FINE ART: Ivor Powell
THERE has been a lot of hype, a lot of confusion and even more outrage generated by the three-venue exhibition (it happens simultaneously at the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery, the Market Galleries and the Institute of Contemporary Art) by Johannesburg avant gardists Joachim Schonfeldt and Kendell Geers.
At least where it is centred around Geers’ work, such visceral reactions are absolutely to the point. Geers, as he sails into increasingly deep conceptualist waters, consciously manipulates such elements of avant gardism as expectation, bemusement and shock in his practice as an artist — and indeed it is impossible to understand his more recent work without reference to this dimension.
Thus one of Geers’ pieces at the ICA consists of nothing more than splatters of blood on the walls — and the smell and insect life that accumulates, in the real time frame, around it. At the Market he has hurled a brick through the window of the gallery and left it and the patterns of broken glass as the nominal artwork. And at the Read Gallery, Geers — along with two porn videos, one playing in register and the other on an incompatible system — exhibited a particularly forensic Hustler centrespread drawn over, so to speak, with semen stains.
Many will dismiss the work as cheap sensationalism and insist it has all been done before. But such reactions are hardly to the point. Geers, for better or for worse, is involved in a kind of art game whose real significance lies not in the visible artwork but in his own persona rendered as a site of meaning.
Sure there are levels of metaphor associated — usually tenuously — with the works themselves. Thus what looks like a merely battered adding machine has, in fact, been salvaged from the site of the pre- elections Bree Street bomb; thus the brick through the window of the Market rests on the fact that the building is a national monument; the blood spattered on the ICA walls recalls kinds of mark-making appropriate to a neighbourhood dotted with meat factories.
The real significance of the work lies somewhere else: somewhere between the real time and real space and the subscribed time and space of the gallery. By collapsing all of these around the central metaphor of his persona as an artist — spelt out in the Read Gallery with its autobiographical reminders — Geers creates an open-ended kind of situation where the artwork is a trigger rather than an end in itself. In some cases, it leads into scandal, in others, more meditative questions around the nature of the artwork and the role of the artist in society. It is a curiously egoistic pursuit, but just as long as it generates controversy, that long it is worth doing.
If Geers is the real conceptualist, gesturist, scandalmongering thing, the same cannot be said of Schonfeldt, and one mistrusts his assumption of the role. Schonfeldt, while there are philosophical and semiotic depths to his work, is pre-eminently one of those artists for whom meaning is embodied in the material.
It is the presence of his “curios” — objects with African reference but rendered up in terms of European values — and not the overlays of rhetoric which make them impressive works. In a sense where Geers reads out of his objects, Schonfeldt signally reads into his.
Thus one responds with hardly more than irritation to such gestures on Schonfeldt’s part as the attaching to the ICA windows of blinds printed with aerial views of the cityscape outside. But where there is an object — his multi-headed cows, his suspended containers of “values” — the work attains profoundly meditative and, dare one say it, conceptual significances.
* Air de Paris, works by Joachim Schonfeldt and Kendell Geers, at Institute of Contemporary Art, Market Galleries and Everard Read Contemporary Gallery