The Plague Is Me

Une Vie de détournements

 

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

 

It’s not easy to be the one pointing the finger when everyone else is looking the other way. South African artist Kendell Geers’ exhibition “The Plague Is Me, Une Vie de détournements” is exactly that: the story of an artist who has taken codes and works from the recent history of art and used them to call out the arrogant errors of a Western artistic community awash in white privilege. As in André Breton’s anthology and with quite a few twists, he subverts, often with a great deal of humour, while the institution of art remains fixated on his pointing finger rather than what he has to say.

 

And yet, fully aware that he too is a catalyst of things he has for years now taken issue with, Kendell Geers recounts an autobiographical tale that lays no claim to speaking on anyone’s behalf but his own. That tale is the story of this exhibition and of the pieces that were consciously used by others to keep the blinders firmly in place for parts of society that are still too ill-inclined to self-criticism and to understanding how and where they perpetuate their faults and failings vis-à-vis enslaved cultural communities.

 

His works are an exorcism of identity, culture, history and language. When you’re born into the midst of a crime against humanity, how do you rewrite your own identity. If you’re marked with the seal of illegitimacy, or if the exactions of History are the colour of your skin, is it possible to heal the stigmata of your identity?

 

Things breakable have more to say than things unbreakable

(The Crime Scene)

 

There are several important points in this exhibition, and if they are not highlighted in an obvious way, it is simply because the artist’s work has until now not been seen, read or understood correspondingly.

 

Among those important points, I would particularly highlight elements of destruction and anything that has been broken. Here one recalls “By Any Means Necessary” (1995), which told visitors at the time that a bomb had been hidden inside the museum and that it could detonate at any time. This is a direct reference to another work: “After Hans Arp (Plant a Bomb Within the Institution of Art Set to Explode According the Laws of Chances)”, (1994), but also to Malcolm X. Whereas Malcolm X’s speech inspired the Black Panthers, they in turn were inspirational to artists from across Africa, including Kendell Geers: “However, since the advent of colonialism, we Africans have redirected our creativity to focus on the most urgent questions of liberation. Consequently, we have become more skilled at creating revolutions and planting bombs than painting pretty pictures.” Also, “Titled Withheld (Vitrine)” (1993), where Kendell Geers throws a brick through a glass display. These two elements are not there by happenstance. The brick has symbolised political and social transformation since the revolutions of May 1968, and it’s also borrowed from the work of Carl Andre, while the glass display comes from Joseph Beuys. Kendell Geers references these two luminaries of minimal and conceptual art so freely mainly so as to enter into dialogue with them.

But the conversation is a straightforward one: “How can I address the existing contemporary art community? And how, having been Richard Prince’s assistant but having grown up in South Africa during apartheid, to find a language that speaks to the contemporary Western world without renouncing my African culture? How to extricate myself from the history of art and policies that victimise African populations?”. Inevitably this new language thus created gives rise to friction and turmoil. Bits clash and break. They break because they’re fragile and because they’ve dropped the mystical part of their culture. “Art, like its mentors War and Religion, is the only legal form of transgression”.

 

The glass display symbolises something else: the plundering of non-Western cultures, and the prideful and arrogant display of religious objects that were made to be used in rites, in dance, in life. In Africa, it makes no sense to remove a mask from the ritual context in which it is used. It only has meaning within the political, economic, religious and social context to which it belongs. A mask is a living tradition, not a trophy to be worn. By breaking the display, the artist symbolically allows the spirit of the African religious object imprisoned inside to escape and calls out the Western cultural ecosystem’s capacity for appropriation and oppression. It would be a failure of self-analysis to see this act of destruction as a form of vandalism inherited from the era of apartheid and unrest in South Africa. What the artist is trying to shake up here is the Western institution of art, unbeknownst to it.

 

So, having exploded a bomb in a museum, smashed glass displays with bricks, and shot at point blank range with a gun because he wasn’t listened to, Kendell Geers drives a car head-on through the window of the Gallery. This is not self-sabotage, but a new attempt at liberation: when things are smashed they can finally be seen differently, and ultimately, for what they really are. It is important to underscore that while Kendell Geers is a white man, he is nonetheless an African artist. And now that the window has been smashed, we can finally view his work in a new light.

 

Lost objects and titles withheld

 

All that was needed, however, was to accord the details their due importance. From the outset it was all laid bare. Many of Kendell Geers’ works are described as being composed not of objects found or gleaned, as many artists do by producing with things they collect in their surroundings, but from objects that have been lost.

 

Significantly, his biography begins not on the day of his birth, but in 1648 when the Nieuwe Haarlem, a ship of the Dutch East India Company (VOC in Dutch) is wrecked within sight of Table Mountain. The crew of the Nieuwe Haarlem survived for a year in a makeshift camp, eating whatever they could find around them, before being picked up by a passing ship and taken back to Europe. In his report to the VOC, the ship’s commander proposed establishing a revictualling station there to avail of the Mediterranean climate and fertile soil, following which the VOC sent Jan van Riebeeck to establish a fortified base that became the first European trading post in southern Africa. These events mark the beginning of the official history of South Africa as recounted by the Europeans: with the “heroic” survival of a white man, who goes on to appropriate what doesn’t belong to him. Just as America was “discovered” even though it existed before Europeans set foot on its shores, a cultural heritage steeped in privilege makes us believe that what we take belongs to us, whereas the land we’ve settled on and the things we found there invariably belonged to someone before us.

 

Kendell Geers creates using lost objects while calling out this legitimisation of appropriation. He allows them the possibility to continue existing without erasing their past history, even adding a new message to it.

