YA BASTA ! | Le Consortium

Interview with Peta Krost préface cat. Kendell Geers, Secession, Wien, 1999 :

« I don’t work from within the realms of art because art has become a pathetic in-house joke », Kendell Geers said in an interview with Peta Krost in 1998. Consequently, the literature about the South African artist is marked by a vocabulary that is unusually violent for the art scene: the artist as an Aesthetic Terrorist or a South African Anarchist. This is due only marginally to the incident at the Venice Biennale in 1993 (where artists from South Africa had been invited for the first time since 1968, the allegedly fictitious year of birth of Kendell and the actual year of death of Duchamp), where Geers used Duchamp’s and R. Mutt’s Fountain for what it actually is: an urinal (after which he was promptly kicked out). It is Geers’ mistrust of the agreements which condition contemporary art in Europe and the USA or even permit its existence in the first place, together with his lustful-anarchical efforts to undermine them, which has earned him his Bad Boy image. Still, he is very conscious of his position as a WSAM (White South African Male) and tries to express that in his work (while being very aware of its expiry date) and in his clothes: « I always wear black on the outside because I am black on the inside… I see myself as a quintessential African, so if I am not black on the outside, then I must be black inside. »

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Christine Macel in catalogue, Extra et Ordinaire – Printemps de Cahors, 1999

« I always wear black on the outside because I am black on the inside… I see myself as a quintessential African, so if I am not black on the outside, then I must be black inside. »