The Passenger
By Joseph Whitt

A bomb has been hidden somewhere in this exhibition, set to explode at a time known to the artist alone. While it is not my intention to kill anyone, that risk does exist. I apologize in advance for any injuries, fatalities, damage or other inconvenience that my work will cause. In this matter I have no choice, being as much a victim of the course of Art History and contemporary politics as those who are hurt in the process. I take consolation in the fact that chance will be entirely responsible for the final statistics...
The bomb will cause serious, if not structural damage to the Virginal White Cube of the space as well as totally destroy any works of art in the immediate vicinity of the explosion. The debris and shrapnel will later be mounted and sold as individual sculptures...
A police investigation will follow and a warrant issued for my arrest. Being guilty I will not resist, accepting full responsibility for my actions and implications thereof... Art Historians, Critics, Philosophers, and Sociologists will be called upon to explain why my actions constitute a relevant work of art at this point in time. History will later debate and decide the merits of the piece...
This text will be presented as evidence of fair warning of the existence of the bomb as well as my intentions... The form of the piece (being what amounts to a terrorist attack) is simply a contemporary African artists response to the world he lives in and the histories he has inherited.
Aluta Continua.

Kendell Geers. - from By Any Means Necessary (abridged), 1995

Perhaps it is the very specificity of art world discourse and its subsequent exclusionary nature that save practitioners of certain unsettling critical strategies from a dire fate at the hands of a much larger, less patient world. Then again, where free will is concerned, what starts as a sanctuary can often end as a prison, given a little gestation time. From the moment that Marcel Duchamp once famously asked, How does one make a work of Art that is not Art, it has been a familiar contention in certain Conceptualist circles that the world surrounding art can become a kind of intellectual ghetto, when its boundaries and tolerances are fully tested. Indeed, in most parts of academia, as a dialogue grows more narrow in scope, there is often a greater likelihood that the questions involved will beg or contain answers that are anticipated by the language of the dialogue itself. One might ask if the pages of this publication (along with those of others like it, around the world) assist a larger network - of galleries, exhibition spaces, and graduate schools - in setting the stage for a type of sanctioned anarchy, where the free will of the artist is tempered with various unspoken semantic and contextual strictures? At what point do we begin to experience such limits as an audience, or feel the consequence of the weight of those limits as makers? How can we distinguish between a destructive act of aesthetic terrorism and a genuine attempt on the part of the artist to induce a new way of seeing?
Kendell Geers might argue that both feats can be one and the same given the right conditions. For more than a decade, his interventions have criss-crossed the globe, scratching, as the artist has said many times, where it does not itch. His varied oeuvre - of conceptual gestures, accompanying documentation, objects, photographs, installations, video projections, texts, wall drawings, and sound work - specializes in bringing about an inversion of power relations, most often through the performative, where private and public are mirrored in one another. Norms, such as the sanctity of the exhibition space, are suspect. The viewer is regularly implicated in some way, and passive expectations on the part of the audience, hoping to glimpse slivers of the artists private world, are mocked by the intrusion of a tense collective reality. The spirits of the trickster, the activist, and the art historian find a fearless synergy in Geers, and his strategies engage where others might lapse and merely sermonize. Giving expression to that point where emotion strips language of all its power to control us is his task. No apologies. No regrets.
Geers has been identified as one of the most suspect people on the planet - an apartheid-era white South African male - since his birth in May 1968, a date that he changed in 1993 to coincide with the 1968 student rebellion in Paris and the utopian activities of the Situationist International founded by Guy Debord. At 15, he became a runaway - abandoning his father, an abusive alcoholic mechanic, and several unabashedly bigoted extended family members who worked as police officers. His mother fled when Geers was a boy for reasons similar to his own. Upon leaving, he changed his given name of Jacobus Hermanus Pieter Geers to the less provincial Kendell, and made a personal vow to avoid speaking Afrikaans. He also vowed to wear black as often as he could as an expression of his newfound identity as a quintessential African, someone black on the inside if not on the outside. He managed to attend university and discovered fine art by chance, while sitting in on a particularly engrossing class devoted to the history and practice of Dada. After publicly refusing to serve in the South African Defense Force during apartheid, he was forced into exile to escape a six-year prison sentence on the heels of his graduation. He lived in New York City for a year, worked as a studio assistant to artist Richard Prince, among others, and returned to South Africa after the release of Nelson Mandela precipitated the lifting of his prison sentence.
Then 22, Geers began taking a series of photographs of himself in private - frontal head shots, snapped minutes after pouring animal blood over his freshly shaven, dramatically darkened and encrusted head. These stark self-portraits, oddly punctuated by the artists piercing blue eyes staring forward are enduring archetypes of the time and place in which they were made. The spring of 1990 was an arguably heady period that seems almost foreign now, given the uber-cynical aftermath of our post 9/11 world - lest we forget that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square uprising preceded Mandelas freedom by mere months. On one level, the image of Geers still seems to embody the brief political exhilaration of that season in an almost wistful way - affirming South Africas (and the worlds) shared ties of blood, need for autonomy and sense of individual impermanence - the we all die, we all bleed, unite all creeds mantra given a full didactic treatment. However, as effectively as it pleads for an end to suffering, it also hums with a sinister and prophetic aura - one that any look at the current international news will emphasize. In the years that followed, and even now, South Africa has been bathed in blood. Its incidence of violence, murder and rape are now unsurpassed by any country in the world as a result of the social destruction and educational neglect caused by apartheids divisions. Geerss deadpan visage continues to stare at his home from a seemingly distant past, embodying the hopes and contritions of an entire nation, implicated in its own undoing - a mirror held up to, and a warning for, the world.