 

Similarly, and again by way of creating a new artistic language that feeds on his learning of Western conceptual and minimal art, Kendell Geers frequently entitles his works “T.W.” or “title withheld”. Like well-known artists such as Klein or Rothko, who frequently named their works “untitled” while tending towards a conceptual and spiritual awakening, our artist shuffles the codes of Western art and offers a more honest and frank language wherein the importance of words, which he is adept at handling in so many languages, merits dissection and analysis.

 

His withheld titles push us to explore further the meaning of his works. Untitled is essentially a nonsense: it’s hard to use words to not name an artefact by giving it a name that means it has none. The artist requires a reading with more meaning and history. Untitled speaks of the artistic institution itself and its history. Outside that context, it is meaningless. Title withheld speaks of the unspeakable habituality of language, its repetitive use, and of the harm it causes by assimilation into its usages. The entire history of apartheid resonates in the use of the word withheld, which back then featured in press reports on bomb attacks that invariably gave the number of victims while withholding their names: “names have been withheld.” It’s an element of history that can be read in his work and its titles if attention is paid.

 

Guilty?

 

Hence the cruciality of according due importance to details and to the stories they convey when considering the work of Kendell Geers. And if there’s one work that stands out, it’s “I am Still (Guilty) Alive” (1997). It’s an ordinary telegram from a post office in Johannesburg that says “I am still alive, Kendell Geers”. The telegram is from a performance exhibition that took place in 1998 just outside Pretoria at Klapperkop fort, one of the main symbols of Dutch colonial history in South Africa. Having been invited to organise an artistic event there, Kendell Geers notices that the anniversary of the fort’s construction will occur during his exhibition. He invites the international associations to come and celebrate the anniversary and entitles the exhibition “Guilty”. When the foreign delegations realise the deception, Kendell Geers is banned from the site and the exhibition is cancelled. The police even issue a warrant to take him into custody after a neo-nazi extremist group designates him a “person to be eliminated”. The commemoration celebrations are to go ahead however, and here is the crux: cancelling the exhibition would mean cancelling the celebrations and therefore cancelling history. So he persuades his gallery to hire an airplane to fly a banner over the fort that reads “Guilty” in several languages. In the ultimate twist of black humour, the neo-nazis celebrating their colonial history screamed at the visitors to the “exhibition”: “we are not a work of art!” The entire story having angered so many nationalist groups, Kendell Geers was refused access to the fort for his own protection. What no-one knew at the time was that he was inside the airplane flying over and back above the site.

 

Many and numerous are the actions and situations that feature in the work and throughout the career of Kendell Geers. Each has its own story, stories that are too seldom told. But the real story in all of this is that there are works in Kendell Geers’ opus that feature in this exhibition that when they were created were rejected by the cultural institutions. This is the case of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Dark Continent)” (1995 – 1998), where on the back of a poster by Felix Gonzales Torres (Veteran Day Sale, 1989) he prints a portrait of himself on a poster for an exhibition entitled “Dark Continent” wearing military fatigues and sitting on an African war throne. He is surrounded by traditional masks and is wearing a mask in the likeness of Nelson Mandela. He wore the mask and fatigues during a performance on the occasion of his first meeting with President Mandela. The work dates from 1998, or twenty years before the Blackface scandal in the US and well before the idea of cultural appropriation assumed the significance it has today. Already back then, Kendell Geers was asking: “how to incarnate the markers of a culture whose skin colour is not one’s own? How to lend it a voice without attributing to it words that a distinct enslaving culture would project onto it?” Answer: by employing a mask and not make-up, as the African cultures historically did by making the mask an attribute and the incarnation of a spirit.

 

The same applies to the two works “Title Withheld (Score) – Don’t Mess With Mister In Between” (1996) and “Title Withheld (Score) – Trade Routes” (1997), which already in the late 1990s called out the unequal featuring of artists in contemporary art events by gender, “race”, sexuality, and religious affiliation. For us today, the result is damning. No museum and no curator agreed to exhibit these works before this exhibition, although now, twenty-five years later, the struggle for equality and inclusivity is raging specifically within the institutions. Maybe back then it was enough for them that they were exhibiting an African artist?

 

The fact that the white African artist Kendell Geers was essentially the only African artist represented in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s highlights the racial prejudices that inhabited the Western art scene at the time.

 

Last but not least: “No Objects (White Out)” (2000) is a rectified lost object. This catalogue of the Annick & Anton Herbert collection, one of Europe’s largest private collections of minimalist conceptual art, is entitled “Many Colored Objects Placed Side By Side To Form A Row Of Many Colored Objects” after a work by Lawrence Weiner (many coloured objects placed side by side to form a row of objects). The collection features however only one non-white artist and one woman!

 

Kendell Geers’ response to what appears to us today as an aberration is to subvert the title of the work: using white Tipp-Ex to delete the word “object”, he leaves us with: “Many Colored s Place Side By Side To form A Row Of Many Colored s”.

 

Guilty then? But of what? And with respect to whom? Maybe with hindsight Kendell Geers is guilty of having been born with the wrong skin colour in the wrong place. When he called that out, aware that the institution of contemporary art was content to show an African artist with the same white skin colour as the other artists it featured, the Western artistic community should have realised that it had a long way to go before it would be capable of deconstructing its perception and thinking and beginning to show the work of these artists rendered invisible. The institution of contemporary art preferred however to make out that Kendell Geers was too violent an artist. But isn’t the true violence concealed where the artist is pointing his finger?

 

Léo Marin