Dangerous to Lean Inward (1)
Christine Macel, "my tongue in your cheek" 2001

 

For almost ten years, Kendell Geers has been constructing a polymorphous oeuvre in which objects, installations and recent video works re-using existing films are inseparable from his critical texts and performances. One of the first things he did was to change his date of birth to "May 1968", though without giving this any concrete form other than a chain, Title Withheld (May 1968). For the moment he wears it, and after his death it will be sold. 1968 is in effect a programmatic date for Geers: student groups launched a revolution, Marcel Duchamp died, and Guy Debord's La Société du spectacle had just been published. It was as though the artist wanted to declare that his own life was marked by rebellion, the pursuit of art beyond any kind of art subordinated to a philosophy of itself, and the development of a critical analysis of contemporary history, despite the risks he might be taking as a white South African participating in the struggle against the apartheid government.
To begin with, his work was de facto grounded in the context of South African society grappling with the horrors of apartheid, up to the freeing of Nelson Mandela in 1990; and then with the Mbeki government, which has so far proved incapable of achieving equilibria. Geers's work, like his political activism, made him an essential figure in South African art until his move to Europe. He highlighted the everyday violence of a country in which the glass and electronic-security industries could afford to promote their products with 3 x 4 m advertising posters. However this critical stance, which is manifest both in his art and his journalistic work, has never been based on a binary vision that would pit the nice against the nasty, but on repeated expressions of doubt about the principles of good and evil, and a suggestion that they may be reversible. Geers does everything possible to shake up moral categories, to create uncertainty, to present the lie as another form of truth in an aesthetic of the simulacrum that is as indebted to Jean Baudrillard's thinking as to the precepts of Friedrich Nietzsche, these being two of the philosophers who have influenced him, and whom he "thanked", among others, in his first catalogue, Argot.
But, far from remaining centred on purely moral or political problematics, Geers's work has been typified, right from the start, by a combination of ethical commitment and informed reflections on modernity, taking into consideration the location and context of art, and the way it is exhibited, for example with his insidious criticism of the White Cube. One also thinks of TW (Virus), an empty cube encircled by one might even say embalmed in a red and white striped plastic ribbon that cut off access to it while at the same time asserting its deathly aspect and perilousness. His work exemplifies the critical relations that artists have been developing between their activity and its context since the 1960s, while pursuing these relations through a radical critique of the artistic establishment and its luminaries. The film he made for the Tokyo TV project, produced by the Palais de Tokyo, perfectly illustrates this provocative irony. It is a remake of a work by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, in which they slap each other, and it features the two directors of the institution that commissioned the project.
Beyond these topics, which are the critics' favourites, Geers extends his political and aesthetic commitments into other areas of interest that are bound up with the human psyche at its most intimate. His work gravitates round notions such as impulse and desire, postulating the reversibility of horror and ecstasy, and confirming the intimate link that exists between violence and eroticism. In this respect it evokes the ideas of the surrealists and Georges Bataille, another writer and philosopher who is "thanked" in Argot. And the form taken by Geers's works, notably the video installations, is often characterised, through an image that is indissociable from the auditory environment, by a movement of charge and discharge which accompanies cross-cutting relationships between apparently-opposed notions.
Often presented as a "con artist", and hailed as one of the most politically committed of artists by the critics in what is really an orgy of self-congratulation, Geers has taken his art well beyond the context from which it originally sprang: that of the struggle against apartheid, as waged by an Afrikaner bearing an inexpungible guilt which he actually plays on by denouncing, often with "black" humour, and with a definite taste for provocation, the background of his art and its paradoxical distancing from what should in theory be its central concerns. But in more general terms, this guilt is set in life itself, in its shafts of light and shadowy corners, in this "dangerous beauty" which Geers seeks out in his personal experience, and which he places "before art". Life is to be preferred to any other value, even at the risk of a collapse or a short circuit.

Beyond Good and Evil. Venturing the lie.

