"PHOENIX EXPELLED"

christine macel, ARTPRESS, 257, 2000, PAGES 28-33

 

Christine Marcel: Do you remember this quotation by Nietzche in his third dissertation of the Genealogy of Morals where he speaks of the notion of « interest », that you can not make or look at art without being deeply « interested in » it - an urgent and very primitive need - not far from Bataille with his concept of « dépense » or from Antonin Artaud. It is somewhere before aesthetics, a more radical thinking about what art should be. Art that can put you in danger as it used to be in the spirit of Plato (the artist is a danger for the city) until the 18th century when art became far more concerned with aesthetics instead. This seems to me very important in your art.

Kendell Geers: This idea of the artist as being a dangerous and subversive force in society has been the driving force behind my art from the very beginning. A lot of people see my work as being related to Duchamp but it is absolutely not - it has never been about the found object, but rather about evoking a sense of danger, an explosion of energy directed towards the complete implosion of language, that moment where it all falls apart.

CM : There are people who seem to only notice the conceptual aspects of your work.

KG : Because they get stuck in the binary Duchampian conception of art where the world of art is defined according to 2 categories only whereby everything is defined as either "a work of art" or "not a work of art." I find this division not only simplistic but high reductive. There is a great deal more to life than just art.

CM : You are less known for these objects that you now speak about than for your videos works.

KG : Even my video works are never really about video either. Take the "Medusa Dreaming" installation at Marian Goodman in Paris for instance - the images on the screens were only one element that can only be understood within the full context of the piece. It was hard not to notice that the floor had disappeared into an ocean of cables and live electricity endlessly moving back and forth between the various television sets. If you were too preoccupied with the image on the screen there was a good chance that you would trip and fall. The construction of the installations are as important to me as the images for it implicates the viewer into the work making them an integral part of it.

CM : Your installations have attempted to reconceptualise the medium of video through the presentation and dramatic use of raw industrial materials like palettes, cables, plugs and television sets.

KG : I use the pallette in part as a vulgar pun on the painters craft really, but more than that its about the by-products of universal trade and commerce. These crude wooden constructions can be found everywhere in the world today as they are the left overs from shipping goods like sugar, paper, tobacco, guns or whatever. But the pallette is absolutely unimportant compared with the goods they support and are more often than not thrown away once the goods have been sold. I have always found it fascinating that the status of "Art" is only accorded an object once its original use has been lost. When an object is totally useless and has no other social value or function. Last year I built "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" at the ARCO Fair in Madrid entirely from materials that had been used to transport works of art for the other galleries. Same with the piece I made for the 5th Havana Biennial in1994 which was constructed using the empty crates and packing materials from all the other participating artists, thereby implicating the entire organisation and process of how such a Biennial functions. As soon as the shows were over the crates and palettes became useful once again and my work ceased to exist. Extracting or recycling objects, images and situations from reality is for me a way of trying to understand how value and meaning are constructed.

CM : You seem to be very preoccupied by the context where your work is exhibited. For "Medusa Dreaming" you cite Géricault's "Radeau de la Méduse" in the Louvre as a departure point and for the piece called "The Lovers" you spoke of Brancusi's "Le Baiser" as well as Man Ray's work by the same title

KG : Whenever I am developing a new work I always begin with the context as a starting point. On a micro-level for instance I developed the "Suburbia" series of photographs whilst considering the work of Dan Graham, another Marian Goodman artist whose work I greatly respect and admire. On a macro-level the other two works considered not only the sources you mention but also Paris in general and the ancient myths that have shaped the city as well as contemporary histories and urban legends. Making art for me is always about charging history and discharging reality.

CM : This is the first time that you have exhibited photographs. How do you place the "Suburbia" series within your oeuvre?

KG : I have always taken photographs but never thought of them as independent works of art. I think of "Suburbia" as being somewhere between source material and forensic documentation. As with all my work I see them as being part of a larger process and connected to the issues being explored in the other works. Johannesburg is an extreme re-interpretation of social space where people protect themselves by creating jails in which they willingly sentence themselves to a lifetime of imprisonment and call it freedom. I am particularly fascinated how paranoia functions in creating these paradise islands of order. Utopia is manufactured here in a very perverse kind of way. Each of these images is a portrait of the people who live there, about the decisions they have made in order to feel "at home." Some of the homes are of people who work within the art world, people like Okwui Enwezor or William Kentridge and in that way the series relates to the piece "Maquette for Private Eye" in which I hired a Private Investigator to follow Rudi Fuchs around for one week and document his private life.

CM : "Blind Man's Bluff," the work you exhibited at the Vienna Secession and "Poetic Justice" which you exhibited at the Carnegie International both ended up with notices about being "disturbing" for children and sensitive viewers. The work "Stand Off" in Bonn can only be viewed on weekends because the museum staff refused to work and threatened to boycott on account of the extreme volume. Would you say that the element of danger is common to all your works?

