A TerroRealist in the House of Love

Interviewed with Jérôme Sans, 2003

 

Jérôme Sans: Would you call yourself an activist?
Kendell Geers: That may be the most difficult question youve ever asked meIm not sure I can answer it. Yes, on the one hand, of course I think of myself as an activist, but on the other hand I dont think such a position is sustainable today. In my understanding, being an activist implies that a belief system can exist that is contrary to the status quo, and, more than that, that its possible to effect change either through subversion or through engagement. That may have been true in the 60s or even in the 70s, but today the notion of truth has never been more fluid or more obscure. Take the photographic image, for instance, whether its a reality-TV video or even an archival photographthat image can today be altered and changed so perfectly that even the people present in the image may begin to doubt their own memory of the event. More than that, the technology needed to create the shift is neither expensive nor difficult to access. Even more depressing is the fact that politics today is no longer about having a position or a point of view, or even any sign of a policy, but about image. Witness the recent elections in the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria, where presidents have been elected to positions of ultimate power on the basis of their image alone. Theres no difference between the left and the right in Europe and America. So what does it mean to be an activist today? I dont know.
JS: How would you describe your stance, then?
KG: Before anything else Im an artist. While I cant say what that means, I do think it makes me somehow socially unstable. If I were not to some degree maladjusted Im sure I would have chosen a more stable way of life. I embrace life as an activist in the sense that I actively engage my daily rituals and activities with a sense of subversive curiosity. Im always looking for the limits, when I find them I try to collapse them, and then I start again. We understand ourselves and our world through limits such as morality and social etiquette. The worst limit of all is habit.
JS: What are your limits?
KG: My biggest challenge is to overcome the limits of language. Whether language is verbal or nonverbal, it acts as a structure that limits what can be expressed. I see it as a kind of bad habit: if one manages to do the same thing enough times, it becomes habit, enters into the realm of the known, and thus becomes language. Up until that point, however, it doesnt exist. Language inscribes everything we are, our conception of morality, and the forms and expressions that are considered appropriate in a work of art. When one seeks the limit in order to understand the center, there are moments when one is likely to step over that limit, when what is said or created doesnt fit in with any habit or memory, so that the expression becomes null and void. I dont know what my own limits or tolerances are because theyre always changing with experience and of course with age. I would say my greatest limits are boredom and habit, but theyre also great incentives to keep me mobile.
JS: How does one break out of these traps of habit and language?
KG: For me its a process of searching out those experiences where language has no control. Those moments when you feel the burden of emotion, the pain of loss, the exhilaration of experiencethe moments when you know what youre feeling but have no way of expressing it in words. These moments can be extreme, as when you witness a car accident or feel vertigo, or subtle, like the experience of beauty or desire or even simply fear of the dark. These moments are exhilarating precisely because theyre indescribable, which makes them taste somehow like forbidden fruit.
Theres an old political strategy, used by everybody from the Baader-Meinhof group to Frantz Fanon to the CIA: its much easier to change a system after first destabilizing its structure. In this sense violence and sexuality are strong weapons, for theres no escape from them. The advertising industry uses sexuality to sell products as much as politicians use the threat of violence (from the so-called other) to get themselves elected. Whether implicitly or explicitly, we in the Occidental system tend to define ourselves in relation to violence and sexuality. Im certain that this is why the image of the crucified Christ remains such an icon, for it is implicitly and explicitly both violent and sexual. It taps deep primeval urgesto be born, to die, and in between to procreate. In other words, it touches us outside language.
JS: Are you talking about the kind of state of emergency in which we become like survivors, always between life and death?
KG: In the system the culture industry is based on, such an emergency is impossible. Everything from CNN to MTV to Vogue functions through a process of masking the realities of being alive. Every aspect of the way our bodies work, from the way we smell to the way our hair grows or the way we speak or the clothes we wear, is predetermined. The function of the culture industry seems to me to be the removal of choicethe numbing, or even the dumbing down, of the individual in relation to the collective consumer consciousness. We are not survivors at all in that process, because we die before we were even bornwe died when our mothers picked up their first baby magazine as they prepared for our arrival. Of course all this collapses the day we have our first shit, and it continues to be disrupted every time we shit and fart after that. No matter how sophisticated or rich we manage to become, there remain things so basic, so primitive, about our being that all the toothpaste and deodorant in the world cant disguise them. Its that collapse of the cultured human into a jelly of desire, a mass of fear, a body of dirt, a bleeding wound, that I think is all that remains of the individual today. You most know when youre alive when you can smell your own fear, or when your desire to be fucked devours your sanity.