For Geers, the truth is far from being a supreme value. His work leads one beyond certainties, into life rather than a search for anything that might be called truth. One must put life in jeopardy, at the risk of losing it; or, to quote Nietzsche, one must at least "live dangerously", in a "cult of internal high tension". With Geers, this search for overexcitement always has something to do with probing into events of the most extreme kind, some of which he has lived through at first hand. He deliberately interweaves historical facts into his life in TW (curriculum vitae), which he constantly revisits and adds to. And in fact his life appears as a succession of personal dramas, with an overt immersion in all the forms of rejection he has suffered, between his attempts to integrate schools and the censoring of his works, starting with Vita Art Now at the Johannesburg Gallery in 1995. He was born into a family of Dutch origin, with a grandfather who committed suicide in 1961, and was placed in the custody of his father at the age of five after his parents got divorced. At fifteen he contracted meningitis, and shortly afterwards he left home. Hospitalised at nineteen as the result of a serious car accident, he made two suicide attempts. The South African Defence Force put him under pressure on account of his refusal to do his military service, and he had to leave the country for New York, where he became Richard Prince's assistant. It was only with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 that he returned to Johannesburg. Ten years later, he left for good. The way he foregrounds biographical material in his work does not so much indicate a desire for transparency as a deliberate condemnation of the procedures that are used to enunciate history on both the individual and collective levels. When, at the beginning of his career, he proclaimed an imaginary date of birth May 1968 he was clearly signalling his intention to use his personal history in a symbolic way, within the history of a "fucked-up" world turned upside down, as can be seen in the work that opens his site, www.geers.net. Here, the story is punctuated by the invention of tools of destruction, from the AK 47 to the H-bomb, as well as murders, attacks and suicides from that of Sid Vicious to that of Guy Debord and acts of terrorism such as those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. If Geers plays any kind of game, it is that of equivocation: that of the lie, where no truth can be made out, in the end, even his own, because the truth is of no further importance in a world where good and evil have long since been left behind or interchanged. And Geers has put this reversibility into practice in numerous works. In 1993 and 1994, for example, when South Africa was embroiled in chaos, he put on the performance Untitled (ANC, AVF, AWB&), which consisted of obtaining the membership cards of all the different political parties, including the extreme right-wing AWB. This ambiguous work, which has now been reduced to a simple perspex box containing all the cards obtained, is not so much a question of choosing a particular party as of choosing them all and thereby generating a climate of uncertainty as to the nature of their commitment and the way they operate. Geers attempts to muddy the water, venturing a lie without any hope of truth, simply in order to pervert the given order of things. What finally interests him is the result of his gesture, and this is revealed indirectly. History vindicated him when the African National Congress, after winning the 1994 elections, finally embarked upon the Truth and Reconciliation operation, thus revealing that the distinction between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" was not wholly clear. And all his work since then has pursued this destabilising logic of the "terrorist" and the "revolutionary double agent". But finally, it matters little that Geers's stories are doctored, as long as the game is exciting. For after all, as we see in Untitled (ANC, AVF, AWB&), manipulation always exists, and responsibility is sometimes impossible to pin down.
It is also interesting to note the extent to which this notion of provocation, or even simulation, varies with the context in which Geers's work is exhibited. Thus the South African critic Ruth Kerkham, who became acquainted with it in Johannesburg in the 1990s, has analysed it from the point of view of the "con artist" pushing the logic of the Baudrillardian simulacrum to its limits, while French and American critics, not being really aware of the confused history of apartheid, have seen only the committed rebel, the enfant terrible who courageously espoused the cause of the oppressed black people. But Geers's intentions are not limited to simply pointing out the paradoxes of politics or institutions. And the recent evolution of "political" art, often naively dialectical, has confirmed the correctness of the artist's position as "terrorism" and "simulation", these being the only two "revolutionary" paths, other than irony, that Baudrillard, writing at the start of the 1980s, considered to be possible. And indeed they have been the strategic choices of numerous artists, notably Maurizio Cattelan. But since the end of the 1990s Geers has taken up other issues which had previously been hidden behind the highly political South African context. He has also been more and more strongly affirming a vision that goes beyond the legacy of Situationism, and has been pursuing a reading of art as "interior experience".