KG : I believe that the viewing of art preoccupied with aesthetics, including conceptual art, has become a passive act with little or no implications outside the picture frame or beyond the white cube. In response I have tried to actively engage the viewer by setting up a "Reality Principle" that forces him or her to accept responsibility for their presence within the piece. The viewer has no option but realise the morality of their aesthetic decisions and judgements. Danger, excess and violence are some of the strategies I use to create this element of risk, strategies that I learnt as an Anti-Apartheid activist, but which are common to any low intensity conflict situation like that of the IRA or the Baader Meinhoff gang.

CM : When I first walked into "Blind Man's Bluff" I felt a deep sense of horror, but then it transformed into a very beautiful, calming piece where the noise became less disturbing. This is very paradoxical considering the images of these eyes which were all being cut into, torn back or taped open. Your work really speaks about emotions and affects

KG : I have often heard about or encountered people crying in some of my installations. Some run away immediately whereas others stay for a very long time, unable to draw themselves away. I have tried to give expression to that point where emotion strips language of all its power to control us. I have for years been fascinated by the impulse that draws us to the scene of a crime or the debris of a violent accident where we lose ourselves to a frenzy of fear and exhilaration. It's the same with the sounds - once you drop your prejudices and abandon your expectations they become more of a mantra or perhaps even a litany. Its like repeating any word over and over again, caught in an unrelenting loop where the original meanings are smashed against the wall and other meanings and implications begin to emerge. In this sense I have been very influenced by William Burrough's book "The Electronic Revolution" in which he makes a case for language being a virus and how sounds created from cut up words and texts can be used to destroy this virus. He explains that specific sounds can even induce illness whilst yet others are the antidote.

CM : You seem less interested in maintaining a theoretical position than in creating visceral moments of unease.

KG : I really feel that whilst all the theories that typified the 80's and 90's were really important in placing art within a political and social context, they did also create the current situation where art has become over theorized and even more of a commodity fetish than ever before. Everything that could not be controlled and everything that was a little dangerous was rejected in favour of neat little theoretical packages that have nothing to do with life. Art may have retreated into its white cube gallery perfectly quarantined itself off from life but the cracks are beginning to show. In the end I think that its all connected and can thus be contaminated - the wires in my video installations are used to create this sense of contamination, everything is connected to everything else, a metaphor of life.

CM : The figure of the discharge, of expulsion, is something that I can trace in all your pieces from the very early burnt paintings, through works like "Hustler," "H.I.V.+", "T.W. (Blow)" to the video installations like "T.W. (Shoot)" or the nuclear explosions of "T.W. (Abstract). This is linked to the energy of life itself.

KG : Even a work like "Stand Off" is the extreme discharge of sound. Standing in between the two screens the viewer was confronted by the physicality of the sounds which you feel in the pit of your stomach far more than in your ears. This is something very central in my work, a kind of purging I suppose, the purging of the control mechanisms in our lives. For me the work of art is a catalyst in this sense.

CM : You do ask the viewer for a lot of attention, a lot of involvement, the way you use video is a very participative strategy.

KG : It is very important that my work actively engages the viewer and demands the same back. At the same I hope that my work is also generous, that the process is also an exchange. There is always the option to walk away or turn around but if the viewer decides to stay then a dialogue begins to take place. As an artist I try to engage with life in a combatant sort of way where one experiences life to the extreme, the residue of which becomes my art. I am sure that one day either I or my art will go too far and i am going to die as a result. I have already been placed on the South African Neo-Nazi hit list as a result of a work I made called "Guilty." Perhaps it will be more banal than heroic and something technical will go wrong and I will electrocute myself.

CM : Have your ideas been influenced at all by Georges Bataille ?

KG: Sexuality is another danger or excess that I use to destabilise language and in this sense I can see how Bataille influenced my work particularly with his writings on sexuality and death. But I think of him less as an academic and more as a drunk anarchist and sometimes as a misunderstood genius. He is an inspiration inasmuch as he took enormous chances and risks. I like that some of the books are the rants and ravings of a drunkard. The value of Bataille for me is not as a point of arrival but rather that he sends me on a journey, that he sparks off so many thoughts and possibilities in my head. In this way I am drawn to Guy Debord as well. In my life right now I am not searching for theories as much as a return to the sensory and the visceral. I am so tired of the languages of art that have become so claustrophobic and prescriptive and am now far more interested in the visceral, in that which cannot quite be defined or described, that which lies on the tip of our tongue but cannot quite be expressed. Its where the familiar twists around and suddenly becomes your own corpse staring back at you.

CM: Have you completely abandoned aesthetics and beauty as elements in your work? Some of the installations seem very beautiful to me.

KG: There is far too much beauty in the world than for me to try capture or kidnap it for the titillation of the art institution. Of course there is that element of beauty in my works but its more about the residue of the process or the intrinsic beauty of the material world than something I contrived. I am attracted to the kind of dangerous beauty that can harm you, like the moth which falls in love with the flame. There are many kinds of beauty for I am sure that the rat thinks of the sewer as being beautiful. It is also about how things can grow in the dark or in hostile environments and still be beautiful. The rat is a fascinating animal that has survived centuries despite every attempt to kill them off. No matter how perverse its environment became it adapted and changed, thriving on effluence and living without sunshine, without love, without water. Maybe that's one of the problems with so much contemporary art for too much love can also become claustrophobic.