landmines in the gallery

jerome sans, TRANS > #8, 2000, pages 268 - 274

 

Jerome Sans: The question of South Africa where your were born is very sensitive. And your work has been often read as post Apartheid. Don't you think this is a misunderstanding ?

Kendell Geers: I really hate this question and it comes up so often. Of course my work is connected to where I was born inasmuch as any artist is connected to where they were born. But coming from South African it seems to always get stuck there and never move on the really important issues about art, about the strategies I use and why. It would be like speaking about Damian Hirst's work only in terms of his being British or Mathew Barney as being American. The world today is a small place and as an artist I am influenced by all sorts of things that are not only about being African or having lived most of my life in the Third World .

JS But what about the violence, the fear in your work ?

KG Naturally by growing up within a perverse context like Apartheid South Africa I witnessed first hand all sorts of atrocities that continue to influence what I make and how I see the world. But you must remember that these things are not as much about South Africa as they are about the human condition. Look at what's been happening in Kosova, in Mexico's Chiapas or even the streets of the Paris Suburbs, the things that we human beings are capable of. For me its about where we lose everything that we think makes us cultured and our words fail us, about the moment when we find all that we have learnt and been taught is not enough to express ourselves. Its not just about violence or fear but about any emotion or condition. Take for instance the sound we make when our soccer team scores a goal or when we are making love or even a simple moment of extreme beauty. Its about that which lurks within everyone of us just beneath the surface of civil society.

JS Do you mean you are talking about the fragility of the human being ?

KG Absolutely! With my installations I try to create a situation in which the viewer is made conscious of their body in space, aware of the act of looking and thus implicated in the work itself. When you are standing in the centre of a piece like "T.W. (Shoot)" you are being assaulted visually by the images pounding away on both sides of you whilst the extreme sound track crawls inside your stomach, all the while trying to negotiate your steps through the loose wires strewn across the floor like landmines. You begin to understand just how fragile you are as your senses begin to fail you and you feel totally disorientated emotionally as well as physically.

JS It seems that each time in your installation you try to create such a destabilisation ?

KG It was my experiences in the fight against Apartheid that alerted me to the power of destabilisation as a strategy. We are fighting a war against the mediocrisation of art through the purging of everything that is not banal or decorative. I am not interested in passive viewers who walk by the beautiful "invisible spaces" that pretend to be art . I try to create pieces in which the viewer has to accept responsibility for their presence in the work of art. Of course they are always free to walk away or move on but if they decide to engage with my work then the process becomes an active one. On a very literally level if you are not thinking about where you are walking and what you are doing there is often the danger that you could in fact hurt yourself. Danger is something that I think is present in all my works even if its sometimes more covert than others.

JS Is it a strategy to oblige the viewer to take position ? Art as position ?

KG Is that not what life is all about ? Everytime we cross the road or make love we make decisions that are about staying alive, about one position or another . Art has lost touch with reality and the sorts of decisions that are about living in the world today. It seems to me that the White Cube has become a quarantine from life and in turn generated some very boring art which is about nothingness as a strategy. As an artist all I am trying to do is maintain contact with the world that I am living in.

JS Is it why you are producing a kind of " infection " or " contamination " of the traditional frozen or generic White cube space for exhibition ?

KG Oh yes! I use sound as one element of contagion precisely because it cannot be contained or disinfected, leaking out all over the place and infusing the walls and floors that ultimately consumes the viewer. The silent halls of the gallery or museum always reminds me of a hospital or a place where something has just died and we need to speak in whispers. My sounds are not necessarily always loud but they always cut to the bone, sink inside our flesh and blood to that point where we are most human, and most fragile. The art world itself is fragile as well but it refuses to accept that about itself.

JS Are you talking about a "virus" system ?

KG If you like. I prefer to think of myself more as a cultural terrorist working the way a computer virus operates infecting the system right at the core in the programming . JS But what then is your program ?

KG I think that in order to be really effective as an artist you have to reinvent yourself all the time as the world changes, constantly redefining your strategies and techniques. As soon as I understand what I am doing even for myself I feel the need to create more challenges that force me to change and develop. Its like a prison sentence - I am in this for life and so have time to make mistakes and embrace the unknown.

JS Is this why as a cultural terrorist your actions are most of the times site specific ?

KG If I did not think carefully about where I was exhibiting and respond to the history and politics and psychology of that place I would be just another decorative artist. Whenever I create a new work I always try to respond to that site but I dont think its site-specific work as such because I am working with the human being at the centre of my thinking and how the human fits into history and into space. I understand objects and histories and places as being the residue of the humans that have lived there and left these things behind as memories or the physical embodiment of their deepest fears, guilt and desires.