JS: What is the meaning of failure or success for you?
KG: As an artist Im not interested in those terms. If I can communicate, and in some way that affects the viewer, Im happy. That communication need not even be positive; a negative reaction to my work is as strong as a positive one. Failure to me would be when a person remains unaffected, or has an entirely passive experience, or notices only the works decorative aspects, or simply doesnt notice the work at all.
JS: Why are death and disruption central to your work?
KG: We will all experience death at least once in our life, and the knowledge, or fear, of that experience appears in just about every culture in the world. Even where death isnt feared, its acknowledged and respected virtually daily. Im drawn to the taboos that govern death and sex, because they imply beginnings as well as endings and because in both we are unable to control ourselves, no matter how rich or educated or sophisticated we presume ourselves to be. I frequently use the strategy of disruption, for, like death, it speaks both of that which has ended and of the consequence of the ending, and also, at times, it suggests new beginnings. Disruption is thus an in-between space that speaks as much about what its not as about what it is and what it could be.
JS: Do you believe in utopia?
KG: As with death, sex, and disruption, Im much more interested in dystopia than utopia, for the former implies the latter and is thus so much more. Freedom can only exist when you have the ability and sense to accept the rules and the system and then beyond that to abandon them. Im quite utopian in my thinking but only on the road to dystopia.
JS: What does freedom mean today?
KG: I can only speak from a personal point of view, and increasingly I find myself escaping into the space of my own thoughts and private world. As the world becomes more and more international and in effect Americanized, so the differences between us are disappearing. Those colloquial differences are essential to my understanding of freedom, because theyre what defines me in terms of my own reality. Theyre inscribed in the everyday decisions I make, which are built around my own everyday needs, as opposed to the idea of me projected through some soap opera or Hollywood film. Freedom to me is the ability to speak for myself, the ability to define myself, and the space to represent myself based on my own needs and experiences rather than on an external prescribed idea of me that serves somebody elses needs or even their fears.
JS: Do you mean that theres no more contestatory spirit, and that everythings predetermined by the media?
KG: There has been a fundamental shift in the way artists work and understand the world around them. I think the shift began in the 1950s in Paris at the Beat Hotel with William Burroughs, and specifically with his theory and method of the cut-up. The simple technique of cutting up fragments of newspapers and books and reassembling them as entirely new texts changed the course of history, for from that moment on the artist was destined to become a consumer instead of a producer. Where that challenge was confrontational and militant to begin with, it has now become simply banal. Even as recently as the 70s, electronic punk bands like Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire were still able to use the cut-up techniques and machines to make music that challenged the way we understood the world and our notions of beauty. Then, sometime, in the late 70s, the entire Western world shifted and we all started changing into professional consumers. The shift is now complete, to the point that we purchase our dissidence at Christian Dior or Diesel. Politically its the same, for the differences between campaigning political parties are growing so small as to be negligible. We vote for the most consumable president.
Artists and musicians today dont produce their work as much as recycle it. In the persona and method of the DJ we see the most sophisticated expression of the consumer as producer. Producing has become more and more difficult, because its so much easier, and more professional, to sample the best of the past without having to experience the vision or the trauma. Why would an artist want to compete with Prince or the Beatles or Beethoven or Warhol or van Gogh when its easier to quote, parody, sample, and cut up?
JS: Do you think we are living in a period when creation is on hold?
KG: Yes, I do. I think we are living in a moment when the act of creating is defined, like everything else in our age, by acts of consumption. For a long time I wondered how so many artists around the world, simultaneously and without knowledge of each other, were able to create works of art that were almost exactly the same. Then it occurred to me that it was because so many young artists today are reading the same art magazines to look for ideas, and are developing their art based on those magazines. So of course they all arrive at the same conclusions since theyre consuming the same raw material. Every aspect of our lives, from the clothes we wear to the magazines we read and the television we watch, is based on the almost religious experience of consumption, and art is no different.
This is also something of a honeymoon period, because for the first time in history the individual has access to computers and software that can change, edit, reedit, re-create, mix up, and mix down any image, sound, song, text, or film. The power to control the image is no longer the exclusive domain of Hollywood or the magazine industry, and that changes everything. In music weve already seen how the idea of the author has changed with the rise of the DJ, hip-hop, and even so-called electronic music, where the act of consuming somebody elses material is the basis of creativity. The spirit of this process, however, is in stark contrast to Guy Debords idea of plagiarism. Its lost a great deal of its political implication.