The fight against fantasy-inhibition

Geers is constantly in the front line, and his works are terror alerts, from the most surreptitious to the most visible and from the most personal to the most collective. They interrogate political contexts, whether in South Africa or in local and international situations. In 1999, during the war in Kosovo, Geers had a wall of barbed wire erected in front of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig. This dictated how one entered the building, which was "caught in a trap" (and was above all situated close to the American embassy). This work, TW Deployed, made an important contribution, in the context, to local awareness about a conflict that had up to then been viewed as somewhat remote.
But Geers's work is also a project of consciousness that goes beyond politics and global conflicts, impinging on the individual confronted in his private sphere with his own inhibitory defences. The media-conditioned dimension of contemporary life, and its consequences for the way people function, is now a central theme in Geers's work, preoccupied as he is with maintaining the highest degree of life in a society where the individual is rendered passive by entertainment, whose apogee is the kind of Hollywood action film that is re-used by Geers, but also includes what is nowadays described, by politicians among others, as "tittytainment", in the cynical phrase coined by Jimmy Carter's former counsellor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Geers sounds a warning against the "cocktail of mind-numbing entertainment and enough to eat" that "keeps the planet's frustrated population in a good mood" eighty per cent of the world's population, according to Brzezinski. As a South African who spends a lot of his time travelling, Geers is keenly aware that the concept of globalisation advocated today as a redemptive reality, with its other facets of consolidation and multiculturalism, also conceals hints of a new civilisation in which the modalities of control and regulation of a "useless" population take on the appearance of democracy, wellbeing and a flourishing of culture.
In this context, "living dangerously", for Geers, also consists of getting back into contact with one's own imagination, and fighting against "fantasy-inhibition", to quote Julia Kristeva, as a means of survival for an artist from an ultra-conservative Afrikaner background permeated by the kind of Judaeo-Christian morality that leaves little room for individual creativity.
Title Withheld (Shoot) (1998-1999), presented for the first time at the ArtPace in Texas in the form of a labyrinth of fifteen suspended monitors, and then at the Printemps de Cahors as two screens face to face, with amplifiers, illustrates this tension between a contextual political position and an almost-psychoanalytic utterance, with an awareness of the threat hanging over the very ability to imagine.
The screens in Title Withheld (Shoot) show a 30' loop with a montage of dozens of extracts from American films of the 1980s and 1990s (for example James Cameron's Terminator, John Woo's A Bullet in the Head and Brian de Palma's Scarface), in which the character literally fires at the spectator. The sound, which verges on the intolerable, is like a litany of shots constituting a kind of repetitive, obsessive music with techno-like rhythms. In a way it recalls Shoot, an action that Chris Burden put on in 1971 at the Fspace in Santa Ana, but it also speaks of the social violence of an American class trying to come to terms with the loss of its bearings, as it protests against the massive use of firearms in the United States, and especially in Texas. First and foremost, however, it addresses the spectator, who is caught up in a ceaseless projection of images and is himself an integral part of the installation.
If, at the outset, this work expresses outrage at the trivialisation of violent images by their continuous presence on television and in the cinema, it also returns to other ideas about the image that had already been present in previous works that focussed on anxieties and desires, and partly obliterated the ability to imagine. Is the trivialisation of murder scenes by the American cinema not a symptom of a schizophrenic society in which sensationalism has replaced the propensity to imagine?
Title Withheld (Hustler) (1993-1994) is a pornographic photograph onto which the artist has projected his own sperm, signifying the inability of desire as such to express itself outside the cliché-image of the Hustler woman; and, precisely, far from the body. Caught up in the discharges of Shoot, with expressions of a destructive impulse repeated to the point of saturation, the spectator is confronted by his own fantasy-inhibition, at the risk of ignoring his very being as a result of trivialisation, or even denial.
