Kendell Geers’ art is inseparable from his life. How we become who we are is one of the core themes in his oeuvre. More broadly, he also reflects on political issues and art, ways of exhibiting, and on the art world and its players. Geers firmly believes in art’s political, erotic and mystical power. For example, he recognises himself in the text of Bruce Nauman’s neon work ‘The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths’ (1967). Says Geers: “art can change the world – one perception at a time”.
Geers is the son of white, Dutch parents. His mother left the family when he was five. He was raised by his ultra-right-wing, strict and religious father. Disgusted by his family’s support for racial segregation in South Africa, he ran away from home at the age of fifteen. He then dedicated himself to the anti-apartheid movement. Geers was imprisoned on several occasions and went on to study art, which was the antithesis of family traditions and expectations. While studying at the University of Johannesburg (1985-1988), he exhibited extremely militant work. Its compelling linguistic urgency, powerful aesthetics and visual economy were all directly linked to the contemporaneous political world. In 1989, he refused to do military service and went into voluntary exile in London and New York to escape a six-year prison sentence. Geers returned to Johannesburg in 1990. He marked the moment with the performance Bloody Hell (1990), in which he ritually washed the ‘guilt’ from his body with his own blood. Until the first democratic elections in 1994, Geers was a member of every possible political party, from the extreme left to the right. He denounced the parties’ fetishism. Following the anti-apartheid boycott, Geers was present when South African artists were readmitted to the Venice Biennale (1993). On that occasion, he changed his given names Jacobus Hermanus Pieter – the names of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather – to ‘Kendell’ and his date of birth to ‘May 1968’. Geers thereby redefined himself. With these artistic-conceptual gestures, he once again distanced himself from his origins.
May 1968 symbolises resistance. It is also the year in which Marcel Duchamp died. Geers has a love-hate relationship with the latter’s oeuvre. In Venice, for example, he actually used Duchamp’s Fountain as a urinal. Geers settled in Brussels in 2000 and took Belgian nationality. The year also marks a turning point in his oeuvre. Up until that point, he had made politically charged and socially engaged work, visualising evil and pushing the boundaries of what is permissible. He exposed the moral and ethical contradictions of apartheid in a very confrontational way and examined power structures, establishment values and social injustice. In the process, he banished anything aesthetic that might distract from his challenging, visual language. Geers work with materials that alluded to violence: broken glass, barbed wire, explosives, fences, electricity and extreme tension, truncheons and fire, amongst other things. The artist brought the turbulent South African streets into the art world. Self-portrait (1995) is particularly emblematic: a razor-sharp, broken glass neck of a Heineken beer bottle, an object that can only be dangerous.
After 2000, Geers tended to focus on global themes such as terrorism and environmental pollution, also turning his attention to universal feelings of fear and longing. Language became even more important. In 2007, he joined the audiovisual group ‘ThefucKINGFUCKS’. Geers believes in the power of the word ‘Fuck’, which relates to sex and aggression. He builds patterns with it, as with the letters of the seven deadly sins: ENVY, AVARICE etc. Geers also writes manifesto-like texts, paints mandalas based on razor wire and publishes books. His artist book Point Blank (2004), a blank volume riddled with bullets, is just one example. Alongside language, his vocabulary also includes references to art history, pornography, kitsch and African art.
