Kendell Geers - Interview

Edited byClive Kellner

with essays byNicolas BourriaudLaurent DevèzeKaterina GregosClive KellnerAnitra Nettleton

and a conversation between Kendell Geers and William Kentridgemoderated by Okwui Enwezor

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ForewordOkwui Enwezor

Kendell Geers (1988 — 2012)Clive Kellner

The Perversity of My Birth: The Birth of My PerversityKendell Geers

Kendell Geers: A Proletarian GnosisNicolas Bourriaud

On the Aesthetic and Political Language of Art: A Conversation between Kendell Geers and William KentridgeModerated by Okwui Enwezor

On the Political in Kendell Geers’ Early Work, 1988 — 2000 Katerina Gregos

(With Your) Back to the Wall: The Murals of Kendell Geers Anitra Nettleton

Kendell Geers, or the Denial of the Evident Laurent Devèze

List of Works in the Exhibition

Photo Credits

Authors’ Biographies

Colophon

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Kendell Geers / William Kentridge / Okwui Enwezor

On the Aesthetic and Political

Language of Art:

A Conversation between

Kendell Geers and

William KentridgeModerated by Okwui Enwezor

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Okwui Enwezor

Let me sketch out very quickly the parameters of this discussion. William, as you know, Haus der Kunst is organizing a survey exhibition of the work of Kendell Geers, curated by Clive Kellner. The exhibition covers all the periods of Kendell’s practice, from 1988 to the present. While this is a survey exhibition based on a classical monographic survey format, given the nature of Kendell’s work, the exhibition is in many senses also a biography of South Africa. Over the past 25 years, Kendell has produced a series of self-portraits refl ecting on his identity as an artist, both in the conventional sense of making self-portraits, but also in the larger historical sense of implicating the South African historical trajectory as part of his self-construction as a white male within that society. Given the fact that both of you hold very important and crucial positions in the debates surrounding South African contemporary art of the past thirty years, perhaps we can initiate a discussion about the place that each of your practices holds in the narrative of South African art. Or, on the other hand, we can examine the di! erences in your practices and the strategies that you have each employed as artists, to speak to the larger question of the space of the arts, the space of representation, and the various aesthetic contexts that you bring to bear in your elaboration of South Africa. So let me begin fi rst with you, William. And Kendell can then come in. Within this notion of the biography of South Africa and how that is implicated in the work of artists of your generation, do you see your work as being embedded in the same trajectory in terms of the relationship between your artistic practice and the country of your birth?

William Kentridge

Let me give a short biographical description. When I was in the university I was concerned with how my work as an artist could be carried out in the context of South Africa. It was a question of, what is to be done di! erently to provide a clear answer about what is to be done. When I started to work while fi nishing up being a student, I had a dilemma: one could make a list of images needed by the working class in their struggle, or one could ask what were the images needed by the working class in

that struggle. I spent a lot of time making posters for trade-union movements and doing theater work for shop stewards. This was in the mid-1970s, from 1973 onward after the growth of the trade-union movement and then continuing until 1976 or so. That work came to an end in 1981, when I decided that actually, in order to have a clue about what other people thought, I had to try to think about what was needed to make my work. An invisible gap developed between the drawings I was doing for myself and drawings I was doing within the political world. When I came back after a gap of about two-and-a-half-years, it was in a very di! erent way: allowing the world to come into the studio, whether the political, the social, or the private being transformed, taken apart, and reconstructed into drawings and fi lms, without an agenda or a program or an understanding of what the relationship would be to the world. In retrospect, if you look at the works I did over the last years, there are correspondences between work being done in the studio and particular moments in South African history.

OE

Kendell, given what William has just sketched out, I want to begin with your own engagement with similar topics, especially, with work that engages a broader space of the struggle in South Africa in the 1970s, which William has just described, as well as work that he produced outside the framework of that struggle. Here, we are describing images created within a more refl ective personal engagement with the work of art insofar as it resonates in the public arena, which may or may not have to do with politics. Nevertheless, this work made for oneself and work made for the context of broader public engagement were deeply connected. For you, though, you started with the self-portrait, which encapsulates both your personal identity and the broader identity of the South African nation. The fi rst entry in this self-portrait was the year 1652, the year Jan van Riebeeck and his crew made landfall in today’s South Africa. Make a connection between what William has spoken about and your work, and how you think the work of your generation has taken on the particular question of the relationship between the individual as a private fi gure and the artist as a public fi gure, in a larger historical, social, and political process.

On the Aesthetic and Political Language of Art

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Kendell Geers

The primary di! erence between the South Africa that William was born into and was talking about and the country I was born into is the question of a di! erent times or political eras. I was a student from 1985 until 1988, which was the tail end of apartheid in its dying throes. I had the very fortunate situation, I remember, in the earliest days of my own protest politics, of entering into a world and a cultural political language that was already defi ned, and from my very fi rst protest march as a young man, I saw and was able to follow William walking down the streets with his banners and posters. William had really prepared the way for somebody of a di! erent generation to be able to try to bridge the gap between the stu! that needed to be done politically and the stu! that I was trying to work on, let’s say, in the studio, at least as a student. One could say that artists like William or Paul Stopforth and Michael Goldberg were role models in the ways they were working with various political organizations, making posters, lending their talents to the struggle, and inspiring me with the idea and the belief that art could, or even should, be a weapon of the struggle. But already the violent fl ash point of 1985, my fi rst year in the university and the fi rst of many imposed states of emergency, was a time when things were basically falling apart socially and politically for the apartheid regime. South Africa was turned into this incredibly violent and volatile political state in which the only possible way to think was extreme “By Any Means Necessary.” That was certainly what a lot of the anti-apartheid politicians were saying at the time. At the most awful and extreme low point, there was Winnie Mandela saying: “With our matches and with our tires we will liberate the country.” 1 With that statement she gave permission to mob rule in which people, many innocent people, were being burned alive with tires doused with petrol around their necks. That sense of emergency translated into a need to make very strong commitments to an aesthetic language that was the aesthetic translation of the very strong ethical commitments being made to the politics of the time, and as a result an almost militant commitment began entering into my work as an artist. The idea was one of making art from an extremely militant point of view, militant as much in relation to the apartheid condition as well as toward the international languages of modernism

