Kendell Geers (born May 1968) is a South African conceptual artist.
Biography Kendell Geers was born in Leondale, a working-class suburb on the East Rand outside Johannesburg, South Africa.Peta Krost, "Interview with Kendell Geers." Saturday Star, 24 January 1998"Salon | Artist Talk | Manifesta 9: FIRED UP by Kendell Geers", YouTube video.Kendell Geers, "The Perversity of my Birth: The Birth of my Perversity," reprinted in "Art in South Africa: The Future Present" by Ashraf Jamal and Sue Williamson, David Philip, 1996, Geers applied to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to avoid conscription into the South African Defence Force.Warren Siebrits, States of Emergency 1985–1990, "Irrespektiv." BOM / Actar, 2007.
At art school, Geers and Neil Goedhals formed the performance art group KOOS with Marcel van Heerden, Gys de Villiers, Megan Kruskal, and Velile Nxazonke. KOOS sang post-punk / industrial music ballads based on Afrikaans protest poetry by poets such as Ryk Hattingh and Christopher van Wyk. KOOS disbanded in 1990 following the suicide of Neil Goedhals on 16 August 1990.
His first artwork created upon his return to South Africa was titled "Bloody Hell". It was a performance piece in which he ritually washed his white Afrikaner Boer body with his own blood, in acknowledgement of his own family's role in the colonization of South Africa."Fin de Partie" reprinted in "Hang Grenades From My Heart" Edited by Jerome Sans, Blue Kingfisher, Beijing, , pages=23–43
In a political act challenging his Afrikaans family and Boer culture, Geers changed his date of birth to May 1968. By doing so, he symbolically rejected his Afrikaner political identity and baptised himself as the artist Kendell Geers.Nicolas Bourriaud, Kendell Geers: A Proletarian Gnosis, Kendell Geers 1988–2012, Munich, Prestel, 2012. The act of washing his skin in his blood was a reference to the line "My head is bloody, but unbowed" from the poem Invictus. Whilst incarcerated on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela recited this poem to other prisoners.
Shortly after his return from exile, Albie Sachs wrote a seminal essay called "Preparing Ourselves for Freedom" in which he called on his fellow ANC members to desist from "saying that culture is a weapon of struggle." In response, Geers wrote an article for the Star Newspaper in which he reversed the challenge by "saying that the struggle is a weapon of culture." He wrote "All good art is political in the sense that it challenges the ideologies and cultural prejudices of both the viewer and the artist. Political art must be perceived less as a set of predictable subjects and more as a critique of social representations." Believing that there could be "No Poetry after Apartheid", Geers used the alienation he felt about his cultural heritage to create a new practice that he called "Relational Ethics" in which he used his experiences as an activist as a weapon to challenge the minimalist aesthetics of Conceptual art. In this period, he began using police batons, razor mesh, broken glass, gunshots, danger tape, and punk-style xeroxes in his art. In 1995, he created "Self Portrait," an iconic work consisting of a broken Heineken beer bottle neck with the label still attached, which reads "Imported from Holland. The Superior Quality."
In 1999 Geers took up a one-year residence at Solitude Palace in Stuttgart and then moved to Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna, finally settling in London. After experiencing disillusionment with the art system, Geers took a 12-month sabbatical during which he did not create any artwork. He intended to spend this time reading and reflecting on art, life, and politics in search of a justification to continue making art. However, already committed to a solo exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans, he agreed to present the outcome of his year-long, research-driven sabbatical at the Palais de Tokyo. The resulting exhibition titled, "Sympathy for the Devil", consisted of a single matchstick called "The Terrorists Apprentice" installed in the empty museum. During the opening on 1 June 2002, the matchstick was vandalized but was replaced the following day
Methodology Curator Clive Kellner described the 1988–2000 period of Geers' work as political, but the artist does not like this label. Instead of declaring his beliefs, he prefers to create art that embodies moral ambiguity and invites viewers to confront their beliefs. This way, there is a dialogue and a transformation. He refers to this as TerroRealism, which he defines as "artists who had grown up in countries that had been torn apart by war, revolution, conflict, crime and genocide created work according to an entirely different set of aesthetic principles. In place of the cool, detached passive showroom aesthetics of the white cube shrine, their work was invested with a Reality Principle that sought to disrupt the viewer's pleasure more than satisfy it."