In this sense, Title Withheld (Shoot) was a turning point in Geers's work, which has since moved in the direction of issues that are more closely linked to questions about archaism and impulses, as explored in the audio-video installations of 1999-2001, though with less emphasis on critical readings.

The primacy of the percept. An interested relationship to art.

The interpenetration of a political consciousness with an interest in the most intimate, and even the most archaic, affects and psychic functions gives Geers's work a richness of meaning which offers itself up to the spectator through immediate experience, without the concept ever dominating the percept, despite the unmistakeable influence of conceptual art. "I don't like the kind of video where the spectator has to wait fifteen minutes before starting to understand something. A person should be able to arrive at any time and react, as though before a painting", says Geers, whose work is a reaction to "the cold conceptual art of the 1970s".
His works follow on one after the other like punches, in the simplicity of their arrangement and the violence of their content. Thus HIV + (1991-1994), a "drip" work of dried blood, is ironic both about painting, the will to subjectivity of abstract expressionism, and the wall-painting tradition which is currently regaining popularity with, for example, Douglas Gordon and Ugo Rondinone, while making its primary intention clear without seeking to veil its meaning, namely death at the heart of vital substance and this in a country like South Africa, where the incidence of seropositivity and the speed of propagation of HIV are the highest in the world.
Again, in Cry Wolf (1999, Consortium de Dijon), with its pop overtones, a heap of red light bulbs indicates urgency and distress (and also recalls cells, or a mass of eggs), so that the spectator is torn between, on the one hand, the perceptual joyousness implicit in the eminently decorative aspect of the installation and, on the other, a fear of the irreparable.
In Geers's set-ups, the role accorded to feeling, and consequently to the spectator and his experience, is revealed, notably, in the video installations, through the importance attributed to the details of the spatialisation and the auditory dimension. As he says, the installation is at least as significant as the video image itself, in that it "gets the spectators involved and integrates them into the work". Thus Medusa Dreaming (2000, Marian Goodman gallery, Paris), where one stumbles through a tangle of electric cables connected to monitors placed on pallets on the ground, is a metaphor of the flux of life in opposition to the unsettling images of a skeletal face with its teeth chattering.
The importance of the spectator's experience is sometimes less obvious, as when the experience is intended to be more discreet. The use of a screen made of silk in projections such as TW Scream (1999) sets up a paradox between the softness of the fabric and the violent, delicate, phantom imagery whose movements are determined by those of the nearby spectators. In this instance it is the work he does on the sound that reveals Geers's intention to grab the spectator viscerally, from the hysterical, sadistic laugh of the man in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to Harvey Keitel's strident wolf-like howl in Between the Devil and the Blue Sea. The sound track is usually reworked by Geers himself, with the use of echo effects and repetitions to suggest litanies and their cathartic power of invocation.
Influenced as he is by William Burroughs's ideas in Electronic Revolution with the application of the cut-up technique to sound considered both as a potential virus inducing confusion, deflection and subversion, and as an antidote to the excessive power of the word Geers uses the auditory dimension in a double register. In one way he tries to create a sort of primitive music that is similar to a mantra, which puts the spectator in a state that is sometimes almost hypnotic, with a calming effect following on from horror. This is the case in Blind Mans Bluff (1999), where, after the first few moments of almost unbearable tension, the sound begins to exert a calming effect and to confer on the insupportable spectacle a paradoxical beauty. Here Geers successfully implements the "research project" imagined by Burroughs, "with both word and image scrambled on video tape" in such a way as to produce a "unified emotional content". In another way, he belongs to the generation of the punk movement, that of the Sex Pistols whose Anarchy in the UK he distorts in Anthem, which was produced in the Delfina studio in London. He also makes an allusion to the group through the 1979 suicide of Sid Vicious, the group's bass player, in TW (curriculum vitae), and so on up to Sonic Youth. He celebrates the nihilistic, rebellious power of radical music which marked him as deeply as that of the plastic arts themselves, at least before his American experience. What he sees himself as having in common with the Johnny Rotten of No Future No Future No Future for You is not so much a political position he himself says that his art is not "political art" as a desire to create an electrical discharge, a shock to the nerves as disturbing, frightening and tremendous as punk was in the 1970s.