and postmodernism. I think it was for that reason, in that political context, that my work, from very early on, already started to conceive of politics as something that permeates absolutely everything I do, permeates every material, every image, every object, every aspect of what an ideology or language is able to manifest. I tried to pare down my expression to something very minimal, very political, very social, something that Nicolas Bourriaud would later call “Relational” (although I still prefer to describe my work as “Relational Ethics” rather than use his term “Relational Aesthetics”). It was almost just the essence of an idea. And that’s when I began to develop works like “Brick” or “Suitcase,” simple domestic and quotidian objects with only a photocopy on their side, or “Tyre,” with the lettering “eenie meenie miney mo, catch a nigger by his toe” whitewashed on its rim. The racist words of course were taken from the “Counting Out Song” printed in Rudyard Kipling’s Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923), a guidebook for boy scouts and girl guides (youth organizations that were started in South Africa by Baden-Powell as the reserve army during the Anglo-Boer War). I was at the time trying to understand how racism could enter the imaginations of children at such young ages and was fascinated by the ways that so-called family values or so-called common-sense changed over di! erent generations. Kipling’s “Counting Out Song” would be considered absolutely racist today and would almost certainly be banned in South Africa, but in 1923 it was proposed as moral advice to the scouting youth. I was trying to understand how racism, ideology, ethics, and aesthetics all function together and then bring that into my work with a sense of urgency. Given the extreme politics and repression of the time, the numerous states of emergency and political turmoil, my militancy only grew more extreme until, by 1988, I was part of—as you both know—the “End Conscription Campaign,” a group of white men who publicly refused to go to the army and face instead either going into exile or being sentenced to six years’ prison for treason. It became pretty clear at that point that the only way I would survive would be to actually leave South Africa and try to function intelligently in exile outside apartheid South Africa. That militancy haunted me for many years and earned me the reputation of being an “enfant terrible” and the bad boy of the South African art scene, but it was hard to shake it o! given the context out of which my work had grown.

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OE

Kendell’s conclusion had to do with the choices he had to make, that formed his ideas and informed his work in terms of its reduction, paring down the work to what he called the “essence of the work.” William, how did the iconography of your work change from the images you made in terms of the public space and the images that emerged in the studio?

WK

There were certain overlaps. The character of Soho Eckstein, the industrialist in the pinstripe suit that started in the animated fi lms was a holdover from the industrialists, from the capitalists that existed in all the posters I made for the trade unions, for the Fatti’s and Moni’s strike, from the campaign “Rock Against Racism” or “Rock Against Capital.” There were concerts for “Rock Against Management” (it could have been “Rock Against Apartheid”). The same man existed in one of the trade-union plays we did titled Security (1980). He had come from di! erent posters and migrated to having a place in the fi lms. So that was a continuity of iconography. But the self-portraits that started coming in were very di! erent from what the posters needed. There was a sense of allowing myself to put images in, even if I didn’t quite know what they meant, or what their larger places in the fi lm were, or the point I was making. So I was doing drawings of a bedside photograph of two lovers in the corner of a café. I feel that’s an image that talked to me, but I didn’t know how to fi t it into any political agenda—but nonetheless, allowing that space. There was a key moment when I thought, if people are going to think of it as political, then I’ll discover who I am, or if the work doesn’t have a use, then that’s about me. And then say, let the works show me, or try to instruct the work, how it had to be presented to me. For me that was an important shift. One of the things I must say, and I’m not sure if Kendell had the same feeling—but I don’t know if it was just because of the 1970s and 1980s—was a sense of being interested in some of the language we saw in European or American art, but then feeling that it needed to be fi lled with the crisis of the emergency that was happening in South Africa. At one stage I wanted to paint like an abstract expressionist, but to bring German

expressionism, or the fi gurative, back into it. I always had a sense of some of your work, Kendell, as being completely indebted either to forms of minimalism or conceptualism, but needing to fi ll it with the emergency around you. I didn’t feel that in a lot of the work being made in Europe or America at that time, in the 1970s or 1980s.

KG

William, it’s interesting what you are saying because I think that the di! erence between the your childhood and teenage years in the 1970s and my own a decade later is that by the 1980s everything that apartheid had been built upon, the foundation of its political power, was starting to fall apart. I think that the sheer weight and power of the price of gold in the 1970s made the country wealthy enough to hide things under a carpet of luxury and pretend that things were under control, and most white South Africans could live their lifestyles oblivious to what was going on in the townships, living in their cozy suburbs lives that resembled some kind of “normality” from a blinkered point of view.

WK

In the 1970s, when I was fi nishing school, there was complete stagnation in South Africa until the trade unions started. When you were a student, it was the state of emergency, massive repression, white boys being conscripted into the army, where it was better to be in the townships with their guns, or on the far side of Zimbabwe; Angola and Mozambique were still Portuguese colonies. It was a very di! erent situation from what it was to be a white someone leaving high school in the mid 1980s than it was in the early 1970s.

KG

Well, indeed, I think that is exactly why I ended up becoming an artist. Having the compulsory conscription hanging over my head from my fi fteenth birthday, knowing that if I went to the army I would be fi ghting very real people with very real guns in either Soweto or in Angola; and knowing that I would, in e! ect, be supporting a crime against humanity by going to the army, I decided at a

