!1

!!!!!!!!!

“Making Whiteness Strange” in the Post-Apartheid Art of Candice Breitz and Kendell

Geers

!!!!!!

Senior Art History Capstone

Maya Aguayo Schmidt-Feng

Macalester College, Art and Art History Department

Professor Joanna Inglot, Advisor

May 7, 2014

!2

In the early 1990s, once the Apartheid system of racial discrimination and segregation

ceased to dominate social and political life in South Africa, visual artists began to respond to

racial tensions and social imbalances established by this oppressive system, drawing attention to

issues of power and representation of race in contemporary art. As the Nigerian-born art histori-

an, curator, and expert on contemporary African art—Okwui Enwezor—pertinently remarked of

representation in post-Apartheid South Africa, “no longer tenable is that hardened position of

binaries—black/white, settler/native, colonizer/colonized.”  In the blurred realms of South 1

African art and politics, the official end of Apartheid adamantly called for the breakdown and re-

imagination of strict representational codes that reinforced sharp racial distinctions. How these

changes should be appropriately, successfully, or effectively visualized in art, however, was not

necessarily apparent. And yet, in such a political and social context, the production of rigorously

thoughtful, nuanced, and complex depictions of the South African subject, which do not purely

reinforce racist differential systems of value, become all the more critically important. Ideally,

representations of race in post-Apartheid South African visual culture would resist a logic of

false dichotomies, such as “black/white, settler/native, colonizer/colonized.” The pervasive hy-

pervisibility of racial difference that fueled the Apartheid regime raises questions of how, after its

official end in 1994, South African white artists critically visualized themselves within the fabric

of the “Rainbow Nation.” This term was initially coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu after the

first democratic election in 1994 to describe a multi-cultural vision of post-Apartheid South

Africa, and President Nelson Mandela continued its popular use in his first month of office. The

! Okwui Enwezor, “Reframing the Black Subject Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African 1

Representation” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (Boston: The MIT Press, 1999), 385

!3

term is criticized for its tendency to invoke ignorance of continued racism and crime. In this con-

text, faced with the task to acknowledge how their racial identity enables a privileged position

along social, political, and economic lines, what does the artwork of South African white artists

and its reception reveal or highlight about the historical moment of post-Apartheid and its ac-

companying debates of race and representation? It might appear counterintuitive or problematic

to give more visibility to art made by white South African people who most benefited from

Apartheid policy. But I argue that a close analysis of their work touches on a core dialectical

problematic in post-Apartheid representation, as articulated by art historian Jessica Draper, who

observes that “ignoring whiteness perpetuates invisible advantage, and acknowledging it reifies a

claim to Apartheid’s visible advantage.”  Representations of race produced by white South 2

African artists have served as a crucial and often polarizing catalyst for heated discussions of

race since the 1990s. I contend that although they risk reifying “a claim to Apartheid’s visible

advantage,” this risk is necessary to the bold pursuit of representing racial dynamics from the

position of a white South African subject. Their work, both before and while living in diaspora,

is rife with complicated and subversive results that hope to complicate the simple polarization of

opinion inherent in the dynamic that Draper describes. In fact, the charged and disparate reac-

tions prompted by Geers’s and Breitz’s strategic engagement with whiteness speaks precisely to

the need for a nuanced, critical theory of race that addresses the problematic implications of an

understanding of race predicated on false dichotomies, and without directly addressing white-

ness. Their art prompts a diversity of reactions appropriate to its paradoxical subject matter.

! Jessica Draper, “A Spear of Contention.” (PhD diss., University of Oxford). Accessed at 2

http://www.brettmurray.co.za/essays-and-texts/a-spear-of-contention-jessica-draper-university-of-oxford-dphil-fine-arts/

!4

An engagement with the writing of Trinh Minh-ha is especially apt. Her unconventional

conception of the knowing process as infinitely occurring, aims to reject the problematic reliance

on un-checked preconceptions that perpetuate racism. For Minh-ha, radical consciousness is the

knowledge that someone or something can never be fully pinned down in representation. She

observes the seemingly banal fact that every viewer “mediates a text to his or her own reality.”  3

In advocating this Roland Barthes-inspired conception of spectatorship, it refuses the inter-

preter’s conventional role to “tell what the work is about,” an approach that ignores how in truth

they “complete and co-produce” meaning. This is not meant to encourage the idea that “anything

can be said” about a work; Minh-ha clearly states that because every work has its own limits and

rules, interpretations of meaning “should be rooted in the specific reality of the work itself.” Her

theories offer insight into how Geers’s and Breitz’s on-going conflation of false dichotomies

prevalent in post-Apartheid South Africa intervenes in the ever-pervasive oppressive binary logic

that ruled Apartheid, rules its continued racism, and often dictates the polarized reaction to artists

who attempt to visualize its related issues of race and representation. Their viewers become self-

aware of their role in the construction of meaning, which I argue strategically aims to effect

change in how knee-jerk reactions to representations of race are often unaware of their reliance

on the same logic of false dichotomies which perpetuate racism in the first place—works are of-

ten evaluated on the basis of being either successfully “politically correct” to some, or “absolute-

ly problematic” to others.

