heart of darkness

toast coetzer, 2000

 

I couldn't have been more under-prepared for this interview. Never seen any of his work, never met him before, just read this one article about "shock art in another magazine (which Kendell later calls a load of crap). It's the day before the opening of the joint exhibition by Kendell and Bili Bidjocka at the Grahamstown Festival and all I really want to do is eat lunch. But for the next hour, I would have one of the most engaging conversations of my life. Make no mistake, Kendell Geers is clever, very.

Dressed in black, brushcut on top and eyes that lock onto yours and demand attention. But first I have a look at the exhibition. Deep in the gut of the sickly square Settlers Monument Theatre in Grahamstown lies the Gallery in the Round (predictably round and directly under the main stage). The location of Heart of Darkness is pivotal to some aspects of its interpretation and already I catch a whiff of post-colonialism. Luring you down the stairs is the static-filled, disconcerting sound of someone whispering "the horror, the horror", a sound which bounces around the dark gallery itself, seemingly out of all directions. The only light in the gallery comes from TV screens and tiny light bulbs scattered around the room. The light bulbs hang from the ceiling inside long, transparent plastic dresses (body-bags, I thought initially) which have words and phrases printed on them. There are only two regular images on the screens B that of two dying men, who I later find out are Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and John Malkovich in the film Heart of Darkness. Every now and then though, the images change for an instant, revealing a different picture, some of the screens roll the image, others switch of loudly at intervals. You try to look at all the screens at once, but you can't, they're scattered all over. I loiter around for half an hour, check all the TV screens, read all the phrases, scratch my head and have to ask: "Kendell, very briefly, what is Heart of Darkness about?"

KG: Very generally, it's about a dialogue between an artist from SA and an artist from Cameroon who have both traveled extensively. Bili Bidjoka lives in Paris, he lives in NY, I travel extensively. A dialogue between two artists B looking at Africa, the heart of darkness, the dark continent which is where we both come from, but looking at it from an international perspective. Looking at Africa through our experiences in a very multifaceted planet which is about information, about the internet, magazines, TV B mass media. Like cinema, and how cinema constructs our identity and how we're as influenced by American cinema as American people are. Africa's no longer the lost continent where information doesn't arrive at, we're now participating as equal partners in the information superhighway.

TC: I suppose using this space here in the 1820 Monument, in Grahamstown, is deliberately ironic, because of the postcolonial themes one can read into the work?

KG:Yes, definitely. It's about understanding that text (Joseph Conrad's book "Heart of Darkness"), about literature, but it's also about a journey into the mind, a journey into the soul. And for me this building, this space, this gallery is the soul of the 1820 monument and it's our journey into the centre of it. That's why you hear it as you come down the steps, this is the call, but it emanates throughout the whole building. That's why the banner (advertising the exhibition) is hanging on the yellow-wood logo of the 1820 Monument, so this gallery is to this building what the banner is to the logo.

TC: The exhibition says a lot of things, but there's also a postmodern sense of something unsayable in there: the TV images elude you, the words uttered by the characters hard to make out (they're actually saying "the horror, the horror"), or what?

KG: For me, advertising and the mass media, commercial media is about giving you a fixed answer: Coca Cola adds life, Coca Cola is the real thing. And for me, art is the opposite, art is about opening questions, about ambiguity, mystery. It's about taking the world you live in and shifting it slightly on its axis. So suddenly you have to re-look at yourself in relation to the world. So when you walk in here, you can't rely on your senses anymore, you can't rely on what you think you know anymore. It's about your mind, it's about looking at yourself in relation to what you think you hear and see. It's precisely about taking away the safety of the known. And the longer you stay in there, you actually start finding more and more information. So then you start to read the text, which you don't see at first. Or you start to realise that, in the videos, it looks the same, but it's not the same. Every now and then you see other information and other things happen, or you hear something else that you didn't hear before. So it's about a layering of information and the more time you spend with a work of art, the more you get. That's no different from any work of art - the more time you stand in front of the Mona Lisa, the more you'll understand it.

TC: If you've read Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and seen the featured movies, it would certainly help to interpret the work, but what if someone who's totally foreign to those texts, or let's say foreign to interpreting art B like my mother, walks in? What can the much sought after Man in the Street get from this?