JS That is why your work has a big emotional part and physicality at the same time ?

KG Emotions are not the subject of my work but one of the materials. I try to create a physical presence in the work that the viewer realises is inhabiting the same space and time as they are . The emotional aspect of the work becomes a bridge that the viewer has to walk across if they are to understand what's going on. But I must say at this point that I am definitely not speaking about emotions in some pathetic hippy sort of way. When I speak about emotions its about the raw and the visceral, about extreme states of being. In order to create this state one needs a physical presence, something larger than life so to speak.

JS Your are now often read as a " video artist " although you deal with sculptural issues. What do you think about that label?

KG Video is only one element in my work and only in some works. From the very smallest work to the hugest installation I am always working with space and with materials. I am extremely comfortable living in the 21st century where the digital has become a totally integral part of our lives. I feel very comfortable switching between video and the internet and computers and raw scaffolding and electricity cable. I am living in a time when its possible to fuse the digital with the analogue, the television screen with the human brain. I think that if you think of my work as being "Videoart " you have totally misunderstood the work. Its convenient for the art world to create these categories but its precisely the in-between where i feel most comfortable both as a person and an artist. Art historians have always used such labels and categorisation as a way of dividing in order to rule and thus define for themselves what has happened in art in order to serve their own ends.

JS But normally you speak about your work as sculpture.

KG I think that I have never really been able to completely purge myself of the formalist education I was taught at art school. My interest is in materials and their spacial relationships which makes it very sculptural. Whenever I create an installation I am very aware of the sculptural dimension and often find myself thinking back to artists like Brancusi and his notion of truth to materials. Even if my materials are quite different from his, the principle remains the same I think. When working with an emotion for instance I allow it the freedom I would any other material that it be the purest expression of itself and not to sentimentalise it or wipe its arse that it become a better commodity.

JS What would be your most contemporary references for your work ?

KG I would say that cinema and the internet are each in their own way my most significant structural sources of inspiration and reference. I am curious by the extreme high brow nature of the one and the extreme low brow nature of the other and how they have both become so universal, simultaneously existing everywhere in the world. I think that we are both of a generation that grew up watching films and this has influenced the way we see the universe. I mean we all live inside that world where we feel somehow related to Harvey Keitel or Al Pacino, that they are our cousins or god-fathers. It has been from these people that we have learnt our lessons in life, from them that we have understood the difference between good and evil. Cinema has replaced the church in that sense. The internet is the place where go to find everything else , where anything is possible and you can be anyone. The internet is the first space I have ever found where the concept of freedom does exist and where borders have become irrelevant. Every attempt to control it has failed because nobody owns the internet and nobody can. I love the fluidity of it. My art tries to bring these two extremes together, the high and the low, the dirty visceral pungency of the internet with the cool high-budget subversion of Hollywood.

JS You have been an activist in South Africa, fighting for contemporary art in magazines,... do you still feel engaged? and How?

KG The question of South Africa is really a most painful one for me. I live in a state of self-exile, constantly travelling away from where I come from. This is in part due to the fact that I feel extremely unwelcome at home as a result of what I think and what I make as an artist. But having said that I also feel an enormous sense of responsibility towards the country and am constantly working towards improving the state of art back home. Whenever I meet an artist or curator who I think could positively contribute to South Africa I invite them to exhibit or lecture or just visit the country. Its going to take a very long time to fix the extreme damage that was caused by Apartheid and the Cultural Boycott.

JS Would you move to another country?

KG I don't really have an option but to live outside of South Africa but I don't think I am any less South African or any less African in the same way that not living in Israel does not make you less Jewish. Being African is as much a state of mind or attitude as it is a geography.

JS How do you see South Africa now ?

KG When I first introduced the notion of Conceptual Art, Installations and even Video based work in South Africa in 1988 my proposition was met with extreme suspicion and aggression. It was of course the time of Neo-Expressionism and everybody was drawing like William Kentridge or painting like Anselm Keifer so it was in a way understandable that such a challenge to the status quo would not be taken seriously. Now a decade later everything has changed and everybody is calling themselves a conceptual or video artist. I think it's very healthy that things have changed in that way and that the South African art world has opened up its mind to art after Modernism. But the aggression and nepotism of isolation still pervades and it gets really nasty as times as artists try to trip each other up or catch one another out in the race to Chelsea. I think that the more South African artists get out there and the more international artists exhibit in South Africa, the better the situation will become.