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very young age that there was no way I could do that, no way I would use my body (and soul) as a violent weapon to defend the apartheid government. Things were falling apart politically and they could not hide it any more. They could not pretend it wasn’t going on any more. It was in your face, everywhere. And in retrospect I still don’t understand how white people in the 1980s, in my kind of situation and from my background, were still able to pretend that this thing wasn’t going on. As you no doubt remember, so many people pretended it wasn’t going on, that apartheid was “normal” and even “God-given” at the Battle of Blood River. I think that it was this understanding and the understanding of the perversity of the lives that white people were living, that set o! the political acceleration in my teenage years, suddenly changing one day from being super naive about what was going on in the world and the next throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at fascist policemen. I think I was twelve or fourteen when it suddenly hit me, like a blinding fl ash, that my entire life had been based upon a lie, based on looking in the other direction when the police were sjamboking [horse-whipping] black people as they rounded them up to check their dompas (pass) books. My family, my education, my faith, my entire world was suddenly called into question and my world fell apart as I understood that everything I had been taught, every moral and truth that I was taught to believe in by my father, my teachers, and priests, was in fact a lie and worse still, fundamentally morally corrupt. I lost my faith in everything and everyone as I understood they had all lied to me and colluded in one of the most violent crimes against humanity. At the time I strongly agreed with Adorno’s infamous quote, that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric! Based on this, I found the idea of “poetry” or beauty to be untenable, rejecting all notions of visual representation, of imagery, or even the idea of metaphor. For in my opinion they were all distracting and would only contribute to the suburban blinkers. I tried to pare down the work of art to something extremely charged and politically volatile. My understanding of politics in those days was not about announcing whom I would be voting for because I thought that much was obvious, but politics was about paring the work of art down to something contradictory or ambiguous, creating a tricky situation that would literally pull the carpet of expectations out from underneath you in terms of expectation and representation. There was at the

time a lot of discussion about what was termed “Township Art” (the work by black artists that the suburban white collectors were suddenly “discovering”) and I remember Neil Goedhals and I were talking about our work as being “Suburban Art” or “SUB-urban Art,” an art that grew out from the white suburbs of blinkered values and eclipsed morals. I was just going to make art that, in its moral ambiguity would demand of the viewers that they consider their own personal political relationships toward what was being presented, to look at their own politics in relation to what they were looking at, and in the process making aesthetic as well as ethical judgments upon it. It was for that reason that I decided to veer away from the international languages of painting, away from imagery of any sense and really try to work with something very bleak and stark, simply a text, or an idea, of the least amount of things I could do in order to ideologically produce something which we could collectively agree to call a work of art. And indeed you’re right somehow: in the absence of imagery and the absolute disregard of aesthetics, the work veered toward the traditions of Dada, Duchamp, Picabia, and could even be read as somehow connected to the languages of minimalism and Conceptual Art.

WK

If you think of your brick with the text on it and the whole history of it—which in a sense is a reworking of Carl Andre’s work—a brick as a minimal work of art. That became a way of saying here is this common material but with di! erent ways of working, a commonality of saying, here is a formal language which one can add to post-1970. But then, you can’t just have a brick in the context of South Africa; that certainly has a story, with associations to itself and sets of meanings.

KG

Well, I mean it’s a brick, of course, and indeed I’m quoting Carl Andre and referencing that international language. But it has a badly printed local Xerox stuck on the side of the international brick and there is tape around it on the fl oor as though it is all the scene of a crime and the work is placed directly on the fl oor so you’re forced to bend or kneel down in order to read the text. As soon as you bend down to read, the fi rst word you see is “Mmabatho”

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and so you would immediately know that the story is set in Bophuthatswana, one of the Bantustans, the home of Sun City. The text, taken from a newspaper article, tells a story of a family who was cold and so put a brick in the fi re, then wrapped it in a blanket to keep warm, but the brick smoldered and gave a lot of smoke and the entire family died; a tragedy in a few cold sentences. When you read into that text with half a heart, you should understand the complexity of apartheid’s broken families and ask, so where is the father? Of course, he is o! to work somewhere in Johannesburg or the gold mines. The fact that she had to put a brick in a fi re to warm herself means she was probably living in a shack and the fact that she didn’t realize that this was going to kill her means she is probably uneducated. Reading it in this way, you see the whole history of apartheid’s policies and the whole political dynamic being played out in this simple domestic object, and that I was at the same time a few hundred kilometers away hurling at the police outside Wits University. The quotidian banal brick, relocated to the gallery fl oor with its Xerox cloak, stands as a monument to the lack of proper housing, the lack of enough real houses made out of real bricks and mortar, which forced these broken families into shanty towns. All of a sudden, you understand that the cold, cerebral, aesthetic language of Carl Andre is transformed and turbocharged with politics and the international aesthetic is suddenly inextricably wound up with a discussion about ethics and local conditions.

OE

This is very interesting. Obviously, what you are both talking about sort of elucidates not only the di! erences in artistic strategy, but the commonality in terms of the language used to speak in a broader context of representation. Now, might it be possible to really get into that space of representation, but also the space of reception? Kendell, you are saying that if one were to take a look at the work that you are talking about, with the brick, one has to bend down to read it. Where would people have seen that work? And who would have seen this work? And what kinds of discussions might that work have provoked at that particular time? And similarly for your work, William: when your fi lms began to be presented in South Africa, what kind of resonance did they have? And who was looking at this work?

WK

At the fi lms?

OE

At the fi lms or your drawings. What was the space of representation like? With artists, with museums, with critics, and so on?

WK

The work was seen in galleries and exhibition spaces such as Market Theatre Gallery, which was both a gallery and a theater space. It would have a theater audience and an art audience. I was always astonished that it was a slightly wider audience, to some extent in festivals, but essentially in the gallery context, that the viewers of galleries in South Africa are very largely a white, middle-class audience. It was always astonishing back then and now when I discovered a lot of younger black artists, who had seen the work or had come across it in one form or another, and it had resonated in some ways for them. Sometimes in surprising ways. In one of the Soho Eckstein fi lms, there is a drawing of a curtain around a hospital bed, with the corrugations of the curtain. And somebody came up to me and said, “Now you have drawn my shack in a squatter settlement with corrugated iron exactly like where I live.” I was surprised that it was not just the white bourgeoisie who saw the work, but also that there were things that people read in very di! erent ways; that was always a surprise.