JS: Does activism today involve using the political and its codes?
KG: I think its about being critical, trying to understand the limits of the languages of the present and to work them up into something more. I dont miss the Cold War any more than I respect a fascist moron like George W. Bush. For me the real tragedy is the fact that weve lost all sense of the spiritual in Western culture. We have no faith in anything, whether art or politics or history; we live only to consume. I would say that activism today must first restore our sense of faith, for without that nothing matters anyhow.
JS: Since the mainstream fashion and mass media have co-opted all the codes of dissent, where do you think art can be effective?
KG: Yes, the mainstream has stolen every weapon of the underground, from sex to violence, and art has been reduced to simply another commodity designer fetish. What can one do today outside of total despair and capitulation? Im not sure, but for my part Im trying to shift the emphasis entirely away from the material body of the work, away from the commodity toward the content, and then above that to insist that the content be political. Instead of working toward the seamless, perfect image Im trying to explore flaws, dirt, disruption, static, white noise, and decomposition of the image or object. This fracturing both affirms the perfect image through its absence and shifts the focus to other ways of understanding reality, on the other side of the comfort border. The sex and violence I use in my work and am interested in, and that I think remain effective weapons against bland consumerism, are not the sanitized clean poses of CNN and empty v but the dirty, gritty white noise of a television set tuned to a bankrupt pirate station.
JS: But you work within the spirit of the DJ, remixing contemporary culture, and your style is that of an urban guerrilla in combat fatigues. How is that different from what youre protesting?
KG: Theres a significant difference between the rap and remixing of people like Public Enemy or Skinny Puppy or even Aphex Twin and the stylistic remixes of Madonna or Janet Jackson. The former use the remix as a weapon against consumption: the act of sampling becomes a form of shoplifting, reclaiming street culture for the people who created it. In this way the word consumption returns to its fourteenth-century meaning as something dangerous that could kill you. Theres an important conceptual difference between the artists and musicians who use the remix as a weapon and those who simply go Photoshopping as the latest consumption trend.
Of course Im drawn to the former, and especially to Debords statement that plagiarism is essential. I conceive of the remix in the spirit of recycling effluence as opposed to regurgitating influence.
JS: Is there a difference between the Beat generation cut-up spirit and that of todays urban guerrilla?
KG: I would say that the former were like a bomb exploding in an urban shopping mall whereas the latter are more like computer viruses. As soon as Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, and the South African Sinclair Beiles came up with the cut-up for their collaborative project Minutes to Go [1960], the group was divided. Where Burroughs and Gysin understood that they had found a radical new way of working that would fundamentally change the way they understood art, the other two felt that they had in the process murdered the creative muse. Given the speed with which such challenges are processed and assimilated today, the artist must function more like a hacker or a virus, infiltrating the machine and cutting it up from the inside. There is no underground today because nothing is beyond the limits. Everything is equally without value, significance, and thus consequence.
JS: Why do you think things have changed so dramatically?
KG: On the one hand I think its because artists today are basically spoilt. Occidental society in general is characterized by extreme affluence and privilege, and theres little to fight for unless you cast your eyes toward the Third World. Even unknown or unsuccessful artists today can earn a very good living, even if it means teaching, while fifty years ago even the most important artists were living on a breadline. With affluence comes an unprecedented amount of choice in terms of production methods: at little cost, a young artist today can decide to paint, draw, sculpt, work with found objects, make installations, or even buy a small, relatively inexpensive computer and edit video, sound, photographs, and so forth. Since the choices are practically endless, theres a gratuity in the methodsthe medium has definitely lost its message. Meanwhile the art system is extreme in its demand that each artist find a little corner and stay in it. Artists become typecast for a particular video editing or Photoshop method, or a way of assembling found objects, and theyre doomed to regurgitating that solution until every collector is sated, when the artists are expected to renew their trick for the following season. The political climate further compounds issues in that everything is possible, everything is accepted, so why bother to make art about anything at all when to make work about nothing is far more attractive? If you dress your nothing up as an emperor without a kingdom or a religion, all the better.
JS: What will the next step be?