The year 1994 marked the official end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the

! Trinh Minh-ha, “All-Owning Spectatorship” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and 3

Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991, 93.

!5

first democratic general elections, in which citizens of all races were allowed to vote. From 1990

to 1994, the Apartheid government and the African National Congress (ANC) negotiated a politi-

cal settlement that resulted in the implementation of constitutional liberal democracy.  F. W. de 4

Klerk, the last president of Apartheid-era South Africa and leader of the National Party, un-

banned the ANC in 1990 and freed Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners not guilty of

violence the same year. The ANC, led by Mandela, became established as a mass political orga-

nization inside South Africa between 1990 and 1994.  In April 1994 the ANC won South Africa’s 5

first democratic elections, Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president, and an interim constitution

was enacted. In 1995, Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which

relied on voluntary depositions  and was tasked with investigating human rights abuses commit6 -

ted during Apartheid. The TRC’s final report was comprised of evidence and information from

both victims and perpetrators, based on 22,000 statements from victims and public hearings at

which victims gave testimony. Although not a perfect solution, the TRC hoped to hold perpetra-

tors of Apartheid accountable and tried to give voice to those affected by its brutal violences.

South Africa was thought of as a miracle nation undergoing its reinvention as a multicultural and

multiracial society.  The traditional belief that art reflects social change is especially relevant to 7

this particular moment in South Africa’s history: South Africans and the international art com-

! Tom Lodge, “Resistance and Reform, 1973--1994,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, eds. 4

Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson. 1st ed. Vol. 2. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 481. Cambridge Histories Online Web. 12 April 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521869836! Ibid., 483.5

! Ibid., 484.6

! Okwui Enwezor, “‘Better Lives,’ Marginal Selves: Framing the Current Reception of Contemporary 7

South African Art” in South African Art Now (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 16

!6

munity sought evidence of concomitant post-Apartheid changes in the work of South African

visual artists.

Prior to the country’s first democratic election, a thirty-year boycott prevented South

African artists from participating in the international art circuit, unless they were living abroad.

Even so, only those in diaspora who made their staunch opposition to Apartheid clear were able

to gain support and sponsorship from international patrons during this time.  Art historian Okwui 8

Enwezor cited both the end of Apartheid and the release of political prisoners by President F. W.

de Klerk in 1989 and 1990 as the critical points after which the attitude and response toward

South African artists rapidly changed. This shift was most palpable in the frequency of exhibi-

tions that focused on South African art, resulting in global acceptance and recognition in exhibi-

tions, museums, and markets. Yet Enwezor articulated a set of problems amid this success. The

first was demonstrated by the perpetuation of the prevalent logic of the Rainbow Nation in the

initial series of South African group exhibitions that aimed to offer a well-rounded and com-

pelling look at artists previously banned from displaying their work. Perhaps unequipped, un-

able, or unwilling to tackle the complexities and subtleties of post-Apartheid South Africa, these

exhibitions tended to gloss over the clear contradictions that defined post-Apartheid South

African art and “very seldom was the question ever asked about the precise designation of post-

Apartheid art, or what exactly unifies a one-time segregated culture into a singular, undifferenti-

ated whole.”  In the conclusion of his essay, Enwezor is careful both to acknowledge the suc9 -

cesses of South African artists during the years immediately following the freedom from boycott

! Ibid.8

! Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu., eds. Contemporary Art Since 1980 (Bologna: Damiana, 9

2009), 16.

!7

and to caution against thinking that the post-Apartheid model that succeeded Mandela has not

come without crisis. He cites the horrible irony of current xenophobic violence against African

migrants living in South Africa, not to mention the persistence of AIDS, crime, and lack of op-

portunities for the lowest classes of workers and migrants.  Confronting the realities that have 10

followed South Africa’s induction into the international art scene as a “normal” global power

points all the more strongly to the continual need for artists’ cultural critique and political voices.

