Brenda Atkinson wonders whether Kendell Geers’s recent show was a success.
Was it a punchline without a joke? An olive without a Martini? A vetkoek without filling? Was it an ingeniously constructed art event, an accurate barometer of cultural neurosis, or a distorted painting of political intervention gone horribly wrong?
It was an exhibition by Kendell Geers, called Guilty, that took place (or not, depending on your perspective) at Pretoria’s Fort Klapperkop last weekend, where Geers had appropriated right-wing festivities (to celebrate the fort’s centenary) as part of his exhibition.
The assembled right-wingers were confused. But mostly, they were pissed off. Believing that Geers was a German artist who painted with his own shit, they stood proudly to announce, “Ons is nie kuns nie.”
Earlier in the week, the French Institute, which had originally invited Geers to exhibit at the fort 18 months ago, publicly withdrew its financial support. In a letter to The Citizen newspaper, its cultural attache explained that Geers’s intervention fell outside the realm of art. Then the African National Congress-led Pretoria city council, which owns the fort, refused him or any other artist permission to work there.
By Sunday, when Geers was to have locked himself inside the fort “in the name of art”, the hysteria of the preceding week had settled into subdued expectation. For the handful of artists and Afrikaners who gathered in Pretoria on Sunday, the only reward was the sight of a light aircraft which appeared, two hours late, somewhere in the sky above Pretoria. It trailed a banner with the word “Guilty” in four languages. The misguided pilot circled a few times, unfortunately over the wrong fort, and then disappeared.
Guilty has left a tangled trail of attacks, counter-attacks, and questions in its wake. Media hype has led to speculations that Geers himself engineered the publicity, from right-wing outrage, to death threats, to the French Institute’s withdrawal. Such conspiracy theories credit Geers with an absurd amount of power and ignore the issue of whether Guilty works as what it is: an exhibition that aims to explore the pervasive presence of, and silence around, the semantics of guilt in South Africa.
Geers himself is not exactly shy of hype – his press release states that “all the press coverage, urban legends … discussions, arguments, and controversy” are part of the work. But its spectacular nature, he insists, was never part of the plan: “Guilty was originally going to be called “Fort-Da” – Freud’s name for the games infants play to signify loss and recovery. It was meant to be about absences, silences, and confused codes … Questions arose about absence, censorship, occupation, and boycott. The embassies ran to claim their guilt. It proved that the interests of the right wing in this country are more sacred than the rights of the artist to critically reflect on politics and culture.”
There’s a troubling contradiction in the circular politics of Guilty. According to Geers, the show succeeds on two levels: it speaks – and gets others to speak – about the unspeakable in South African life: historical guilt, new guilt, renewed guilt, and of course, denial. “People have told me not to scratch where it doesn’t itch,” says Geers, “but that’s my job; I set out to draw attention to the unspoken, and not only in relation to Afrikaner nationalism. I’ve made a site-specific work that explores the mechanisms and depths of guilt.”
It also succeeds according to Geers’s original intention, which was “to create a pregnant silence, a nothingness that would be more apparent than the noise”: by Monday, not a curator or cultural attaché in town was prepared to comment. Guilt? Good sense? Or just good censorship? If we’re talking so much, why aren’t we talking?
Which raises another question: has this in fact done any good for the South African art community, which is seen by some as being rescued by Geers from its own apathy? Has it done more than allow Geers to declare his own guilt in a grandiose display of defiant conviction?
Geers concedes that the hype around Guilty has conveyed an image of art and artists that is “not the right one”, confirming the stereotype of the artist as rude, mad clown. But he thinks that insofar as it got the right wing talking about art between Boerekaskenade; insofar as it underlined his belief that “guerrilla tactics” can create political controversy, it broadened art community horizons.
The fact that interventions such as these frequently degenerate into dinner-talk, or worse, embarrassed silence, might indicate that avant-garde art attempts are too easily absorbed by a society that swallows controversy like a Big Mac.
It might suggest that operating within the space of public hostility is different from effecting significant political change. We could wait to see, and hear, when the pregnant silence finally lifts. Or we could make damn sure that it does.