Ivor Powell
IT was, of course, a set-up for censorship in the first place. Approached by the Vita Art Now selection panel to participate in their annual showpiece exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, artist Kendell Geers put forward three works. One was uncontentious, a red overall to be positioned where the hanging committee saw fit. The other two might as well have been little bombs with the fuses already lit.
First there was Geers’ semen-stained Hustler centrespread, titled (or not) Title Withheld (Hustler).
Second was a less offensive though probably more obscure piece, Title Withheld (Small Change) — a few coins scattered randomly on the floor of the gallery.
Predictably enough, with their fuses lit and all, both bombs exploded in time. And Geers — one imagines him sitting with a stop watch, waiting — was duly notified that the staff of the Johannesburg Art Gallery had decided to intervene. Title Withheld (Hustler) would be provided with a pull-up, pull-down blind — the kind usually reserved for the most valuable and fragile of artworks.
In a letter dated May 25, the recently appointed senior curator: communications, Steven Sack, sheepishly but, one feels, not unreasonably, explained that the gallery provides “guided tours in which children are assisted to ‘read’ the works on display” and that “none of the voluntary guides conducting the children’s tours were prepared to present your work”. Hence access was to be limited by the blind.
This action, Sack said, by the way, has not only limited but also significantly expanded the work’s audience: green-uniformed municipal security guards in particular have been observed to take an unprecedented interest in the visual arts.
So far so good. Given the circumstances, and the elevation of what he describes as a “work on paper”, Geers acceded to the gallery’s intervention. More problematic is the case of Title Withheld (Small Change), mainly because the 14 scattered coins are backed up by an insurance policy worth R6 000. If somebody misses the point that this is an artwork — and it is specified in the description of the work that there should be nothing in the way of lighting, titling or presentation to tell the casual visitor that it is an artwork — and pockets them, it is not 14 coins that have been stolen but a R6 000 artwork.
You can see why the gallery authorities decided to place the coins inside a glass box. This solution was arrived at after earlier attempts to solve the crisis left Geers variously “disappointed” and “dismayed”. The gallery authorities tried gluing the coins to the floor, but, objected Geers, interaction with the environment is part of the meaning. They tried locking the coins in a safe — which Geers described as “adding insult to injury”.
Finally Sack was forced into the classic bureaucratic argument: “Museums all over the world have to take steps to ensure that they safeguard works.”
Geers points out in an open letter that to place the coins in a glass box “in effect completely destroys the piece …
“The potential to pick up the coins … and the resulting museological and ethical conflicts and debates this potential elicits is precisely the work of art,” Geers goes solemnly on. “When declaring that the coins be left to compose themselves according to chance, I intended that the process continue throughout the duration of the exhibition.”
It is up to the museum to make sure that the artwork doesn’t come to any harm, says Geers. But the gallery doesn’t have the staff to assign a full-time guard to look after just one piece, says Sack.
So, at the time of writing, an impasse. And, of course, the work continues to unfold …
One watches the space with interest. Meanwhile, it is worth recording that Geers insists his motives are not mercenary. “I’ll probably give the money to the gallery if it ever comes to an insurance claim,” he says.
His real interest is in “the limits of art and the limits of life”. And more specifically in challenging the commitment of sponsors to contemporary art, and the direction such art is taking.
My interest is in how the FNB Vita Art Now organisation could have fallen for it. Both works, considered as “works of chance”, simply reprise earlier provocations. When it was first exhibited at the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery in 1994, the Hustler piece forced the management into a similar act of censorship, when they created a special viewing space inside the gallery.
And as for Title Withheld (Small Change), though different coins are used, it repeats in essence a feat of prestidigitation first performed at the 1993 Volkskas Atelier exhibition. In Title Withheld (R8,69), Geers similarly positioned coins on the floor. When artists CJ Morkel and Gordon Froud replaced the money after borrowing it to buy beer, he accused the management of fraud. Finally, when the coins disappeared again, Geers claimed the R3 000 insurance – – and though Volkskas objected that the claim was too high, in the end he got it. Then he set about making the next piece in the series …