KG

It’s interesting that William spoke about the Market Theatre Gallery because that was also very much part of my own starting point as well, as a space that was outside of the commercial gallery systems. The Market Theatre was extremely important for me in my early years, as a student as well as a young artist, because it was one of the few places outside the commercial system where one could exhibit work that was resistant and political. It was there that I was able to exhibit a lot of my early works because it was the only place in Johannesburg at the time where one had the opportunity and possibility of presenting work that was outside the commercial

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gallery system. Despite the noncommercial context, the fi rst reactions to my work were extremely negative and that’s pretty much how it has remained right up to the present, within South Africa. But more than just a gallery, the Market Theatre context in general was extremely important from a number of other points of view. At the time it was defi nitely one of the very few public anti-apartheid sites presenting all kinds of protest theatre with international funding and support. I remember, as a young artist, going there to see plays like Asinamali (Mbongeni Ngema) or Woza Albert! [by Ngema, Percy Mtwa, and Barney Simon] in which the political content of the shows was explosive and extreme, but more important to my young imagination was the economy of means: the props were absolutely pared down to their bare essence. You would have these black actors playing both themselves and white policemen with absolutely nothing on the stage. When they changed character from themselves into the character of the policeman they would simply put on a red clown’s nose and take it o! again to transform back into themselves. I was extremely impressed by this ability, with an economy of means, to be able to change perception so incredibly, acutely, and precisely and to mock the power of the police state at the time by making clowns of them with a small red nose, brilliant acting, and nothing more. That became a massive infl uence for me, understanding the ways I could use objects or images or contexts to be the equivalent of an ideological red clown’s nose and change their meaning and in that way question perceptions and values.

WK

That’s very interesting.

OE

William, you are very much involved with theater, and given what Kendell has just spoken about the Market Theatre Gallery being this space that is outside the realm of the commercial and, I suppose, the space of the white bourgeois context. What do you see as the di! erences between those two spaces? Are there di! erences for you, as Kendell remembered it? And what kind of work did you bring into that context?

WK

The Market Theatre Gallery was an artist-run gallery. The decision to invite you to show was taken by a group of people like Wolf Weinek, Paul Stopforth, Michael Goldberg. So fi rstly it had to do with an a" rmation by one’s peers. In my case, by artists who were slightly senior to me and whom I really respected. So that was very important, that it had an internal, logical a" rmation rather than just a market a" rmation. Obviously, it’s more than that; it was also a commercial gallery. But in terms of audiences there was a big overlap between the audience that came to the Market Theatre and Market Gallery and the commercial gallery. But there were also other people that would not have gone to the commercial galleries at that time. That was important. It was not a major part of the audience, but it was a big overlap. It had a very di! erent atmosphere. I think it was a good way to start for me and I think for Kendell, showing one’s work, fi nding what was interesting, how one saw the world, how one could do work. The work at the theater itself was important. I think for Kendell, he picked up on the minimalism, of the minimalist means used by actors in Woza Albert! and Asinamali, astonishing productions like that in the 1980s. It was very much a time of workshop theater, where a group of people would get together and collaboratively make work as Woza Albert! and Asinamali, whereas the theater group I was involved in, Junction Theatre, the student theater group, worked in the same way. And it became an important place. Also because Junction Theatre was made up of white students at Wits—which was a white university—and black actors from other workshop groups that had amalgamated together. It was one of the few places for conversation in those years between (in this case) white students and black actors, and fi nding a common language on the stage. Not to say it was without all the complications of being in South Africa in those years. But I think the Market Theatre is a space for that, and the gallery as a space were they could assemble was very important for me.

KG

What was also important for me about the Market Theatre, in the late 1980s, especially on Saturdays, was that it was such a utopian site, where everything seemed possible. If

101


you remember it wasn’t just a theater; it was also a fl ea market, as well as a bar, a beer garden, and a restaurant where black and white people could mingle, eat and drink together without fear. It was one of the only places that I can remember in the late 1980s where you had people of di! erent classes and di! erent social or political groups, black and white, coming together in this utopian spirit, in the light of day, where you felt, ah, everything is possible, and a new South Africa could exist somehow, someday.

WK

It was like that. For my case I would just add that the Johannesburg Art Foundation was very much a meeting-place for people from di! erent worlds. It was pivotal to my experience. But the Market was pivotal as well.

OE

If it’s possible to shift away from this, I think that obviously, William, you talked about the a" rmation by one’s peers outside the recognition of the market. And Kendell spoke about the necessity to create a space unencumbered by commercial concerns. So this space was in a sense serving multiple functions, but with completely di! erent intentions from the people who participated in its program. One can also say that there are some—perhaps, if there are any—ideological di! erences between the work made by artists like Kendell, for example, or Joachim Schönfeldt and other artists, and your work. Because certainly, while in a political sense you could be put on the side of the liberal progressive tradition, but ideologically, within the framework of artistic practice, were there di! erences that needed to be ironed out in terms of the debates about the stakes of contemporary art in South Africa?

WK

There were big di! erences. I’m not certain how to defi ne them, but I’m sure Kendell’s was a sense of not wanting to come with his work at all through the traditional trajectory of liberal opposition to apartheid, which was very much the background through which I came. I had the sense, when I saw Kendell’s work, here are artists, street fi ghters on the block. This is a di! erent energy, a di! erent approach to things, which are both distanced

from and challenged. All of those di! erent things were certainly there. Someone who puts out a broken bottleneck, and that’s the work. There is certainly a challenge in this. I think there was a di! erence. My sense from the outside, not being from Kendell’s or other people of that generation, was a sense of a di! erent politics; we are going to fi nd our own way, and not be bound down by any of the pieties or assumptions. I came, certainly as a student, starting with politics and trying to fi nd a way to get my art to make sense in organized politics, whether it was in student politics or trade unions. I am not sure if that is a misreading, but that was the reading, from my side, of Kendell’s work when I fi rst encountered it.

KG

I think you’re absolutely right. The way I was entering into this question of the language of art at that time, was with that of extreme militancy. I had this very militant and extremist idea that anything the middle classes would like was an enemy of my art. The idea was that anything beautiful would be turning away from the reality of the situation and be the poetry after Auschwitz that Adorno had rejected as barbaric. So to drag the street into the gallery was an essential part of my artistic language, the red clown’s nose from Asinamali, the Brechtian agitprop, in-your-face confrontation of hey, there is shit going down on the street, and you need to open your eyes. As I perceived it, anything that can be an aesthetic distraction is going to be something that will take you back to your suburban comfort zone and away from “the truth.”