I have tried to critically use the tactics and strategies that I learnt in the fight against apartheid as strategies for creating art. I am not interested in illustrating themes of apartheid as much as trying to translate the resistance to one power structure as a method to resist another power structure. Both apartheid and the art system are built on a consumer capitalist culture and both rely on the complacency of the bourgeoisie. So why not use the same strategies? I think that as time has gone by, my method has been greatly misunderstood, for the violence seems to be the only thing that people focus on and reject. On the other hand, I come from the most violent city in the world, so why is it that I should not use that space and resist the cool temptation of translating everything into some kind of designer dissent? There is no anarchy of the mind in the art system I know - just loads of safe cathartic rituals.

Throughout the nineties, Geerss career ascent appeared to be much like a tightrope walk without a net; and along with his reputation as enfant terrible came more than a few enemies. Installing a 6000 volt electric fence within several international group shows and turning it on with only one deterrent - a small metal warning sign - may have imposed some curatorial distance; even if such a work was conceived, respectfully enough, as a reference to Sol Lewitts thin pencil line drawings with 6000 volts running through each line. Acts such as throwing a brick through several gallery windows and displaying the detritus as an installation, or placing texts that were effectively personal bomb threats against the art establishment within museums also did much to ensure some misunderstandings. The number of feminist diatribes written in response to the artists presentation of a leg-splayed (notably Caucasian) Hustler centerfold - complete with the ornamental topping of his own ejaculate - within a display case, could provide enough raw material to stuff an effigy. But, it was his one-time voluntary conscription to every existing political party in South Africa, and the eventual display of the nine separate ID cards that were issued to him, that elicited his first death threats. He began the project just hours after hearing of the massacre of seven Zulu taxi passengers in Johannesburg at the hands of gunmen demanding to know each passengers political preference. Only one man survived, Geers reported at the time. He lied about his political allegiances. That got me thinking.
In 1995, when Nelson Mandela was scheduled to open an exhibition in Berlins Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Geers arrived to greet him, at the end of a long line of artists and handshakers, wearing head-to-toe camouflage and a latex mask caricaturing Mandelas own face. A surprisingly good-natured exchange followed, with Mandela laughing and complimenting the artist on his idea. I did not know how to greet a god,Geers conceded, so I thought about the African tradition of masks in which the wearer showed their highest respect for a god by wearing a mask of the god. I also wore camouflage - the modern African fabric and mask. A mob of angry German onlookers saw no humor or meaning in it, however; and as Mandela left the reception, Geers was attacked and a loud debate ensued among everyone involved.
Granted, listing such acts and responses in a reductive way, without the benefit of each ones complete context and two steps removed from a real experience, is unfair. Yet, doing so sheds a lot of light on how many misconceptions about the artists work have grown and reinforced themselves within some parts of the art world. Geers is not interested in an illustration of shock tactics, nor does his work easily lend itself to summary. The situations that he creates are deceptively simple, and really, what you see is the last thing that there is. Simultaneously embodying a thought and the end product of a process, his work often functions more like the scene of a crime, where visitors try to reconstruct what has transpired and then try to find their own relationship to that understanding. Inside such a process, the viewer can clearly see the self and how the self is constructed inside language, and also inside what some might call morality. In a strict sense, there is a covert politics at work here as well, due to the commitment demanded of the viewer when he or she assigns, or rather, decides meaning. The fact that Geers never makes his position clear in relation to the object, image or situation is perhaps the greatest source of frustration for some of his most vocal critics. But, without this ambiguity of stance, the artists strategies would quickly become pedantic, moralizing, and worst of all, predictable.