Kendell Geers is one such unflinchingly blatant yet sophisticated artist who calls himself

an “aesthetic terrorist.”  His themes deal with the contradictions of identity and structures of 11

power, language, and politics from the position of a white subject. His art articulates and makes

prominent his correspondingly paradoxical sense of self as both a Dutch and African subject. Ti-

tle Withheld (Kendell Geers) (1968-?) (Fig. 1) was technically listed as a Performance/Situation

in a 2012 exhibition of Geers’s work at Haus der Kunst, a museum space in Munich directed by

Okwui Enwezor. Because the artist has instructed that this work be auctioned upon his death, the

“end date” of its completion is given on didactic text with a question mark. The photographic

representation consists of dog tags inscribed with the words “May 1968” and “Title Withheld

(Kendell Geers).” They serve as the physical representation of his name and birth date changed

as an act of political protest and a means of foregrounding and dislocating his oppressive Dutch

South African colonial ancestry. He appropriated May 1968 from the year that defined revolu-

tionary movements across the globe, beginning with the student rebellions in Paris (and subse-

quently throughout Europe) that month. 1968 was also the year that South Africa was banned

! Ibid., 20.10

! Sue Williamson, South African Art Now (New York: Harper Collins, 2009) 82.11

!8

from the Venice Biennale; the country was not allowed to return to this event until 1993. Geers

was among the few artists chosen to exhibit at the Biennale that year, decisively placing him in a

global, postcolonial, post-Apartheid context early in his career, which formally began in 1988.  12

By deliberately changing some of the seemingly most natural elements of oneself—name and

date of birth—Geers reveals the simultaneous fallacy and material reality of identity markers. He

manages not only to stage a conceptual critique of his heritage and the classification system that

underpinned Apartheid but challenges the traditional Western notions of what constitutes art, es-

pecially what “authentically” constitutes “African” art.

Geers notes that from a young age he grappled with the “illegitimacy of an identity”; he

ran away from home at the age of fifteen. He states: “I understood that I was born into a working

class white Afrikaans South African family, and during Apartheid and post-Apartheid, this was

not something I could acknowledge, depend upon. My family had been living in Africa for 300

years but I had not yet become African.”  As an artist who sought to reinvent himself, his work 13

and personal history unsettle the dominant ways of understanding the conceptualization and vi-

sualization of a stable identity. His simultaneous desire to alter the signifiers that rule the catego-

rization of his identity and to acknowledge this challenge is mitigated by modeling himself after

the mythological “trickster” spirit. Geers constantly changes and transforms himself and his art

to avoid being stabilized or captured. He has even made his curriculum vitae into a work of art

(or “situation,” as listed in exhibition catalogs), starting this document with April 6, 1652, the

! “Kendell Geers 1988 -- 2012”, http://www.hausderkunst.de/en/exhibitions/detail/kendell-12

geers-1988-2012-5/! Kendell Geers Studio, “Kendell Geers talks about his work at ‘Kendell Geers 1988-2012,” Haus der 13

Kunst, Munich http://vimeo.com/69337876

!9

date Jan Van Riebeck declared South Africa a Dutch colony.  It also includes the Berlin confer14 -

ence of 1884 at which European powers divided up Africa; the sinking of the Titanic in 1912;

and the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Subverting the conventions of a traditionally cele-

bratory document, Geers continuously adds and subtracts these dates as his thinking changes,

thus commenting on the subjective nature of history and the fluid multiplicity of identity con-

struction. The inclusion of political events into a document usually dedicated to the achievements

of an individual decisively locates Geers in a critical post-Apartheid context deeply aware of his

origins and contemporary subjectivity as a white South African man. His practice intervenes in

traditional conceptions of identity that hold it to be stable, rationally determined, and myopic.

Instead, he foregrounds the absurdity of this notion of identity perpetuated by the oppressive log-

ic of Apartheid, which maintained distinctions in heritage and lineage with violent rigidity.

Geers’s unique and continuous manipulation of his C.V. profoundly signals the need for infinite

knowing and the radical consciousness that representations are inherently partial, as established

by Trinh Minh-ha, so as to avoid fixed representations of racial identity that perpetuate racism.

This idealistic theory of knowledge is not expressed here without more complex undertones. In

spite of the constantly changing events Geers chooses to include, their historical specificity is a

gesture crucial to a critical study of whiteness. It is undeniable that Geers’s international success

as a white South African artist is tied to colonial conquest and the history of Apartheid. Although

he cannot fundamentally, materially change his whiteness, he acknowledges the historical basis

of its power in an attempt to reimagine his relationship to it and thus highlights the performance

of the radical way of conceptualizing representation postulated by Minh-ha.