WK

That’s an interesting phrase you used, “I’m going to bring the street into the gallery.” I think of your brick being thrown through the window. For me, in retrospect, the phrase would be “bring the street into the studio.” There is a di! erent thing happening in the studio that goes from the studio to the gallery. That distancing space that the studio gave, a protected space, I think it was one of the important di! erences. A brick could come into the studio, but turned into drawing, and turned into di! erent objects. There is a di! erence of immediacy, especially in di! erence of bringing the street into the gallery and the street into the studio.

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OE

In your fi lms, William, you certainly did bring the street into your studio: the protest marches, the bodies littered on the landscape, and all of that. And there is Kendell’s much more visceral, much more direct and contestatory approach. But I want to really continue this conversation by bringing your attention to the exhibition that David Elliott curated, Art from South Africa, at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1990. In many ways, one can say, it is a summation of the di! erent sides of the debate in contemporary South African art. And Kendell’s own response in the exhibition catalog to Albie Sachs’ critique of—let’s call it—resistance art, so to speak. For me, this is one of the crucial di! erences between the artists of your generation, William, who came of age working with a sense of commitment and not at all circumspect about the e! ectiveness of resistance art, of engaged art, or whatever term one might use to describe it. Can you talk a little bit about that particular exhibition?

WK

The exhibition that David Elliott curated was done at the stage when there was the cultural desk. Remember there was a post-Khaza decision that there will be a selective cultural boycott and it would be administered by the ANC, by the UDF (United Democratic Front, an umbrella organization of di! erent activist, cultural, and trade-union groups against apartheid) a cultural desk inside South Africa. For some period there was an organization in Johannesburg that was delegated to deal with visual art. It had Penny Siopis, Colin Richards, I was on it, and Steven Sack, I think. And when David Elliott came to do his exhibition, he went through a nightmare with the di! erent organizations and people saying essentially, what right does someone from outside South Africa have to come and choose what work from South Africa should be seen in Oxford? And I remember, in my case, he looked at my drawings and he looked at my fi lms and he said he wanted to show some of the fi lms in the exhibition. And my response was to feel insulted. I said: Those are fi lms, the fi lms are not my art, my art is the drawings. The fi lms are something di! erent. So I am immensely grateful to him, in retrospect, that someone could bring me kicking and screaming to actually understand the

work I had been making and to put it in the exhibition. And when I saw the exhibition in Oxford, it was a strange mix with good work, with bad work, with millions of tiny works from community art centers, the very imbalance and unevenness of the work that was on show in some way was representative of the actual fi ghts and battles within the art world in South Africa at that time. So that was my perspective of the exhibition. I was on David’s side, saying for God’s sake let the curator choose what he wants to see, there will be other curators to say this is not the only work that can ever be seen. I failed in everything I ever fought for in that particular organization, which is one of the reasons why I stopped being on committees or organizations. I don’t remember what you wrote, Kendell.

OE

I will tell you the title of Kendell’s article: “Art as Propaganda Inevitably Self-Destructs.” Very much critical of resistance art, very much critical of the confl ation of the space of art with the space of politics, without necessarily giving up the right of art to be political.

KG

Prior to David Elliott arriving in South Africa, Albie Sachs had written his seminal essay “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” in which he suggested it was time to stop creating art and culture that was a weapon of the struggle and focus instead on poetry and pure aesthetics. He was giving the artists of the post-apartheid nation permission to make art that was beautiful and aesthetic once again, to turn their backs on politics. In response I wrote my essay for the Vrye Weekblad newspaper (later reproduced in David Elliot’s catalog) suggesting, with all due (militant) respect, that we should not start making beautiful art but instead make the struggle into a weapon of our art, to forge an “African avant-garde” that could grow out from our everyday experiences on the front line of resistance politics. I was proposing this idea of an avant-garde practice that is always critical of its time and place, that even during the honeymoon period where we thought things might actually change for the better, that it was not a time to “forget” and start painting fl owers. No, I was saying that we should still be conceiving of art as being critical of the time and place in which it has been made,

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that we should be as critical of post-apartheid South Africa as we had been of apartheid.

OE

This is an important point that could help us to draw out other critical connections between both of your works, which is the reception of your work internationally. The move, willingly or not, of your practice, and the work of South African artists entering into a broader international discussion. And at the moment the Oxford show was certainly one of those examples of the internationalization of South African art. And for you, William, your fi lms were not your art, they were just the fi lms. Your art was the drawings. However, your fi lms’ international reception has kind of transformed the relationship between the drawings as physical examples of the fi lms and the fi lms as a representation of the process of the production of that drawing into something really quite complex and fundamentally innovative, even though you are working with very traditional means in this sense. Now that both of your careers have really made the fundamental connection between South Africa and the international art space, what has enabled this transformation over the last, say, twenty-two years from being a South African artist to becoming an international artist?

WK

It certainly had to do with, fi rstly, the ease of travel, so that instead of it being that all collectors and curators stayed in New York or Europe, they were interested in traveling around. The curators and museum people who came to Johannesburg for the (Johannesburg) Biennale was completely vital. David Elliott was traveling to South Africa. That probably had to do with not so much being an extraordinary rarity, but being very much more common. I think there is also a sense of people looking outside, . . . I’m not sure, what was the cause of it, but certainly there was a sense of: “there were not only South African artists,” there were artists from Asia, from South America, who would be looked at in the 1990s, that before would have been living in New York for their work really to be seen. I certainly benefi ted from that shift in the pressure. When I fi rst went to New York with my portfolio in 1986, I thought the big problem would be being a white South African. But the least important problem was that I was

a white South African coming from an apartheid South Africa. The biggest problem was that I made drawings and not paintings. And the biggest problem in 1986, as I said, was that you weren’t living in New York. If you want to be seen in New York, you have to be there, pay your dues. Which is a terrible phrase, implying a feudal relationship of a serf who would come and take part, tied to the manor and pay his dues, and then be given a place at the table. So the biggest problem for them (the artists) or for the galleries that I saw in New York in 1986 was that I didn’t live in New York. By the late 1990s that had changed. I think we all benefi ted. There are many other artists who benefi ted in the same way from that.