KG: I can't say, because I'm not that person. I know for a fact that it's easier for your mother or the person in the street to appreciate this kind of art than to stand in front of a painting. The reason why Bili and I make this kind of art is precisely because we live in the here and now. That's why I work with video, because it's about the present. I don't paint, because I think painting is a language very few people understand. So I'm producing work in such a way that, if just the lights, the spectacle, the beauty of it is there to seduce anybody who has absolutely no knowledge of art. And the more you know, the more of the text and subtext that you're able to understand, the more you'll take away from a work of art. And for me the truly great art is such that anybody can take something from it. We have a broken record in this country people complain about art being elitist, ballet being elitist. I really think that is to underestimate the intelligence of the audience. And what we're doing is that we keep lowering the standard of our art, to the level of real drivel B and I mean that across the board B in order to appeal to the Common Man and then the Common Man goes off and watches Steven Spielberg anyway. So why don't we try and craft our art to be the highest possible standard, so that we become internationally comparable, and then educate the Common Man to understand our work. And I do think that anybody can understand Heart of Darkness.

TC: And how do you propose we educate people?

KG: With knowledge and information. With visual arts, for instance, you teach people how to look. I think that we underestimate people. To watch a Steven Spielberg film and to sift through it you also have the skills to decode a work of art. But we assume that they're two totally separate disciplines. It just takes a little bit of commitment. The video images show two people uttering their last words, is there some sort of implication in that for Africa? Of course. I don't think Africa's got a copyright on death, people are dying all the time. And as an artist, I'm always interested in these questions of life and death and in between you have sex. And those are the great themes of my work, to try and understand my role in relation to the world and my own mortality. And where I'm coming from and where I'm going to. We all end up in death and I think it's one of the recurring themes in art, whether it's the crucifixion - it's one of the most famous images in art, it's an image of death and the role that death plays in our society and culture. It's there, everywhere, completely pervasive and yet at the same time we pretend it's not. I think more paintings have been painted on death than any other theme and yet we pretend art is not about death, which I find very curious.

TC: So what do you ask from anyone walking into this exhibition?

KG: An open mind, leave your prejudices behind. You don't have to respond, come and take a look with your eyes, open your mind. I cannot force anybody to respond in any way. I always see art as a bridge, I build the one half and it's up to the viewer to build the other half and we meet halfway.

TC: Can something really arbitrary, like working at the supermarket, become art or be made into art?

KG: There's a lot of really bad art going around the world at the moment. People have realised it's possible for just about anything to be a work of art and therefore they do just about anything. But everything has a history and everything has a context, so no, I don't think that just working at the supermarket can be a work of art. I think it needs to be coded in such a way that turns it into a work of art. There is a possibility that such an experience could be art, but art's about posing questions, shifting things, changing things. And if you're just working at the supermarket B that's reality, that's life, there's nothing about art. You'll have to work at the supermarket with a switch in order to transform it into a work of art. You've got to go that extra step somewhere before it becomes art - otherwise it's just mundane.

TC: Now for the bad part, what's all this shock art stuff? The tag has been put on some of your own work, but what do you think about it? Personally I think it's something that happens to electricians!

KG: I have no idea what shock art is. From time to time, my work has become controversial. And when that happens I'm always amazed, because it says more about the people who think I'm controversial than it says about me. I don't think I'm controversial, I think I'm reflecting the world I'm living in. And there're positive sides and there're negative sides, there's horrific sides and beautiful sides to that world. I'm reflecting it all and I don't think that I'm a one-dimensional person or very simplistic. I like to think that it's like a pie-graph and there're all sorts of things in there. Occasionally I make things that people find shocking and sometimes I make things that people don't find shocking. And I hope that people look at an exhibition like this and then begin to think about the apparently shocking or controversial things that I've made with an open mind and realise that I'm not deliberately doing things for the sake of doing them. I don't try and shock people for the sake of shocking. I try to pose questions, absolutely, questions about life and death, because I think in South Africa we're all confronted with that every single day. And I think it's only very stupid and lazy critics who use words like "shock art" B with two words, you can dismiss an entire body of work, and that's ridiculous. It's a way of them walking away of what they should be doing and that is to get to the bottom of why I do what I do. I think it's very arrogant to want to shock people, because I don't have the right to do that. I just do what I do. If you come along and you're shocked, you're speaking for yourself, not for me. That's your half of the bargain.