Geers uses a variety of images, objects, colors, and materials that signal danger in an attempt to examine power structures, social injustices, and establishment values. Geers also uses words to explore the power relations and coding of language the borders of semantics in communicating complex contradictory emotions and states of being. Geers creates disarmingly simple situations, like a single matchstick in an empty museum or a broken bottle of beer, but the simple reading quickly disintegrates within a complex forest of signs. He often compares his work to the scene of a crime in which the viewer must reconstruct what has happened and then try to find their connection to that understanding.
Most of Geers' artwork showcases visceral, raw emotion where words fail. He tries to "create pieces in which viewers have to accept responsibility for their presence in the work of art. They are always free to walk away or move on, but if they decide to engage with work, then the process becomes an active one." Geers' works create a physical presence and are about performing a specific effect rather than depicting it.
Geers centres his work around the limits of experiences like ecstasy, fear, desire, love, beauty, sexuality, violence, and death because he believes that these extreme experiences are beyond our ability to express in words. The knowledge, fear, and theories of these experiences are central to most cultures worldwide. He is drawn to the taboos that govern our lives because they are beyond our ability to control, no matter who we presume ourselves to be: rich, poor, illiterate, or educated.
Lost object Lost object is an art historical term coined by Geers to set apart his practice of using existing objects, images or materials. The term is a protest against the term found object popularized by Marcel Duchamp. The play on words contrasting lost with found is a semantic strategy often used by the artist."Following the Blind Man," Kendell Geers, Lecture at Copycat Academy, Luminato Festival, Toronto, Canada, 2014 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=EbWjzPm-09A
According to Columbia University Professor Z. S. Strother, "He rightfully rejects the use of the term found object since it grants megalomaniac power to the last person in a chain of hands contributing to a work's biography: 'I prefer the concept of the LOST OBJECT because it suggests that there is a history and a context to the object, image or thing BEFORE it is reduced to a work of art."Page 62 "Kendell Geers: Or, How To Philosophise With a Hammer" Z.S. Strother, published in "AniMystikAKtivist: Between Traditional and the Contemporary in African Art" Yale University Press and Mercatorfonds, , Publication Date: August 7, 2018
In his 1996 essay "The Perversity of my Birth, the Birth of my Perversity", the artist wrote that "Modernism was built upon precisely the same essentialist Christian philosophies and beliefs as Colonialism""The Perversity of my Birth, the Birth of my Perversity" published in Art in South Africa, The Future Present, Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town and Johannesburg, Page 15 and that "In rejecting Colonialism and its protégé Apartheid, I thus have no option but to also reject every element of its ideological and hegemonic machinery including its morality, art and the culture" and so, therefore, the concept of found object is rejected as flawed in a moral association with Colonialism."LOVE, By Any Means Necessary", "NO Rhetoric(s): Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art," Piniella Grillet, Isabel Josefina; Alonso Gómez, Sara; Rosauro, Elena (eds.) Diaphanes, (2021)
Geers compares the Modernist concept of the found object with the Colonial act of "DISCOVERING" a country, or a continent, that effectively erases centuries of history by disregarding the indigenous people who live there. By the very same logic, Duchamp's act of finding erases the history, ownership, provenance, use, value, and context of an object, whereas the designation "Lost Object" implies all former histories and context in the spirit of Guy Debord's concept of Détournement.
The Lost Object releases the work of art from the Artist's ego with an open-source participation in the history of the design, manufacture, use, ownership, and function of the object through symbolic upcycling. Geers argues that the found object cannot exist outside of the quarantine of a White Cube Gallery, so Duchamp transformed the gallery into an aesthetic zone comparable to hospitals and toilets in which every form of reality is purged like the contaminant of a virus."
Body of work Early work His early work was influenced by the ideas expressed in his response to Albie Sachs and the idea that "The Struggle is a Weapon of Art." Strongly influenced by the ideas of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Geers used his experiences as an anti-apartheid activist to interrogate the reading of conceptual art from an Afro-Centric perspective. Writing about African Conceptualism for the groundbreaking exhibition Global Conceptualism: points of origin, 1950s-1980s at Queens Museum, Okwui Enwezor wrote "In African art, two things are constantly in operation: the work and the idea of the work. These are not autonomous systems. One needs the other and vice versa. A paraphrase of an Igbo idea will clarify this relationship: where there is something standing which can be seen, there is something else standing next to it that cannot be seen but which accompanies the object. In its material basis, African art is object-bound, but in its meaning and intention it is paradoxically anti-object and anti-perceptual, bound by the many ways of conveying ideas whereby speech or oral communication are highly valued"."Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on African Conceptualism," Okwui Enwezor, published in "Global conceptualism: points of origin, 1950s-1980s," Queens Museum of Art, 1999, page 110