At the heart of Geers's work there is thus, above all, what one feels and what one experiences. In terms of its form it tries to give the spectator, without any circumlocution, a perception of the world that combines horror and ecstasy, beauty and violence. The artist's world is connected to that of the spectator, who cannot remain a mere onlooker exercising his aesthetic judgement "at a distance" but is drawn into the work in a pathos that rules out the idea of maintaining a stable, disinterested relationship with art, since the work confronts him with a real "instinct of freedom", in Nietzsche's sense.

"Destroy", he said.

Geers's work, through the images and objects utilised, and the gestures made, is based on a movement of discharge and expulsion which consists of projecting and liberating a reality or force that had previously been confined within the self. He portrays impulses as such, where the will to live and the desire to die come face to face.
From the shots in TW Shoot (1998) to the explosions in the video TW Abstract (1999), from TW Scream to the stone that breaks a window in the action TW Brick, from Untitled (Bomb) (1993) a action which was never actually produced, but which would have consisted of blowing up part of a museum-type building to the bodies riddled with bullets in TW Memento Mori (1996), Geers's works are salvoes of primordial violence which sometimes lead to things being broken into pieces.
One might also add that Geers's videos generally consist of "chopping up" existing films according to an aesthetic of collage and montage that seems to mean nothing on the conceptual plane with regard to the cinematographic image: we are much closer to the case of Martin Arnold, who conjures up a sort of unconscious of the image, than to the re-use of Hollywood films by Pierre Huyghe or Douglas Gordon. It is almost a fragmentation of the image which can go all the way to the laceration of the film itself.
This danger of breakup is central to TW Self-Portrait (1995), with a fragment of a Heineken bottle Heineken being a beer that comes from Holland, just as the artist's family did which is supposed to have shattered in the unexplained explosion of TWA 800 over Long Island in 1996. This shard of glass was used by the artist to make TW Self-Portrait, which reminds us of Baudrillard's contention that terror, "the ecstatic form of violence", has now replaced alienation. It recalls the political reality in which a terrorist takes hostages, thus authenticating the historical loss of the scene of exchange, from the rule of exchange to the social contract. But it also symbolises individual reality in a civilisation in which psychosis and loss of structure replace neuroses. TW Self-Portrait appears as the representation of the dislocation that threatens the cohesion of being, beyond the allusion to terrorism and to the impossible search for the truth about facts. The artist identifies with something that is supposed to have partly survived destruction, or death by shattering, which TW (curriculum vitae) amply confirms. Here we touch upon a reality which is that of non-completion; but also the expulsion of that same reality which allows the object to maintain the cohesion of being. This dialectical movement runs through the entire work, as if the tabula rasa were the precondition for a possible re-creation, as in the metaphor of the phoenix, which is always in the process of being reborn.