KG

Do you recall in 1993, when we were both in an exhibition together at the Venice Biennale, the fi rst South African participation since the boycott started in 1968? I remember that the South African pavilion was in fact on the ground fl oor of the building that, upstairs, housed the Flash Art o" ces. That meant that every single curator or critic visiting Flash Art was passing through our exhibition, seeing our works, and yet not one single artist was noticed.

WK

I didn’t realize that the exhibition was there.

KG

The world wasn’t ready for South African artists back then. I clearly remember that your video was placed next to the elevator, which probably meant that so many of the curators whom you now work with probably saw your work without realizing it way back in 1993. I think that the shift into paying attention to art from Africa, Russia, China, India, Brazil, or wherever really followed on from the political end to the Cold War and the eventual consequences that that has had politically, economically, and ideologically around the planet. Besides that, the center cannot hold, as Yeats put it, and curators or collectors are all demanding more for their e! orts and attention and have started looking further afi eld, in order to fi nd things that could sustain their interest intelligently.

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WK

There has always been a sense that at di! erent stages the center needs to be reinvigorated by new energies from the periphery, for example classical music needing folk music for new impetuses, or painters needing folk traditions to invigorate what they were doing. There is a way in which things from further out, not from the center, were welcomed back into the center. Both have to do with the end of the Cold War and the end of apartheid. In practical terms, it certainly owed a huge amount—in both of our cases, I would say—to Okwui’s Johannesburg Biennale. A huge number of new audiences both saw the work and also proclaimed to the world, look at what has been made, what one needs to pay attention to. Magiciens de la Terre also set some groundwork for that. It opened and expanded the language of what was being looked at.

OE

Certainly, William and Kendell, your works on di! erent levels made very important impacts and contributions. And the di! erence in your strategies for me is very essential to hold onto in the sense that they pointed to a much more complex artistic space. First, you were fl uent in the materials that you used. Second you were very aware of the international language, albeit being put into di! erent uses in the South African context. And third, it was also highly sophisticated in terms of the ways in which the iconographies and the representational tools were deployed, the way those things were used. And I think it’s very important that people could come to South Africa and see di! erent types of practices coming out of the tradition of, say, resistance art, that there were still very clear conceptual individual languages that became very notable and in a sense enabled the search for other artists within the context South Africa. I believe that both of you o! er a very succinct bridge between di! erent strategies, but also from di! erent points of departure. What I want to come back to in this particular case has to do, with the fact that your work, William, was often seen to be much more easily digestible in the sense that it really took on the larger themes of humanism in the way your fi lms and your drawings were made. And also it was very much connected to a broader European tradition, and that made its reception that much easier; the codes were

readable. But Kendell’s work was much more scrappy, yes, in a sense of a minimalist and conceptualist bent, but could have sometime been seen to be a little rough around the edges, in terms of his refusal to completely nullify the criticality of the place from which it was coming. Could you both speak specifi cally to these concerns in terms of the responsibility of each other’s work? Because I do know, Kendell, that you were not always in agreement with William. Even though William was deeply infl uential, he was also the person you had to fi ght for your voice to be heard. Can you both speak to the kinds of works that each of you made with regard to this dialogue?

WK

As you’re saying this, I’d like to add that it’s one of the virtues and one of the important things that what people saw in South African art was the range of work. If you look back with respect to work that uses such very di! erent means and very di! erent ways of approach such as between Kendell’s and mine, it is kind of a boon that it does show the range and the di! erent ways in which the work needs to be understood. Then, at the time when I fi rst saw Kendell’s work, I certainly thought, is this guy nuts? This isn’t art. This is a one-liner. Where is the sweat and blood? Where is the commitment of himself to it? In the same way, I’m sure, Kendell would say. As you know, he had problems with my work. But in retrospect, I said no, there was a rigor in those minimalist works. It was not going to be a painting but a photostat covered with varnish. And that will be the means. But in fact, as I also understood, to get the varnish right the way, as Kendell did, there was a lot of sweat and care.

KG

Back in the day, as a young artist trying to search for and defi ne my language, you were defi nitely one of the fathers that I had to kill. The resistance to any decoration or visual aesthetics, for instance, was very much this idea of removing any kind of labor from the process. It was a very, very specifi c way of trying to question how, in my opinion, you guys were constructing your language and your aesthetics based on labor more than anything else. I understood your work as a surrender to the suburban white middle classes, an aesthetic distraction from the

105


realities of the township streets. From my point of view as a young radicant, the question of anti-aesthetics and anti-labor was always very important. Your point about the di! erence between going from the street directly to the gallery and going from the street to the studio fi rst and then on into the gallery is an extremely important di! erence of strategy between us. By choice, I didn’t have a studio at the time, and I was trying to think about how to work using the street as my studio, both from a political point and as a way of working in opposition to what you were doing. I felt that artists of your generation were way too impressed and infl uenced by the Italian and German “Transavangardia” and “Junge Wilden.” When I eventually got to meet you and artists like Robert Hodgins I was very surprised by how I was able to learn from both of you. Ironically Robert, the quintessential painter’s painter, had an enormous infl uence on my work even though he never taught me professionally. He taught me how to be an artist and eventually he helped me understand that actually there was not that much di! erence between what you guys were doing and what I was trying to do. He would explain how, when he thought he had fi nished a painting he would take white paint and remove everything that’s not essential to the painting. That painter’s strategy rang a bell inside my own discourse, for while he was creating according to a very di! erent logic and language, the simplifi cation and paring down of expression to an essence was exactly what I was trying to do in my own postconceptual practice. After that I developed the habit of using an imaginary white paint to eliminate absolutely everything, including labor, that’s not essential, to ensure the most basic condition of art, doing it of course ironically as a form of protest and resistance against the labor of paint and charcoal that you were all using at the time.

OE

Let me come back to where you are today. Looking back, so to speak, and projecting forward. What is your analysis of contemporary South African art today? And where do you think your work fi ts in to this landscape, given what has changed individually in your careers? Kendell, you live in Brussels; William, you’re still very much living in Johannesburg, but your career quite frankly is elsewhere.