KG: I think its already happening. Its already clear that the world changed on September 11, but its not clear yet what its changing into. Theres an incredible and seemingly unchecked rise of conservatism around the globe today that I think must be challenged at all costs. Its more important than ever to challenge authority and the abuses of power. In art I notice a degree of virtuosity, with artists more concerned with their technique than with what theyre saying, but the pendulum of history always swings back, and very soon I think we are going to see a return to raw reality, lived experience, and analogue expressions emerge as a resistance. Already with the group of artists I describe as TerroRealists, we can see how the work of art is understood in entirely different ways in a Third World context, or in a context of collapsed political power. For many people in the world its news to discover that reality is different from its representation on television, that the so-called news is different from the lived experience of the same event.
JS: Do you believe in history?
KG: Yes and no. I believe that I am, like everybody else, a product of historical events that predate my birth and define my understanding of the world. On the other hand, my understanding of these events that predate me is influenced and blurred by the people who wrote the events down as fact. History is written by the winner, and is always recorded from his or her point of view. In South Africa, for instance, the winner changed in 1990, so we rewrote the events of history in minute detail. The holidays I celebrated as a child are still holidays today, but theyve changed from days of celebration to days of mourning.
JS: Why, as a biography, do you give a list of historical facts, a history of revolution?
KG: I hate the idea of the CV in art, because it reads to me more like a trophy room than anything else. Whenever I look at a CV, even my own, Im reminded of an old musty study with the heads of dead animals on the wall, the smell of cigars, no lightits very macho in a way. More than that, when I look at my CV I dont recognize myself in it: I see the art-system machinery working its little cogs, and not much else. So I decided many years ago to steal this space back for myself, and I reworked it into a list of events that had truly had significance in my life, had authentically changed me and influenced what I think. If you read my CV as a history of revolution, I guess its because Im interested in radical methods of change. Im influenced by the notion that barbed wire was used for the first time by the British in their war against South Africa in 1890, and by the fact that thousands of South Africans died in British concentration camps in the same war. I was also influenced by the deaths of artists like Marcel Duchamp, of thinkers like Debord, and of musicians like Sid Vicious. Perhaps Im as influenced by the idea of death and disruption as by anything else.
JS: Some people see your work as very macho.
KG: Nietszche said that when you look into the abyss the abyss looks into you. He also said that one should be careful, when fighting monsters, that one doesnt become a monster oneself. Since the cultural, political, and social phenomena that I work with in my art are often very macho, my expression can sometimes be read in that way. I try to destabilize structures of power and collapse hierarchies but in order to succeed I sometimes have to approach my subject in precisely the same terms as its defined. That can be read as macho if youre not looking at the big picture.
JS: Is your quasi-autobiography TW(CV) a strategic history of human conflict for an African artist?
KG: We define ourselves by failure as much as by success. Politically as well as socially, we refer to moments of failure as moments that should never be forgotten even more often than we refer to moments of success. The dates on my CV, which go back to the Dutch annexation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, are important to understanding and decoding my work. Moments of private failure are mixed in with the grand failures of social revolutions. My experience as a child was in Africa, I still see myself as an African, so my CV emphasizes African events. At the same time, I think that in the African context weve witnessed the best and worst of what human beings are capable of. Im speaking about Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, both in the South African context, on the one hand, and on the other hand Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, Rwanda, Mobutu Sese Seko, and so forth.
JS: How do you see Africas future?
KG: Africa was the origin of both our civilization (in Egypt) and our species. Things go in cycles and Africa is in a dark place right now, as a direct result of colonialism. Perhaps in fifty years it will have reversed once again, and the United States will be begging countries like Angola, Nigeria, and Congo for funding and food.
JS: Do you think the world is ready for this?
KG: Not yet. For the time being the world cant conceive of Africa as anything but impoverished, both economically and politically.
JS: Would you say that you were fortunate to have been born in South Africa?
KG: I call this the perversity of my birth and the birth of my perversity. I cant say whether or not it was a misfortune to be born into that context, but it certainly affected me. Growing up in a country under siege, where a bomb was hidden under every chair, a spy behind every bush, and the thought police in every corner, obviously permeate ones thoughts and ones understanding of reality. The fall of apartheid gave rise to rape, murder, and other crimes, and the old paranoias and aggressions became the monsters that crawled out from the abyss. I will never be able to exorcise these demons from my unconscious, but at least theyre now resting.
Im not unhappy to have been born into such a perverse context, where one witnesses firsthand the depths to which a human being may descend. It continues to influence my conception of human nature. At the struggles most extreme, even those fighting apartheid stopped at nothing. This fight for basic human rights, and finally the failure of the so-called revolution, colors my understanding of art and its role: how can one create decorative or unengaged work when the world is so obviously unequal in its distribution of wealth and privilege?
