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Kendell Geers: LOVE, By Any Means Necessary
LOVE, By Any Means Necessary
(p. 93 – 104)

Kendell Geers

LOVE, By Any Means Necessary

PDF, 12 pages

  • contemporary art
  • global ecology
  • rhetoric / elocution
  • politics
  • artistic practice
  • resistance

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Kendell Geers

is an artist of our times who understands better than anyone else the contradictions of an age defined by extremes. Born into a working-class Afrikaans family at the height of Apartheid, he ran away from home at the tender age of fifteen to join the ranks of Nelson Mandela’s liberation movement. Five years later he fled South Africa as a refugee, eventually settling in New York, where he worked as an assistant to Richard Prince. Following Mandela’s unconditional release, Geers returned to South Africa in 1990 to rebuild the new democracy, working as a journalist and curator as well as developing his unique Post-Political Conceptual language as an artist. Describing himself as an AniMystikAKtivist, Kendell Geers is the quintessential bridge between the European and African traditions of art, an animist at the same time an alchemist and mystic who believes in the power of art to address the global crisis of climate change. In his hands, the ancient tradition of art flows into the materialization of spirit with the spiritualization of matter. In an age of chaos and acceleration, an age marked by political instability, economic uncertainty and cultural confusion, Geers is a beacon of hope, an enlightened consciousness who believes that art changes the world—one perception at a time.
Sara Alonso Gómez (ed.), Isabel J. Piniella Grillet (ed.), ...: NO Rhetoric(s)

This volume maps some of the territories where points of resistance can be located and where art’s resistant potential becomes relevant once again. "NO Rhetoric(s): Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art" focuses on a neuralgic issue which was intensely debated during the last three decades, but has rarely become a topic of its own. It offers an updated way which art presents itself as an agent of resistance, whether in a mere rhetorical stance or as an effective critical strategy. In the face of general discourse of revolt and insurrection that is highly fashionable today, it is necessary to ask whether the gesture of ‘negation’ still yields an emancipatory potential. Struggling between NO rhetoric and NO to rhetoric, the artistic and the political field permanently interfere with each other; sometimes they merely overlap, while at other moments they strongly insist on demarcating themselves. Nonetheless it remains to be seen more precisely of what their respective critical forces and agonality consist. In this sense, the book contributes to a deeper understanding of the different logics of resistance at play between art and the political, as expressed by Jacques Rancière in his distinction between “the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form.”

 

This volume provides a diverse array of voices and essays from the academic and artistic field that present theoretical approaches as well as study cases. By juxtaposing them, it encompasses both the complexity and diversity of artistic practices within a global instituting framework that seems to capitalize on different political streams. The reader will find contributions on sexual dissidence, ecology and the Anthropocene, geopolitics of the digital age and institutional critique. The authors, artists and scholars from different disciplines share their desire to shed some light on how art approaches these urgent issues.

 

Contributors: Sara Alonso Gómez, Mieke Bal, Zach Blas, Katharina Brandl, Nancy Garín, Kendell Geers, Ben Grosser and Geert Lovink, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Federico Luisetti, Charlotte Matter, Isabel J. Piniella Grillet, Nadia Radwan, Fiona Siegenthaler, David Tenorio, and Jaime Vindel.

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