Title Withheld (Red and White) ,1993
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Notes : Kendell Geers initially established himself in South African contemporary art practice in the 1980s and 1990s as an enfant terrible of conceptualism. A consistent deployment of the banal tools of insurrection and political revolt marked his work through this time – the safety match that lit the petrol bombs and the brick that smashed a window were, for example, staged as gallery exhibits in a post-Duchampian ready-made idiom. However, the most consistent visual marker of his approach was the use of red and white chevron security tape, as with the work on auction. This quotidian object is defined in civil uprising and security situations by being the definition of an excluded zone – either a site of unrest or even murder – and deployed by official state forces to define the spaces of inclusion and exclusion. Geers adds further nuance to this work through the wordplay on works of art being titled ‘Untitled’. Here, it is not an Untitled work, but one for which the title is actively withheld in an ironically authoritarian gesture.
James Sey
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