JS: What do you think of the questions of identity that have been debated in the last decade?
KG: I think you should first ask where and by whom these questions of have been debated. In the art tribes its very often the European curators and academics who debate so-called identity art, but as always these discussions are about other peoples identitiesthey dont involve self-analysis. As the Occidental art model has lost much of its energy and momentum, it has needed to look elsewhere for stimulation.
JS: Whats the art situation in South Africa?
KG: I believe that the art created under apartheid, from the 1950s to the systems fall in 1990, is among the best ever made in the world. Theres a rage, a pathos, and an incredible energy in the work of artists like Dumile Feni, the early William Kentridge, Dan Rakgoathe, Cyprian Shilakoe, Paul Stopforth, Robert Hodgins, Neil Goedhals, Harold Rubin, Gavin Jantjes, Lerato Motau, and so forth. In my mind Dumile is as good and at times better than any of the German Expressionists. These artists made their work out of a sense of urgency, when South Africa was entirely isolated and collapsing from claustrophobic asphyxiation. Art was a protest against this fascist system as much as it was an assertion of life.
The monster of apartheid was an easy reference point through which to understand your creativity and your humanity. The fall of apartheid brought a decade of absolute chaos in which a generation of artists thrived, for every day was more surreal than the next and life changed faster than it was possible to document. This was the golden age of South African art; the air was filled with a spirit of radical and structural change. Today, sadly, the absence of apartheid and the normality of social chaos means that many artists have no idea what to make. Instead of trying to fund a solution in the local context, most artists are waiting at the airport with their bags packed and their portfolio in hand, just in case a curator passes by. Theres the sense that its an either-or situation, that if one artist finds the way to SoHo then he or she will deny all the others. This translates into the most extreme paranoia and aggression among artistseveryone is trying to trip up the others in case they get there first. The truth is that the work is simply lacking, because very few artists take the time to look around them and develop a vision in tune with their experiences.
There are of course exceptions to this rule, and Im very happy to see that artists like Robin Rhode, Minette Vari, Siemon Allen, Johannes Phokela, and Hentie van de Merwe are finding their way though all the bullshit.
JS: Since the Johannesburg Biennale ended, what are the real possibilities for these artists and others who live there?
KG: The government sees art as a luxury and gives it no support. Its not just the visual arts; the opera, ballet and State Theatre have all suffered the same fate, many companies to the point of closure. There are too few collectors to carry the burden, and those who do exist are investment collectorsa fate worse than Hell. The only real possibility is to escape as soon as you can.
JS: When you were in South Africa you were a very active force for the countrys contemporary art. What are you doing for South African art now that youve moved to Europe?
KG: I have never truly left South Africa; one foot remains there firmly. I cant exist there as an artist so Ive chosen to live in Brussels, but I do everything I can to support South African art and artists. For the last ten years, for instance, Ive been working on a collection of art that now includes 800 pieces. I have also tried whenever possible to organize exhibitions of South African art abroad and to arrange international shows in South Africa. In addition to formal activities like that, Im constantly campaigning for younger artists and trying to keep international curators informed of the situation and its possibilities. My dream is to reinstate the Johannesburg Biennale one day, and to establish a museum of contemporary international art.
JS: How do you see South African art inside the rest of Africa, and inside a global perspective?
KG: To my mind theres very little interesting art being made in Africa today, and that surprises me. Even in the diaspora I find the work being produced mostly rather boring and moralistic. Its strangethe same colonial value system that ravaged Africa is being perpetuated in the work of so many African artists. I dont find the same to be true of art from Mexico or the former Yugoslavia or Russia or Brazil or most Third World countries, and I cant explain why.
JS: What does it mean to you to be a white African?
KG: In Europe Im considered too African, in Africa Im considered too European.
JS: Do you suffer from that permanent misunderstanding? Do you speak about it in your work?
KG: I certainly dont suffer, in fact quite the contrary. I feel very comfortable in this space, because its in essence a question of borders, boundaries, and definitions. Im not sitting on the fence but Im very comfortable living in the border zone. Its like a moral Checkpoint Charlie, an in-between space that is neither and both of the spaces it touches. My work is extremely influenced by and connected to this state, for I try to create pieces that exist in nonexistent, in-between spaces: the museum toilets, the space of the CV, the window, my date of birth, the emergency exit, and so on. More than that, I strive to create situations that exist within the space of psychological, political, and moral borders.