WK

Sometimes there is an anxiety, that because the work is still seen a lot in South Africa even though it’s obviously also shown in other places, of being out of touch. I feel out of touch with who the new younger artists are, what works are coming out of the art schools. I feel that as a loss. I’m not quite sure how to remedy it. I do feel that it’s much harder for artists now to begin to know what it is they are going to be doing. The pressure that in di! erent ways was there for me and for Kendell, however it was represented or came out in the art, in very languages, was without a doubt a great boon to know what was there, whether it was coming into the studio or coming o! the street into the gallery. So I do think it’s harder now. But I also think that maybe there may be fabulous or interesting young artists doing work I’m really just not aware of.

KG

I think that what we were living through in South Africa during apartheid gave us an extremely visceral and very charged reality that grounded whatever it was that we were making. Don’t forget, too, that we were creating art in a time of extreme isolation and we saw only art by, of, and about South Africa. The boycott made sure that we never saw art from outside of South Africa and we ourselves never exhibited beyond the borders of South Africa. We were not making art for an international audience but were making it for ourselves exclusively. There was no real art market as we understand it today and we were making art to be looked at and critiqued by other artists. There were no collectors and those who did buy work were really interior decorators purchasing work only to look good behind the sofa. I think that the experience of fi ghting against apartheid, or at least having something very real to fi ght for or fi ght against, a worthy subject to work with and contest, is something that a lot of younger artists today don’t share. I have heard so many young black and white South Africans saying that apartheid is a problem of their parents and they neither know nor care about it. As a consequence some more recent work is losing touch with that experiential base, but not necessarily in a bad sense, because they have more freedom than we ever did in terms of being able to express themselves without thinking. The thing that remains the most sad for me, when I think of

106


William or myself or so many other South African artists, is that there is very little institutional support in our own country. It’s sad for me that we are having this discussion via the Haus der Kunst rather than at Iziko or the South African National Gallery.

OE

That’s a fair point. But nevertheless, don’t you think, Kendell, that one of the strengths of the South African context, regardless of how much the institutions are struggling, that there is a good university system, the context from which artists can really emerge and enter into the broader framework? And that the success of artists like yourself and William has also revived the notion that it’s not only institutions that enable ideas to emerge, but conversations between artists, conversations between practices, conversations between di! erent means of achieving the end of being heard. Don’t you think that South African contemporary art today is perhaps even just as strong, if not necessarily as politically vibrant as it was during your time?

WK

Obviously there are a lot more South African artists that are known internationally than they were fi fteen years ago. That’s clear. In terms of the size of the art infrastructure in South Africa, success or the way that people’s work is being seen is actually out of proportion. If you think of a country like Australia with much stronger art infrastructure, more artists, it doesn’t necessarily in itself make for a better reception of the work or better art being made. So I think, Okwui, you are right there. And it’s very hard in retrospect to think in terms of the minimal conditions or the di" cult institutions we worked under, where we managed things, and emerged into the world in spite of them, or—in a strange perverse way—through that restriction. So Kendell, when you talk about the isolation of the cultural boycott, in retrospect, certainly for me and most probably for you, it was a boon. It was a period when there was the very expectation of being part of the international art conversation, so that when it came to us we had found our feet, and we were doing our work rather than being terrorized by what was appearing in Art in America or Flash Art as what one had to do to be heard

in the world. There are anomalies and surprises in what things are, in retrospect, liabilities and assets.

KG

You are absolutely right. That reality, that lived experience, together with our sociopolitical and cultural isolation, meant that our weakness became our strength and enabled so many artists to create work that was di! erent from the dictates of international fashions and which was more than just another aesthetic pulled out of the pages of Flash Art or Artforum.

OE

This has been a very productive conversation. I’m very, very grateful to both of you.

1 Editor’s Note: According to a newspaper article by David Beresford, quoting

Mrs. Mandela’s speech at Munsieville on April 13, 1986—referring to the

practice of setting people on fi re with tires around their necks—she said, “with

our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.”

See “Row over ‘Mother of the Nation’ Winnie Mandela,” The Guardian [UK],

January 27, 1989. Available online at: http://century.guardian.co.uk/1980-1989/

Story/0,,110268,00.html. Accessed December 29, 2012.

107

The Devil’s Verse, 2007


Brick

1988Xerox on brick, tape10 ! 22 ! 17 cmEdition 5 + 2 APPrivate Collection

Counting Out Song (a.k.a. Tyre)

1988Spray-paint on tyre115 ! 108 ! 108 cm (x 2)Edition 5 + 2 APCollection the artist

Death Certifi cate

1988Situation (death certifi cate)21 ! 29 cmPrivate Collection

Suitcase

1988"Xerox on suitcase, tape64 ! 31.5 ! 15 cmEdition 5 + 2 APCollection the artist

Title Withheld (June Seventy Six)

1988Situation10.3 ! 10.2 cmEdition 10 + 2 APCollection the artist

After Liberty 2

1989Rectifi ed postcardEdition 5 + 2 AP10 ! 15 cmPrivate Collection

After Liberty 3

1989Rectifi ed postcard15 ! 10.5 cmEdition 5 + 2 APPrivate Collection

Possession

1989Marker pen on newspaper10 newspaper sheets each approx. 58 ! 38 cm Private Collection

Bloody Hell, Version 2

1990C-print102 ! 62 cmEdition 10 + 2 APCollection the artist

Hanging Piece

1993Bricks, ropeDimensions variable

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

1993Performance/Photograph101.8 ! 72.1 cmEdition 10 + 2 APCollection the artist

T.W. (Exported)

1993 Razor wire fence (Situation) Edition 3 + 2 APDimensions variablegordonschachtcollection, South Africa

T.W. (Flatwrap)!