When surprise is so important, it usually follows that anything goes, often with or without the consent of an audience. This year, Galleria Continua hosted Geerss latest solo exhibition, Mondo Kane, in San Gimignano, Italy. At the request of the artist, staff members were instructed to inconspicuously collect used or empty wine glasses and cocktail tumblers from all of the attending arts patrons during the opening reception. Each glass was taken without the knowledge or permission of the user, and later carefully dusted for fingerprints by a police officer called in especially for the occasion. The next day, the glasses were labeled and displayed on eight virgin glass shelves as one cumulative project entitled Fingered (2002).
Fingered makes everyone - from the tipsy international curator to the baker in the gallery kitchen - one and the same, and cites all involved equivalently. The piece registers much like a line-up of suspects, of the kind shown to crime victims by police during a manhunt, except that here the victims are on both sides of the one-way mirror looking down at themselves, while the real instigator, Geers, remains at large and invisible. The viewer, and especially the art system, are implicated into the creation of the meaning and value of the piece, and perhaps broadly by extension, of everything the artist has touched in the name of art. It parodies the idea of originality by using the fingerprint - the one thing most commonly held up as most unique to each of us - to represent something that is at once a universal hallmark of guilt and also a constantly discarded self-portrait. When viewed as a whole, the dusty blackened prints read as a sea of casual features - each expressing the same thing, each pointing back unexpectedly to the culpability of the audience.
Masked Ball (2002), on the other hand, not only requires viewer consent to function, but also an outright participation. Masked Ball is exactly that - a latex mask of Italian president Silvio Berlusconi (caricatured in the same manner as Geerss Mandela mask) with a soccer ball placed snugly inside. The artist refers to it as a nomadic sculpture, due to its constant displacement within the Mondo Kane exhibit by occasional uninstructed nudges and kicks from visitors. Berlusconi, in addition to being the president, also exercises a controlling monopoly over all major television channels in Italy. With Masked Ball, Geers touches on a nations mania by referencing its passionate love of sport, and then challenges that energys direction by encasing it within the grinning face of control. It is both a comic invitation to play and a situation to elicit childish opposition. Word has it that the artist has plans to create a similarly masked football team composed of all of the worlds major political faces (Bush, Blair, Castro, and so on), no doubt with the intention of enticing future roomfuls of art lovers to really kick around the powers that be.
In Truth Or Dare (Jan Hoet) (2001), a roomful of bugle megaphones, huddled together amid a tangled mass of connecting cables, softly broadcast several audio loops - each documenting erratic cries of pain from international curator Jan Hoet. Hoet had agreed beforehand, at the behest of Geers, to submit himself to the talents and expertise of a Dutch dominatrix for the sake of the recording. But, judging from his wailing, the curator got much more than the simple art prank that he clearly expected. Geers indulges his sado-masochistic urge toward authority in a much more real, but no less amusing, way here - successfully reversing an established control hierarchy, while slapping a psychic high-five with rejected artists everywhere.

