On Lies and Language in the work of Kendell Geers
Fiona Bradley, "my tongue in your cheek" 2001

 

Kendell Geers (born May 1968, lives and works in London, Leipzig, Vienna and Alphaville)1 is as unreliable a witness to the work produced in his name as the Cretan of Epimenidess classic Cretan Liar Paradox: the Cretan who says all Cretans are liars true or false?

Geers is both a liar and a lie, a persona as much as a person. He is an authorial voice constructed in and for the artists work, an identity almost every element of which is assumed. The first name is a pseudonym, adopted in an attempt to evade the patriarchal authority of his conventional family, in which all first born males are identically named. The date of birth was chosen to coincide with the student uprisings in Paris, Mexico City, Prague and the United States, as well as the death of Marcel Duchamp. The multiple residences, although (with the exception of the fictional Alphaville) places in which the artist has simultaneously lived, are an unreliable index of where one might actually track him down. Indeed Alphaville, a city in an early science fiction film by Godard, is perhaps the closest to the artists true location inside the world of the media than any of the real cities. In the twenty-first century, all artists live in the internet.

Geerss fictional autobiography is part of an integrated strategy, describing as it does an artist whose work relies on quotation, appropriation and redirection, a multiple layering of authorial position and artistic truth. Destabilisation is a coherent intention throughout the artists practice. To achieve it, he employs several methods, notably violence and the threat of conceptual and physical harm, but his target is overwhelmingly the concept of stable identity, the specific identities under threat most often that of the speaking subject and authorial voice.

As a white African, Geers revels in an interstitial identity, seeing himself slipping between Africa and Europe in his geographical affiliations. As an artist, he constructs a similarly indeterminate authorial position, his identity either sliding away underneath his work or under direct attack from it. Untitled (AVF, AWB, CP, DP, IFP, PAC, SACP) (1993-1994), takes the form of a collection of membership cards, one for each of the political parties active in South Africa at the time the work was made. Each is in the name of Kendell Geers. The cards represent a deliberate multiplication and hence fragmentation of the artists identity, both in the danger their multiple existence implies, and the confusion they cause when looked at together. Joining every political party in South Africa simultaneously must have exposed the actual person of the artist to considerable risk. At the same time, the piece makes an eloquent statement about social, political and artistic identity, further undermining the stability of Kendell Geers as an authentic authorial voice.

Much of Geerss work does battle with the notion of the authorial position by literally giving ambiguous voice to it. Double Time (2000) is an installation in which two television sets and two DVD players are mounted on a single scaffolding tower. Imposing, the work is nevertheless familiar the audio-visual equipment is comfortingly domestic, the scaffolding is rusty and well-used, and the DVD which seems to be playing a man in prison uniform doing press-ups - rings a bell as something we have probably seen before. The work seeks to reassure, its soundtrack telling us over and over again that Im gonna be fine. The man is the actor Steve McQueen in the film Papillon. As we watch him, perhaps recognising where the image comes from, we realise that his press-ups are looped, the same one repeating itself endlessly in a parody of healthy exercise. His muttered mantra is heavily treated, so that at times we strain to hear it, while at others it booms out at us loud and clear. The more we listen, the more we realise that the I in the work actor, artist or viewer? is not, in fact going to be fine. The work collapses past and future into a nightmarish present as we remember the film, recognise that the actors character is preparing for future safety, yet realise as we become mesmerised by the cycle of repetition and change which he is doomed to repeat, that he, and we, are locked into a circular space from which there is no way out. The double time of the work is the time served by an individual trying to remain intact in the face of a nameless threat.

Much of the success of this work lies in the treatment of the sound in the way that we as viewers are implicated in the vulnerability of the individual under threat as we struggle to recognise, and finally identify with, the I of the works speaking subject. In recent interviews2, Geers has spoken about his interest in the way in which an individuals sense of their own identity as a cultured and civilised being is bound up with language, and about his attempt to make his art reach beyond language in order to place this identity under attack: 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.

Physical danger is part of this, and several of Geerss works threaten the body of the viewer in order similarly to compromise his or her identity as an articulate being. Title Withheld (Shoot) 1998 is an endless montage of shooting sequences from a series of mainstream Hollywood films, projected on two large screens which trap the viewer between them. Negotiating the piece physically is the first step to negotiating it conceptually when you are standing in the centre of a piece like Shoot you are being assaulted visually by the images pounding away on both sides of you while the extreme soundtrack crawls inside your stomach all the while trying to negotiate your steps through the loose wires strewn across the floor like land mines. 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.

