No Land’s Man

”I am a stranger in the country of my birth by virtue of being too European in my appearance and culture. But at the same time I am unwelcome in Europe on account of my being too African. /…/ I am the abandoned product of a failed experiment, a hybrid of cultures and identities, a contradiction in terms.” Kendell Geers¹

A shattered gallery shopfront, the remains of a car crashing into the building in ‘Le Poète assassiné’ (1993–2022), invites the viewer to use the rear entrance to the exhibition, only to be greeted by ‘Handgrenades from my Heart 15’ (2010), a huge bronze cast of a double-sided (artist’s own) penis in front of a large screenprint of the word FUCK, ‘After Love (Anarchist)’ (2004). Kendell Geers, after having thrown a brick through a gallery window in ‘Title Withheld (Brick)’ (1993) and exploded a bomb in a museum in ‘Title Withheld (Blow)’ (1993), does not spare violence and provocation in his new Parisian retrospective exploring Détournement, plagiarism and the role of language in the artist’s large and diverse body of work.

“Any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite.” Guy Debord²

Kendell Geers is an “arterrorist”³ with a polymorphic oeuvre comprising Lost Objects, installation, video work, text, and performance (Situations) researching the nature and history of language, politics, activism and violence, juxtaposed with the artist’s personal identity of a white South African. In one of his first situations he changed his date of birth to ‘May 68’, as a show of deep respect for the ideas of the Situationist International and their influence on the protests in Paris. In 1968 Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was published and Marcel Duchamp died.

“I was born into a Crime Against Humanity on the wrong side of the tracks and so had no other option than to run away from my family, my culture, my education and give birth to myself as a work of art.” Kendell Geers⁴

He found the key to his birth as an artist in Guy Debord’s Strategy of Détournement which remains today a centrepiece of Geers’s artmaking process. He sees himself as the terrorist of the art world, constantly exploring the limits of social norms and experimenting with various forms of violence — his art is not there to preach or impose, but rather to force the viewer to take a stand. He constantly questions the value of aesthetics and tests the concept of originality.

Having a retrospective in a gallery and not a museum is unusual, but after a bad critical reception of his last retrospective in MOCA Lyon in 2008, Geers has been cancelled in France, as he puts it himself. 70 smaller works are presented, in various media, from Lost Objects to Situations, some artist books, a few installations, one painting, and a few prints, spanning from the oldest dated to May 1968 — Geers’ dog tags entitled ‘Title Withheld (Kendell Geers)’ — to the freshly broken gallery shopfront, done just a few days before the opening.

Lost Object is Geers’ reply to Found Object. Duchamp is an artist Geers “loves to hate”⁵ and as such he has interacted with him on many occasions. At Venice Biennale 1993, he pissed into Duchamp’s Fountain to “transform it from a cold curiosity into a fully patinated work of art.”⁶ Geers compares the modernist concept of the Found Object with the colonial act of discovering new land and erasing centuries of history by disregarding the indigenous people who live there. The term Found Object grants megalomaniac power solely to the last owner of the object instead of rightfully distributing it between all the previous holders: “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.”⁷

The most famous of the Lost Objects is ‘Self Portrait’ (1995), a broken neck of a Heineken beer bottle with an inscription ‘IMPORTED from Holland, the original quality’. The broken bottle is a perfect description of the artist in the context of apartheid and postcolonialism — as the work of a white male South African descendant of Dutch colonisers, this simple object encapsulates two of the major and returning themes of Geers’s art: violence and identity. An edition of 12 (two six-packs) was created after the original was destroyed in the cargo hold of TWA Flight 800 which exploded after taking off from New York City on 17 July 1996.

“In 1990, when Mandela was released and Apartheid de-legislated, our identity as South Africans was up for grabs. Our history, culture, morality, faith, values and everything that one might normally take for granted, as ‘identity’ was in my case illegitimate. As an African I consider myself an animist and respect my ancestors, but those ancestors are Dutch. The broken bottle of beer speaks of identity as violence, the self as broken, the spirit the bottle once contained has been drunk and all that remains is the garbage of history" Kendell Geers⁸

Other Lost Objects in the exhibition include ‘T.W. (Contraband)’ (1994), a handmade gun confiscated by police from Pretoria maximum-security prison, South Africa; ‘Pro Aris et Focis’ (2008), a couple of gold-plated decommissioned Uzi guns; ‘Plato’s Cave’ (1999), a Heineken beer bottle cap; and a few paper-based pieces: posters, magazines, books.

Situationist theory understands the situation as a tool for the liberation of everyday life, a method of negating the pervasive alienation that accompanied the spectacle. Internationale Situationniste No. 1 defined the constructed situation as “a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.”⁹ Geers’ Situations come as close as possible to Debord’s original definition — they are textbook cases of Détournement. ‘White Lies’ (26 February 1885), a tin can very similar to Manzoni’s ‘Merda d'artista’ (1961), refers to the Berlin conference of 1885–86, where the colonial superpowers agreed on the borders and divisions of land in Africa. ‘Title Withheld (Vitrine)’ (1993) consists of a broken glass museum vitrine with the very brick that smashed it laying inside it. The work hijacks the classic form of a museum vitrine where African ritual masks were exhibited (imprisoned), freeing the mask and violently breaking the colonialist tradition, but also references Carl Andre’s ‘Equivalent VIII’ (1966), one of the most famous works of minimalism that can be understood as “the very opposite of conceptual art.”¹⁰ The Andre brick is a repetitive reference in Geers’ work, also present in another exhibited work: ‘Monument (Brick)’ (1988–2012), a news clipping from 1988 describing the death of a family of six in a fire in Mmabatho.

“It was in the Interzone and borderlands between Europe and Africa that I met the ghost of William Burroughs who gave me direction. In 1971 he wrote a book called ‘The Electronic Revolution’ in which he said ‘language is a virus’ so I decided to hijack the entire book and the virus spread into the plague.” Kendell Geers¹¹

The research of language through Détournement culminates in Geers’ eponymous artist book ‘The Plague is Me’ (2003) and later in ‘After Love (Anarchist)’ (2004). The word FUCK is written in the form of the famous Robert Indiana pop-art piece ‘Love’ (1964), with the background colours detouring from green and blue to anarchist black and red. Geers is convinced that ‘fuck’ was one of the last words that possessed real magick. “FUCK is so much more than a vulgar profanity because it embodies everything that we fear and desire. It is the linguistic equivalent of the canary in the goldmine through which we might determine the condition and health of Western culture.”¹² However, in 2007 Tom Ford created a perfume called ‘Fucking Fabulous’ and around the same time Supreme began producing sweaters with the word fuck, reducing the once powerful swear word to a banal and powerless expression.

The broad oeuvre presented in The Plague is Me: Une vie de détournements proves again that Kendell Geers is one of the champions of his time. His work, however, does not belong in a dusty old gallery in the 6th arrondissement — although Geers ideologically destroys it by crashing a car into it. The art market is one of the strongest remains of colonial society — a stronghold of capitalism that Geers so violently fights. The only logical next step is to take Geers’ art back to where it emerged from — into the streets, the public space — the only decentralised and democratic museum of art.