1993Found object (Flat Wrap / Razormesh)Edition 5 + 2 AP57 ! 57 ! 57 cmCollection the artist

Title Withheld (Vitrine)

1993Situation/Performance, Vitrine, brick, debrisEdition 5 + 2 APCollection the artist

Untitled (1976), 1976 — 1993"Found object (1976 autopsy register)43 ! 33 ! 7 cmMuseum Africa, Johannesburg

Untitled (ANC, AVF, AWB, CP, DP, IFP,

NP, PAC, SACP)

1993 — 1994Performance (9 political party membership cards)Collection the artist

Corner Piece

1994Situation (Security signs and tape)200 ! 200 ! 200 cmCollection the artist

Cultural Weapons (28 March 1994)

1994Weapons used in Shell House Massacre 28 March, 1994104.5 ! 19 ! 8.5 cmPrivate Collection

Out of Africa

1994Latex Mandela mask and camoufl age jacketDimensions variableCollection the artist

T.W. Batons (Circle)

199424 police batons170 ! 170 cmEdition 3 + 2 APCollection the artist

T.W. Batons (Spiral)

199427 police batons195 ! 195 cmEdition 3 + 2 AP

All works courtesy the artist; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg / Cape Town;

Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

229


By Any Means Necessary

1995SituationDimensions variableCollection the artist

Self Portrait

1995Found object (original destroyed on TWA Flight 800)5.5 ! 11.6 cmEdition 12 + 2 APgordonschachtcollection, South Africa

48 hrs

1997 — 1999Situation (wallpaper)Dimensions variableSeries of 7 unique panelsFrançoise Pinault Foundation

My Traitor’s Heart

1998Sca# olding, 12 TVs, 12 DVD PlayersDimensions variableEdition 3 + 2 APCIAC, Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel, Mexico

Plato’s Cave

1999C-print102 ! 70.5 cmEdition 10 + 2 APCollection the artist

Suburbia

1999 — 200180 C-printsEdition 5 + 2 AP30.5 ! 40.5 cm eachCollection the artist

TerroRealismus

2003 Brick, cement, glass, neon, aluminium300 ! 800 ! 800 cmEdition 3 + 2 AP Collection the artist

Fuckface

2005 Spray paint on human skull22 ! 14 ! 15 cmMordant Family Collection, Australia

BE/LIE/VE

2006Mural Dimensions variableEdition 3 + 2 AP

Post Pop Fuck 22

2006Wall paintingDimensions variableEdition 3 + 2 AP

Cadavre Exquis

2007Spray paint on resin cast from Nike de Samothrace, Louvre320 ! 170 ! 200 cm

Fuckface (Kendell Geers)

2007C-print 150 ! 111 cmgordonschachtcollection, South Africa

Manifest

2007Neon300 ! 270 cmEdition 3 + 2 APYvon Lambert, Paris

Typhonic Beast 1

2007Spray paint on hippopotamus skull 77 ! 55 ! 34 cmYvon Lambert, Paris

Typhonic Beast II

2007Spray paint on walrus skull77 ! 55 ! 45 cmPrivate Collection

Obelisk

2008Concrete and glass349 ! 75 ! 75 cm

PostPunkPaganPop

2008Installation (razor mesh and mirror)Dimensions variable

Four Letter Portrait (Evil)

2009Plexiglass mirror100 ! 67 cm

Four Letter Portrait (Fate)


Four Letter Portrait (Fear)


Four Letter Portrait (Fire)


Four Letter Portrait (Fuck)


230


Four Letter Portrait (Gift)


Four Letter Portrait (Give)


Four Letter Portrait (Gyre)


Four Letter Portrait (Hate)


Four Letter Portrait (Host)


Four Letter Portrait (Kill)


Four Letter Portrait (Late)


Four Letter Portrait (Life)


Four Letter Portrait (Live)


Four Letter Portrait (Lost)


Four Letter Portrait (Luck)


Four Letter Portrait (Lust)


Four Letter Portrait (Play)


Four Letter Portrait (Prey)


Four Letter Portrait (Sale)


Four Letter Portrait (Sign)


Four Letter Portrait (Take)


Four Letter Portrait (Time)


Four Letter Portrait (Veil)


Four Letter Portrait (West)


Four Letter Portrait (Clit)


Four Letter Portrait (Will)


Country of My Skull IX

2010Indian ink and gesso on human skull and wood 12 ! 12.5 ! 22 cm

In Advance of a Broken Arm

2010Painted bronze and chain81 ! 20 ! 8 cm

Master Mistress of My Passion VII

2010Jesmonite and glass160 ! 80 ! 80 cm

Monument to the F Word X 2010Stainless steel, chain128 ! 25 ! 25 cm

Monument to the F Word XI

2010Bronze 100 ! 25 ! 25 cm

231


Saint Johns Pendulum

2010Painted bronze, nails, and chain60 ! 20 ! 20 cmPrivate Collection France

Flesh of the Shadow Spirit 58

2011Resin150 ! 51 ! 51 cm

Four Letter Protest (After Daniel Buren)

Performance2011Collection the artist

PrayPlayPreyPay

2011Bronze, concrete, handcu# s16 ! 43 ! 43 cmEdition 5 + 2 AP

Age of Iron L

2012Rust on Paper200 ! 130 cm

Age of Iron LI


Age of Iron LII


Age of Iron LIII


Arrested Development (Spiral)

201224 Murano glass police batons170 ! 170 cm

Kaput Mortum XVI

2012Plaster of Paris cast, bottle caps15 ! 17.5 ! 20 cmPrivate Collection

T.W. (CV)

1652 — 2013SituationDimensions variableCollection the artist

Title Withheld (Kendell Geers)

1968 — ?Performance/SituationWork will be auctioned upon the death of the artistCollection the artist

232

Photo Credits

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76 / 7778

80 / 81111141

142 / 143147

148 / 149155158159161

162 / 163166174175176177

180 / 181190 / 191192 / 193

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210 / 211213214215

Lydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaJohn HodgkissLydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaJohn HodgkissLydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaJeannine HowseLydie NesvadbaStephen WhiteLydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaLydie NesvadbaGiulio Buono - Studio BluOak Taylor SmithStephen WhiteEla BialkowskaEla BialkowskaLydie NesvadbaOak Taylor SmithEla BialkowskaStephen WhiteStephen WhiteStephen WhiteStephen WhiteOak Taylor SmithStephen WhiteStephen WhiteStephen WhiteStephen WhiteJuerg IslerJuerg IslerOak Taylor SmithStephen WhiteEla BialkowskaOak Taylor SmithOak Taylor SmithOak Taylor SmithOak Taylor SmithOak Taylor SmithAnthea PokroyAnthea Pokroy

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Kendell Geers - Interview

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Transcript of Kendell Geers - Interview