Kendell Geers puts into practice a confrontation between life and death impulses, while also exploring in depth the representation of a pure form of destructiveness that rarely figures in these extremities. The representation of this incommensurable force of annihilation is accompanied by the expression of violent feelings such as fear, a desire for protection against intrusion, and anxiety produced by loss. He portrays ultimate psychic states which seemed to have disappeared from the aesthetic field of art in the 1980s and 1990s, to the point where some people were talking about a real "difficulty about representing" (see the work of Jean-Charles Masséra and Paul Ardenne), or even a veritable representional inhibition such as can be seen in Shoot. But in fact Geers himself jumps feet first into the chaos of impulses. It is extreme fear that springs from the stridency of TW Scream on the face of the petrified woman, whose repeated shrieks are mixed with sounds which disfigure her humanity. The fear of destruction that one imagines to be physical in this excerpt from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be transposed to another level as a threat weighing down on being and the symbolic. Through this figure of fear, Geers is not adding to some sort of treatise on passions, but constructing a work in which there is always the threat of danger or ruin. Every attempt at protection appears equally dangerous, or even murderous. This ambiguity of the protective barrier is portrayed by those works which use razor wire, like TW Flatwrap, TW Deported, TW Deployed and Waiting for the Barbarians, a labyrinth of razor wire set in the wilds near Münster. And in fact it was in South Africa that this lethal system of protection, which is even worse than barbed wire, was invented. With its sharp edges, it deals implacably with those who try to break free from it.
Worries about protection against intrusion have rarely been more acute than in South Africa, where no property is complete without festoons of razor wire along the top of its outer wall. In a set of photographs showing the houses of well-known members of the South African art world who have incorporated this type of defensive system into their private lives, Geers illustrates this craving for security which haunts contemporary society even more than the craving for freedom. And the convertibility of protection into a lethal agent and a threat to freedom, or indeed to life itself, can be seen in a number of Geers's other inquiries and works. He was interested in the secret tests using red mercury that took place in the 1970s in Israel and South Africa with a view to making miniature atomic bombs that would have threatened the destruction of the very nations they were supposed to safeguard. And on his web site, in TW (curriculum vitae), he vaunts the merits of the wireless micro-cameras that are used in surveillance systems for private houses, in a sort of confusion between protection and inquisition. All of a sudden, TW (curriculum vitae) displays the contents of your computer, as though every attempt to protect privacy were now vain, and intrusion always a threat. Geers also thought up a work that was never produced and quite understandably, because an institution would have been required to exhibit its keys without protection, meaning that any visitor who cared to could enter its premises, with the consequent risk of loss or destruction. It was as though exhibiting or exhibiting oneself inherently signified a sort of peril that could be expressed by the idea of art as a risk to be taken.
The danger of loss is also illustrated by several works which portray missing objects: empty spaces from which something has disappeared, either purloined or destroyed.
Stolen shows a plinth with nothing on it, from which a work has been spirited away (robbed?). Empty crates (first shown at the Havana biennial) exhibits, effectively, crates that have been emptied of their content, while TW (NTTLD) represents the void that has been left in a car showroom adorned with a ridiculous kitsch plant by removing a vehicle of which nothing remains but the number plate, NTTLD an allusion to the title Untitled, but with its vowels taken away. Beyond institutional criticisms and diatribes about the mannerisms of contemporary art, Geers portrays the realities of absence and loss. And the anxiety brought about by this void seems even more violent than TW Scream or the suicidal shots in Stand Off.
Geers thus achieves representations of pure destructiveness and the mechanisms that are mobilised to fight it, notably with the construction of defence systems that end up becoming more restrictive than protective. He portrays the most highly-repressed impulses in the most extreme way, with an obvious taste for everything that is hidden or unadmitted.
He himself also works to maintain a zone that no one can penetrate, a masked zone that is immune to intrusion, let alone destruction, thanks to the cult of secrecy which has been explicit right from the start in his strange choice of generic title, TW ("title withheld"), which indicates secrecy or refusal, revealing the position of an artist whose provocative radicalism also conceals a paradoxical desire to conceal and liberate buried realities, while at the same time taking (sometimes willingly) the risk of being rejected for this very reason.

Happiness in crime. Violence and eroticism.

In the end, Geers is less concerned with representing horror and the unwatchable, as might be thought in the first instance, than with impulses themselves, and especially their intrinsic antagonisms.