TC: In general on the South African art scene, do you think more people are turning to multimedia as a medium as you are?

KG: I think that's a simplistic way of understanding art. Take for instance William Kentridge. He's doing traditional drawings and he's turning them into animated films B but very kind of classical, traditional animated films. And I think he's making some of the most incredible work that anyone is producing in the world today. What you actually have in the South African art scene at the moment is that you have a group of artists who are starting to produce international work, they're starting to pull away. And the people who are left behind are becoming more and more parochial and nepotistic. And they're all running around crying conspiracy. There's no conspiracy, they're just left behind, time is leaving them behind. It's about information, it's about a boycott and isolation that has created the nepotism that tends to surround the South African art world. I think, with effort, anybody can understand what's going on in the international art world. That's where someone like William Kentridge becomes a role-model and inspiration for me. I think he's the first and only artist ever from the African continent who can actually claim to be completely international. We are all walking in his footsteps from now on.

TC: What sets this group of artists that you're talking about apart from the others, is it the themes pursued in their art?

KG: It's not about themes. What sets them apart is professionalism. They don't do art as a hobby, they do it as a profession, as a career B they do it properly. They present their work professionally and they discuss their work professionally. They know what they're doing as opposed to the Sunday painter. A lot of people would say that they are professional artists, but their actions prove that they're not. And I think that's very much what's happening in this very painful separation. It's not about money that makes art professional, it's about attitude. I made the master copies for the tapes in this exhibition on ordinary VHS tape recorders. It cost me the hire of two films and two blank cassettes. I think the excuse that you don't have money is not sufficient for you to be unable to behave professionally. It's about how you conduct yourself, how you understand your relationship with art and the world that you're living in.

TC: A stray bullet question But what would happen if all the artists in the world would stop producing art for a whole year?

KG: I think that you would create a culturally bankrupt world. The numbers of people who go and look at art exhibitions are small, we know that, but they're the quality people. And I don't mean that in any sort of classist way. These people are the sort of people who then go out and influence ten or fifteen people in their jobs and those people then go out and influence a hundred people and so on B it trickles down. And without you realising, the effects of art are there and they penetrate very deep into the world. For instance, all the time advertising or marketing people come to me and say that they watch my work very carefully and they go to my exhibitions, because from there they had the germination for an idea. And I've seen my work turned into advertising. Adverts that you won't even realise might have had its origin in an art exhibition. I think if art stops for a year, you'll find that the entire advertising industry and film industry would shut down. You have this dove-tail relationship with all the artforms and they all do influence each other, whether it's in a way that's completely didactic or not. So yes, I think that it would be a catastrophe, I think that you'll have a lot more wars for instance. TC:

Do you think there're more outlets for art as we near the much-feared end of the millenium?

KG: I think that, right now in South Africa, we've hit an all-time low when it comes to the visual arts. I think that the support for art is atrocious and abysmal and unless our government starts to get its act together very soon, you're going to find a cultural drain. We've had a brain drain and it's a matter of time before this country starts losing all its artists, unless government and leaders in society begin to take our artists more seriously. Here I include various institutions that fund the arts, so-called non-profit organizations, who are funding the wrong kinds of art. They're funding things for political reasons and not because they're the best works of art to be funding. And that must stop, otherwise we're going to kill this country. The artists will survive, they'll just leave the country and that's the danger. Ten days after this interview, I wander back up to the monument to see "Heart of Darkness" again before it leaves town. I go with a friend, we wander around, sit around, shut up, talk a bit. From above us, music filters through from the main theatre, classical strains clashing violently with the incessant, distressing humming of the ongoing mantra "the horror, the horror". My friend has read "Heart of Darkness" and tells me the story of a man looking for himself, running from a continent by hiding in it. It's our continent, but it's also the world's continent. It's the same struggle, the same oppression, the same deceit, the same glories everywhere. We can't run from our world, this insistent planet under our feet. Kendell Geers and Bili Bidjocka know this, other artists too. All they ask is that we give art the chance it deserves, allow its questions to be asked and the rest is, as Kendell said, our part of the bridge. You can think of "Heart of Darkness" what you want, but do think about it. I don't know why, but a line from a Matthew van der Want song keeps on drifting through my head: "Let it be asked: were you there when water killed velvitchia?"