One of the highlights of the Dada South Symposium, held in Cape Town earlier this year, was the cat fight between die-hard feminist Nina Romm and Kendell Geers, the South African-born, Belgium-based artist and provocateur. Romm was apparently offended by the imbalance of representation of cocks and cunts in a special “fuck” issue of Be Contemporary magazine, guest edited by Geers. The argument quickly descended into a cock-and-cunt-spotting contest, with Romm accusing Geers of phallocentrism and Geers vainly thrusting back with almost heartfelt pleas and protests.
Geers is an old hand at navigating the complex power structures and treacherous divisions in art- world politics. In many ways, he has spent the past 20 years exposing and exploiting these divisions, often using shock tactics to disrupt our perception of the status quo — to map the degree to which individual action is constrained, and to explode those limits. He once urinated into Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in Venice. He has sprayed his own semen on a Hustler centrefold and exhibited it. Silencing Romm should have been easy work for this cocky street-fighter.
But recently Geers has tempered his rebellion, replacing his youthful punk outbursts and violent physical protests with a more mature, philosophical assault on the place of power. The questioning of art as language is a constant theme, part of an exploration of relations between metaphysical structures of essence and presence and the hierarchies and dominations they make possible, as well as a critique of oppositional and binary thinking. These themes are central to Third World Disorder, his first solo exhibition in Cape Town in more than a decade.
In her essay, “New WorId Disorder”, Arundhati Roy writes: “When he announced the air strikes, President George W Bush said, ‘We’re a peaceful nation.’ … So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace … When the US government christens a war, ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, or ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, we in the Third World feel more than a tremor of fear. Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.”
‘Violated space’
It is within this violated space that Geers locates his new exhibition. On entering the gallery, viewers are confronted with a series of black-and-white Ritual Slips that take up a full wall in the gallery. Designed as Ndebele ritual aprons, and beaded by anonymous Ndebele crafters commissioned by Geers, these works reference Muslim prayer mats, Catholic rosary beads and the Jewish tallis (prayer shawl). Geers’s prayers, however, offer little hope of redemption. Exposing the violence inherent in religious practice and traditional culture, the slippery line between consent and coercion, and the exploitation of labour, the beaded words collapse into abstract binary patterns, meaningless liturgies that deflect and refract understanding.
In a sense, these works exploit the breakdown of earnest communication, of attempts to say or mean something. Language fails, lost in translation. What remains is an air of frustration and misunderstanding, a silencing that speak volumes.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his Transformer series, a chain of sculptures rising out of the gallery floor like miniature nuclear transformers or giant phalluses. Built from the negative spaces where words have literally been torn away, they form the skeletal remains of a giant 3D stencil set. Referencing the abstract “aesthetics of speed” of early 20th-century Futurist sculptures, Pop Art’s DIY print-making strategies and conceptual art’s reliance on language, these strange chess pieces are at once potent deconstructions of art-world power systems and stark memorials to the death of language.
Geers, as a South African artist based in the West, is acutely aware of the insurmountable distance between language and the self, home and homeland, present and past. Through his relentless use of intertextuality and reappropriation, temporality is called into question, as the mind remains frozen in a modernist past that can only be resolved in an unknown and unknowable future that never arrives, or that seems ever the more ominous and dreadful.
Visual and verbal worlds
On the surface these works seem to recall artist Willem Boshoff’s conceptually playful “word” sculptures, which also explore the complex relationship between visual and verbal “worlds”, art and words, the self and language. In Blind Alphabet ABC (1991-1996), for example, Boshoff creates three-dimensional pieces in which each sculpture symbolises one difficult or abstract word to be understood only through touch. In a powerful and poetic inversion of power relations, the work is accessible to its audience only through the assistance of ‘blind translators”. Outsiders, those traditionally excluded from the visual arts, suddenly become integral to communicating meaning. Here Boshoff uses art to cleave open language, to bring out the creative social and poetic impulse that was left behind when we entered the strange anomie we experience today, in which shallow individualism, cynicism and rapacity thrive in a complete vacuum.
In contrast to Boshoff’s positive tactical approach, however, Geers’s “negatives” remain untouchable. A victim of his own cynicism and fierce individualism, his art offers no such poetic transcendence or hope. There is a kind of wilful, in-your-face, what-you-see-is-what-you-get quality to his work; a relentlessly confrontational masculine aesthetic and a smug, ruthless intelligence that ultimately shuts down interaction.
The title work of the exhibition, Third World Disorder, is an acute example of this. Created out of a giant metallic “fuck” stencil, it forms an imposing triangular structure on the gallery floor that mirrors the division of power into First, Second and Third Worlds, while simultaneously referencing Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” and wittily punning off its three-dimensional standing. Below the work, in the triangulated space where the sides meet, shadows create looping word patterns, exposing a silence that has lost its ability to “speak”, with a mutism that takes the form of an endless echo in an age awash with the obscenity of noise. The echo here is the cleaved voice, the acceptance of a split self that can only be located in and through the mirror of language. But the echo also represents the distance between the artistic voice and the larger social body of language, and Geers’s distance from his own sense of self.
Geers has described Third World Disorder as his most personal exhibition to date. That may be true. It is also one of his most complex, mature and intelligent exhibitions. But Geers remains a dick. A lone and lonely male “word bomber” alternately pissing into the wind and mutely jerking off in one small corner of an unjust, divided world he doesn’t want to be part of but can’t seem to escape from.
Kendell Geers’s Third World Disorder is on at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, until July 10