Humour, black and all, is just about the most important uniting element in all my works. I am very influenced by the concept of Andre Bretons Anthology Of Black Humour and have always wanted to update it. There is a perversity in the everyday that I think of as humourous and it is that perversity that I try to weave into my work. When I use humour, its usually a way to make the viewer self-conscious, so that their response reveals something of themselves... I am also very taken with the concept of the medieval court jester - the single and only citizen who can make fun of the king, make jokes of everybody around them, and still get away with it. He is the only person who can honestly and publicly say what others dream. This is something more than a freedom.

The notion that our personal limits and tolerances can protect and betray us in the face of intensity has long been a hallmark of masochism. Pleasures, such as laughter and orgasm, can become painful if overly sustained; and in turn, pain, or any sharply focused sensual experience, that is prolonged and deliberate, can become trance-like and meditative. In Deep Throat (2002), Geers attempts a similarly masochistic spatial hypnosis that brings to mind the dream machine experiments of Brion Gysin during the early 1960's. Containing a film loop of a scene from the 70's porno of the same name, Deep Throat is essentially a video projection cast very closely against a rotating mirror ball. In a darkened room, the viewer is surrounded by hundreds of silent strobing images that are not only fragmented but slowly spinning across the walls. Discerning the content of each image by eyeing it around the room is a difficult and nauseous experience, made daftly ironic by the fact that the loop itself is of a woman reaching sexual climax. It is probably like a muted version of the fabled Studio 54 drug haze, where dizzy vertigo and eroticism are married in a flickering disco dream.
Nearly all of Geerss recent forays into video have explored the dichotomy between the brutal and the meditative, with Deep Throat ranking as probably his most sardonic effort yet. However, often times, the artist leaves his wit buried so deep in the mix that the experience feels almost a priori in nature - with repetition invoking a simple mantra, transforming content (no matter how disturbing) into something almost like a force of nature, outside the bounds of language. T.W. (Scream) (1999) and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (2000) distill cinematic action into one potent moment - the former projecting a tightly cropped womans face repeatedly screaming in terror onto a double-sided screen, and the latter airing two disjointed scenes from Coppolas The Godfather in which a cigar-smoking fat man laughs knowingly in his easy chair. After the obvious pop culture references fade, the repetition of the edit effectively erases narrative, leaving the viewer with a painfully intimate overstatement of reality. Something fictional and elsewhere suddenly becomes real and claustrophobic. The artists decision to leave the connecting cables of each work strewn across the footpaths of the viewer also underlines his intention of heightening a tangible risk.
Geers lifts practically all of his source material from the public domain - sampling and recycling bits and pieces from high literature, bathroom humor, colloquial expressions, cult cinema, and the bylines of art history - with the encyclopedic ease of a DJ. Nothing is immune. Mondo Kane (2002), in addition to being the title of his latest exhibition, is also the name of a oddly self-referential work made of concrete and glass. The title references two films. One is a 1962 Italian shockumentary - Mondo Cane - that stunned the world when it was first released, as it traveled back and forth from the civilized world to the primitive world, depicting bizarre religious rituals, sautéed insect entrees, and the human being lost and at the mercy of nature. The other allusion is to Orson Welless Citizen Kane - which opens with a tarnished sign on a forbidding black wire fence that appears eerily similar to Geerss electrified version. Mondo Kane could also be mistranslated as Mondo Ken, or Kendells world. The piece looks like a chest-high version of the classic Modernist cube, sacrilegiously cast in concrete and violated by hundreds of broken bottles jutting out from all sides. Several years ago, Geers displayed a similarly broken Heineken bottle - with its imported from Holland, original quality label still affixed and intact - as a self-portrait. In Mondo Cane, he expands that choice to represent an almost virus-like domination and irreverence toward the flimsy sanctities and certainties of art history. In piercing Modernisms infamous final object with green glass shards, Geers recalls his previous readymade and clones it into conquering army. The Modernist cube exists no longer as a gravestone, but as a carcass being actively fed upon. Like everything else in Geerss universe, it is potential prey - a metaphor of the eternal triumph and revisionism of entropy.