This principle of reversibility, observed in works such as Untitled (ANC, AVF, AWB&), applies in fact to the oeuvre as a whole, whether in terms of morality, tragedy or impulse. Geers constantly alternates the moral principles of good and evil, as in Between the Devil and the Blue Sea, with Harvey Keitel in the throes of remorse. In the same way, he draws a parallel between the tragic and the comic, with a marked taste for black humour (but one would perhaps expect no less from an Afrikaner). In What does Diana Stand For? the humour is borrowed directly from the surrealist aesthetic. This work note the double meaning of the title, which in turn doubles the comic dimension: what does she represent, and what does she tolerate? consists of projecting, at floor level (and thus somewhat illegibly), slides showing jokes about Lady Di taken from the internet. Finally, when Geers brings up deathly impulses it is not so much horror that he is portraying, but the constant tension between the apparently irreconcilable impulses of life and death, through a constant principle of the reversibility of opposites.
The resurgence of this theme of horror in art, which is not devoid of a certain complacency about extreme images, now that the representation of the body and sex has become a little tiresome, does not, in the end, seem particularly relevant to Geers's work. Rather, a number of his works contain a sort of "elementary violence" based on the principle of tension between eroticism and violence. Eroticism is rarely mentioned in relation to Geers's work, either because it is hidden beneath the outward appearance of the unbearable, and thus goes noticed, or because the bivalency of the work is reduced to a representation of horror alone. But it is precisely this continuation of the project set in motion by the surrealists and Bataille that deserves to be pondered on, after the close of a century that was more interested in sex and sexuality than eroticism. Geers puts it forward to begin with as a project based directly on a reading of Bataille's L'Erotisme, or again Les Larmes d'Eros a title which he re-uses in Tears of Eros (1998), representing a torn-off ear in an extract from David Lynch's Blue Velvet, another erotically-charged reference. "Sexuality is a further excess, or danger, that I use to destabilise language," says Geers. "In this sense Bataille has influenced my work, notably through his texts on sexuality and death."
The installation Blind Mans Bluff, presented for the first time in the basement of the Secession in Vienna, is the work which most strongly represents these intentions, along with Poetic Justice, Medusa Dreaming and Tears of Eros. The labyrinth of video monitors and screens placed at different heights on the scaffolding of Blind Mans Bluff (the game suggested by the title being one that is propitious to libertinage) show sequences, repeated several times, taken from three films containing variations on the theme of the eye as an erotic object subjected to torture: Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, the Hollywood film Conspiracy Theory, with a wildly-staring Mel Gibson, and especially shots from Luis Buñuel's An Andalusian Dog, one of the most frequently studied films in the history of the cinema, which illustrates the close links that exist between eroticism and violence. In the latter case, Geers uses a loop method to bring a feeling of insupportability to the best-known scene from the film, where a man holding an open cut-throat razor moves towards a wide-eyed girl. Just as the blade is about to touch the girl's eye, the scene is intercut with a shot of the moon, which passes behind a discreet cloud. Finally, the blade cuts through the girl's eye, and a vitreous liquid flows out. This scene, which "after the shooting of the sliced-open eye" left Buñuel "sick for a week", illustrates precisely, according to Georges Bataille's analysis of it in Documents, a convergence between horror and eroticism within the film, which has neither head nor tail and yet comes across as a genuine erotic fantasy representing "the transition from onanism to heterosexuality".
And Bataille goes further: "It does indeed seem impossible, when discussing the eye, to talk about anything other than seduction, there being nothing more attractive than this in the bodies of animals or people. But extreme seduction is probably on the fringe of horror. In this sense, the eye could be compared to a blade, whose appearance also gives rise to acute, contradictory reactions; which is what the authors of An Andalusian Dog must have felt, dreadfully and obscurely." And Geers does not fail to pursue these paradoxes, reworking and distorting the sound tracks of films to create a strange music which makes its own contribution to the process of fascination-repulsion by establishing a sort of cathartic state that is conducive to the acceptance of the tensions represented.