Shoot silences its viewer and its artist blowing both away as they try to come to terms with what they have made or are experiencing. Made up of existing footage, it leaves no space for an authorial voice, while the endlessly repeated violence leaves the viewer little time for pleasurable recognition of any individual film sequence. The work operates in a space beyond language. Similarly Title Withheld (Scream), a projection which confronts the viewer with a scream from the horror movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre, played over and over. The sound is shattering, the victims mouth wide open, but this is sound without language, indeed sound which pre-empts and prevents language.

Geers uses sound as an element of contagion which cant be contained or disinfected, leaking out all over the place and infusing the walls and floors and ultimately infusing the viewer. He uses silence, or more specifically silenced sound or silent language, in a similar way. A key work is 48 Hours (1999), in which Geers papered the front windows of the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London with hundreds of newspaper accounts of violent incidents collected over the previous two years and treated to look like an enlarged listings, news in brief or small ads section of a newspaper or magazine. Where one might expect to read something light-hearted, Geers placed instance after instance of horrific violence, inserting it ruthlessly into the head of the viewer by articulating it in the viewers own inner voice, the voice which switches on automatically when we read. The piece threatens the identity of its subjects, as item after item is read in the matter-of-fact style of police reporting and body piles up on top of body East Rand police found the body of an unidentified man in Kwa Thema on Tuesday. He had been shot in the chest&The body of a 35-year-old man was found in Mashiqila Street, Extension 6, Kwa Thema, early yesterday. He had been stabbed in the back. An 18 year old man has been arrested&. It also threatens the identity of its recipients, as we find ourselves giving voice to the crimes, becoming gradually de-sensitised as we read one after another.

Another, powerfully silent work is By Any Means Necessary, which draws on the tradition of Conceptual Art to exhibit a proposition for an artwork in the place of an artwork. A printed sheet announces that a bomb has been hidden within this exhibition, set to explode at a time known to the artist alone. In the first person, the rest of the sheet details the artists regret for any injuries, fatalities, damage or other inconvenience that the work might cause, and imagines possible consequences for both artist and artwork. While ostensibly compromising the physical safety of the viewer, the piece also threatens his or her sense of identity, collapsing it with that of the artist as the piece is silently read through the court will naturally find me guilty as it attempts to defuse the real implications of the piece. I will most likely be sentenced to life imprisonment, a condition that will in the long term assist me in creating my second greatest work of art.

Throughout his work, Geers uses the easily-recognisable as an agent of destabilisation both of language and the identity it may seek to express. On familiar territory, he can work to undermine our, and his own, security and sense of self. Cry Wolf (1999), a pile of sixty red emergency lights lying flashing uselessly in a tangle of cable on the floor of the gallery, is a work whose meaning begins in language. First, the vocabulary of the street emergency lights are recognised the world over; red for ambulances and accidents, blue for police, orange for road works and rescue. Second, the well-known phrase of its title, summoning as it does the story of the little boy who cried wolf so many times that he stripped the warning of all meaning, exposing himself to the danger of facing the wolf alone and unprotected when eventually it did come, and no one believed his cry. The emergency lights are crying wolf attempting to make us believe that there is an emergency somewhere, but signalling only of and to themselves. Robbed of their power to reference real-life events, they have been effectively silenced, and we would not believe them even if there were a sixty-light emergency going on in the gallery next door.

The viewers incredulity, is a fundamental part of the operation of Cry Wolf and much of Kendell Geerss work. Interested in recognition, in using elements of the real and virtual worlds which will speak directly to the viewer, the artist is nonetheless uninterested in engaging his or her belief. Rather than asking for the suspension of disbelief, as is common in the visual arts, Geerss work demands its active engagement. Geers knows that images and objects can be misleading, and his work circles around this knowledge with some sophistication. One series deals directly with the treachery of images, a lesson learned from Magritte. The series defining work is a photograph from the ending of the siege at Waco in Texas, an inferno of burning buildings captioned as if it were Magrittes most famous work: La trahaison des images (ceci nest pas une pipe) The Treachery (or perfidy) of Images (This is not a Pipe). History and literary theory have taught us that Magrittes this was indeed no more a pipe than Geerss, and neither artist gives us anything stable to put in its place. We cannot trust the title of this image, the speaking subject that is both the voice of the artist as he made it and ourselves as we look at and read it.

An honorary Cretan, Geers may well be the artist who says all artists are liars true or false? Its up to us whether we believe him or not.

Notes
1. Artist details as cited in Trauma, catalogue for Hayward Gallery touring exhibition 2000 2000,
2. With Christine Macel and Okwui Enwezor.