JS: Why did you leave South Africa?
KG: Its basically impossible for me to create the kind of work I do in an African context. While my work is quintessentially influenced by Africa, theres simply no infrastructure or support in that context.
JS: Dont you simply reproduce the model of your historical predecessors, then, artists from the margins who had to move to London, New York, or Paris, the so-called centers, to establish themselves?
KG: Yes, Im reproducing the model, but my plan is a long-term one. I still visit South Africa every three to four months, and Im still working from my experience as a white African artist. Its possible today, more than it ever was, to live simultaneously on two continents without losing your sense of self; when Duchamp went to live in New York or Buenos Aires, he didnt become any less French than when he lived in Paris. I believe that I can better help the art situation in South Africa from here, because the world has changed. The notion of a center doesnt really exist in terms of geography. I mean, how would you define the center of an Internet-based world?
JS: How do you see multiculturalism, and the common current idea that margins are becoming centers and centers becoming margins?
KG: I cant answer that question without wondering why this word even exists. In an international art world, and in an age of globalization, what need do we have for the concept of multiculturalism? As soon as you call something multicultural you create a ghetto within which anything non-Occidental is stigmatized and thus reduced to something other. Im happy with my non-Occidental identity and perception of the world, and at the same time I feel an equal right to define the nature of that world. Why is it that multiculturalism is always defined from the Occidental point of view, always from the so-called center to the outside? Why shouldnt Johannesburg or Beijing be the center and Paris be considered multicultural?
JS: What about the sudden art-world interest in courting artists from South America, Africa, the Balkans, Asiaplaces not inscribed on the traditional international art map?
KG: Frankly I think the traditional art map, like the global economic market, is unable to renew itself quickly enough to keep up with the markets demands for something fresh. The artists emerging from the former margins are producing work so fresh that its become impossible to ignore. Apart from refreshing the market, I think the work produced in the Third World context is interesting because its references move beyond the empty v of global consuming culture. The lived experiences of artists who were born into or have lived a significant time in such a context naturally change the way they understand the possibilities and limits of art.
JS: Do you really think African artists can still live in Africa and have international careers?
KG: Yes of coursejust look at Kentridge, Vari, Tracey Rose, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and dont forget that Okwui Enwezor was living in Johannesburg when he made the second Johannesburg Biennale and with it established his reputation as a curator.
JS: In a recent text for the artist Milica Tomic for the Venice Biennale, you mention TerroRealism as a lived position. What do you mean precisely?
KG: Ive noticed a certain physicality in the experience of works by artists like Tomic, Santiago Siera, Alexander Brener, Oleg Kulig, Sisley Xhafa, and so forth. All their work exists in a state of ethical relationalism that places the viewer in a difficult, often physical situation where they have to decide for themselves where they stand. This ambiguity is very different from that of classical political art from Europe or America. All of these artists were either born into a so-called Third World context or currently live there in exile. I believe this state of exile from the traditional centers translates into the artist considering the work of art an exile from life. This strategy isnt restricted to the current generation, either: it has historical precedents in artists like Marina Abramovic and Cildo Meireles.
JS: What art do you refer to in your work? Who has influenced you most?
KG: David Hammons, Cildo Meireles, Ilya Kabakov, Jimmie Durham, Vito Acconci, Georges Bataille, Aleister Crowley, Michel Leiris, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Daniel Buren, Ana Mendieta, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Charles Argent, and Neil Goedhals.
JS: What about African modernism?
KG: Thats a very good question that I cant answer. I dont think the conditions for a European-style modernism exist or can exist in Africa. Of course there are works of art that mimic the modernist languages and styles, but its not the same.
JS: How do you see your fight for Africa now?
KG: I dont. Im building a new life as a person in a postglobal context. I consider my identity to be postglobal, and I work from that position. Of course I refer to Africa, but I refer equally to Hollywood or Brussels or hip-hop or even Tokyo. We are living in a global village now, and since no French artist is ever asked how they see their fight for France, I dont understand why in Africa we are still stuck on these colonial fantasies of difference.
JS: Apartheid is deadis that really the reality in South Africa?
KG: Apartheid is illegal and if youre found to be racist toward a black person you can go to jail. Of course there are still racist people, but theyre the minority, and no different from racist conservatives in France or the United States or anywhere else in the world.