The theme of the eye also appears in another of Geers's installations, Medusa Dreaming, through the apparently-mysterious title, though the work, executed in Paris, actually refers to Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, which is in the Louvre. The image shows a face with its skin torn away, its bones sticking out, and its teeth clacking appallingly. But if one recalls that the head of the Medusa, with dozens of eyes coiling round her face, has always acted as a surrogate representation of female genitals or at any rate this was Freud's view of the subject in Das Medusenhaupt (1922) the work can be seen as a portrayal of desire and the fear of castration, of eroticism and horror, in a mode that is clearly ironic.
Geers has pushed the analysis of eroticism still further in his work, as a vital impulse strongly bound to death, or even murder. Poetic Justice seems to embody a conception of eroticism as "the approval of life all the way up to death", with an image from the American remake of Weird Women, showing a head held under water by the vengeful women.
In The Beautiful Ones are not just yet Born it is the child murderer, the acme of horror and taboo, who appears, laughing, with blood on her face. This image, taken from The Exorcist at the point where the child says "Let Jesus fuck up" with an almost ecstatic look on her face, is like an illustration of "happiness in crime", or a conception of murder as the apogee of erotic excitement, as described by Sade, one of Geers's favourite authors.
And Bataille also quotes Sade in his work on eroticism: "No libertine who is even slightly steeped in vice is ignorant of the fascination that murder exerts on the senses."
Far from Bataille's lineage, Geers pokes fun at desire and sexuality, in the same way that, in the last analysis, his vision of eroticism goes beyond the movement of death. With Anthem, he makes a discreet but ironic allusion to breakdowns in desire, as a sort of follow-up to Dan Graham's Detumescence (1966). With a distorted version of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK in the background, a phallic column of palettes is topped by a monitor showing a flag that cannot quite stay upright. And he uses comic effects in his audio CD Fucking Hell, where the sound of couples making love turns into the snorting of pigs.
With the important ongoing work The Garden of the Forking Paths (2000), produced in Japan, Geers seems to be developing a vision of eroticism that goes beyond the links between desire and dread, pleasure and anxiety. In a purely natural setting, a square-plan rough concrete construction like a sentry box, open on one side, is extended upward with walls made of barbed wire. As the seasons go by, the edifice changes and gives opposing impressions. In winter it is covered with snow, and only the wire is visible; but in summer, when the snow has melted, the concrete becomes visible, while ivy, the symbol of eternal love, gradually creeps over it. Here, Geers would seem to be saying that if danger and eroticism are undeniably linked, as Lovers suggests, with its two distress signals revolving side by side, "the final meaning of eroticism is fusion, and the abolition of limits".

Where Kendell Geers's work is concerned, it may sometimes seem "dangerous to lean inward" (to borrow the phrase with which Buñuel and Dali mocked the warning displayed in continental trains). In the field of aesthetics he is pursuing the most radically critical of discourses on modernity: nothing extreme or unnerving escapes inclusion in his works, whether they are political and moral in their implications or centred on psychic and instinctual life. And this is because art, from Geers's viewpoint, focusses first of all on life and its possible violence, in a Dionysiac perspective that he shares with the projects of Nietzsche and Bataille; which is why his work is characterised by an exaltation of "ill-starred" impulses, and by his fundamentally anarchist position, which also takes into account the recent revolution brought about by the mass media through the instantiation of an aesthetic of simulation tinged with constant irony. With his espousal of a radical critique that gives short shrift to modernity, Kendell Geers is working on a primal position in art which consists of an interested operation, a genuine stimulant to the instinct of freedom. To his mind, freedom should always be given preference over security.

Notes
(1)This was the initial title of the script by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali for An Andalusian Dog, 1929 (35 mm, 16' 30", black and white). See Luis Buñuel, "Letter to José Bello", 10 February 1929, in Philippe Dubois and Edouard Arnoldy, "Un Chien andalou, lectures et relectures", in Revue Belge du Cinéma, No. 33-35, 1993, p 1.