others, it is not a personal thing. I am ruthless in my career and while I may criticise their work I do not judge them personally." Geers is extremely critical of art in South Africa and the academic system in which art is taught. "If your teachers like your work, you are no good at it. We are a new generation, so they should not be able to identify with our work," he says. At university he was the art department's hot potato. "No one knew quite what to do with me because I don't sanitise things - I cut to the chase and ask too many questions. I was, and still am, an inside-outsider" Geers admits this position is a little lonely but says it entitles him to see things in perspective". I cannot see the artistic value of wearing a latex Nelson Mandela mask to meet the president, nor in becoming a member of every major political party registered before the 1994 elections. When I asked Geers about this, he seemed to be taken off guard. "I don't feel the need to answer this - it is not a question I find interesting" he said. But he admitted he was not sure if his election stunt was in fact a work of art, and if it was, he wasn't sure why "I generally like to leave it up to art critics to decide whether to bestow such a title on my work." The Idea of being an artist is not one that he really likes. "It is unnecessarily limiting - I don't feel the need for such titles," he says. "I don't work from within the realms of art because art has become a pathetic in-house joke." He claims his art is a full time career in which he pushes himself to extremes to find "things that unsettle me. Therein lies the work and it is my task to find the key to translate it into art." While he is undoubtedly "scratching where it does not itch" and "going where most people fear to go", he is condemned by many in the art world as a shameless self-promoter who cons people with his brazen opportunism. Darryl Accone, editor of The Star Tonight is one of the cultured few who admire Geers and believe he is "one of the few artists in South Africa who knows what's cutting". Accone says Geers "has an international perspective on art." However, he sees him as "a widely misunderstood, lone voice in the local art field". Another controversial issue surrounding Geers is that his second profession is that of art critic and part time curator. How dare he criticise and condemn his competitors in such a competitive field? Accone believes Geers writes without advantaging or disadvantaging himself. Geers claims no one is queuing up for his art critic job because it is a discipline few want to enter. "Instead of standing on the sidelines and complaining that there are not enough critics, I just go and do it - it's the way I am." While I had heard he had a girlfriend admired for her beauty, he would not give any clues about her or about any other special people in his life. He won't reveal where he lives,~except to say it is not the northern suburbs because he claims people who live there are too adept at masking their feelings. "Eastgate is far more honest than HydePark," he says. But wherever Geers appears, he's sure to be wearing black. "I always wear black on the outside because I am black on the inside. If I had to see myself as a colour it would be anarchic black. I see myself as a quintessential African, so if I am not black on the outside, then I must be black inside"