! “Kendell Geers 1988 -- 2012”14

!10

Geers’s dialectical relationship to his Afrikaner roots is actually more appropriate to its

origins than the rigid policies of Apartheid would have us believe. South African scholar Melissa

Steyn traces the origins of Afrikaner identity to the early settlers of mixed European (but primari-

ly Dutch) ancestry unified in their lack of attachment to European homelands.  Contrary to the 15

eventual aim of Apartheid to render conceptions and practice of white South African identity ab-

solutely pure, its historical roots are necessarily contradictory, hybrid, and perhaps Creole. The

mixture of slave, indigenous, and European heritage blurs the supposed boundaries between

“white and brown,” which of course were made hierarchical and absolutely differential. Geers’s

struggle with his identity’s “illegitimacy” is true to the nature of seemingly discrete identity.

Steyn notes the necessary relationship between “exposing whiteness and decolonizing the imagi-

nation of both the oppressed and oppressors,” which places the critical study of whiteness in a

present tense. She rightly assumes that the construction of whiteness does not belong only to a

South African history of modern colonial domination, but that it continues to deeply affect the

contemporary, postcolonial world. Whiteness studies (and by extension the analysis of white

South African artists) certainly risks reinscribing the dominant group back into the center of aca-

demic attention, Steyn emphasizes that, in fact, the examination of whiteness offers one potential

approach to understanding how its continuing hegemony has ramifications for not only the sub-

jugated but also the perpetrators and their descendants. As an artist, Geers strategically acknowl-

edges his whiteness, which confronts his viewers with profound commentary on structural power

and representation in an increasingly globalized world.

! Melissa Steyn, “Rehabilitating a Whiteness Disgraced: Afrikaner White Talk in Post-Apartheid South 15

Africa.” Communication Quarterly 52:2, 2004, 148

!11

Art historian Liese van der Watt similarly notes the crucial function of acknowledging or

“foregrounding whiteness” in Geers’s art. In “Witnessing Trauma in Post-Apartheid South

Africa: The Question of Generational Responsibility” (2005), she probes deeply into how white

South African artists Minnette Vári and Kendell Geers confront their past, considering what it

means to do so on a psychological and personal level, and asks how unproductive feelings of

guilt, denial, or repression of the South Africa’s violent past can be avoided with alternative ap-

proaches. Van der Watt relates her notion of foregrounding whiteness to scholar Richard Dryer’s

understanding of “making whiteness strange,”  a gesture that Geers articulates by insistently 16

confronting his viewers with what lies at the core of whiteness, while aiming to negotiate a sense

of his own white responsibility.  She interprets Geers’s work as enunciating a present in which 17

the past is always present. This is needed not because descendants are personally guilty but be-

cause they are liable for the consequences of past deeds.  Van der Watt concludes that the visu18 -

alization of traumatic memory should not be limited to documentation or representation but

rather should be performative: it should lead to change, and not simply commemorate.  19

This tenuous expression of guilt is embodied in Geers’s photographic self-portrait Bloody

Hell (1990) (Fig. 2). The composition is tightly cropped to feature the artist’s face and the top of

his shoulders with great detail. With one eye barely squinted open, blood covers his head, drip-

ping heavily across his contorted expression. The background is simply black, and Geers wears

no visible clothing. Bloody Hell is a visceral image that denies the viewer obvious contextual

! Liese van Der Watt, “Witnessing Trauma in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Question of Generational 16

Responsibility,” African Arts 38 (2005): 26.! Ibid., 27.17

! Ibid., 35.18

! Ibid. 19

!12

clues, and its simultaneously playful and somber title aggravates the sense of confusion. Is the

artist injured, or does his poised body language suggest otherwise? Where is the blood’s source?

Was he attacked, or do we bear witness to self-inflicted harm? This ambiguity and multiplicity of

possible meaning is a tactic common to Geers’s work. As van der Watt observed, Geers draws

the viewer into a confrontation with the past by foregrounding whiteness, often through perform-

ing and challenging the “inertia” of the guilty bystander.  The corporeal immediacy and am20 -

biguous use of blood in this work demands a shift in the viewer’s role from passive observer to

actively engaged or concerned participant. This facilitates the spectator’s awareness of how, in

Minh-ha’s words, they “co-produce” the image’s meaning, and become responsible for complet-

ing its interpretation. Bloody Hell discourages arriving at the right meaning, a practice that Minh-

ha observes is common in interpretation. Yet, “every decoding implies choice and is interpellated

by ideology, whether spoken or not.”  For Minh-ha, this problematic ideological basis for the 21

right meaning can only be subverted by works like Bloody Hell, which enters explicitly into dia-

logue with the viewer.  22

Geers describes Bloody Hell as evidence of a baptism, or “ritual cleansing,” where he

gave “birth to himself.”  Because of his involvement in the anti-Apartheid struggle, he had to 23

leave South Africa in 1990 to avoid arrest. When he was able to go back to South Africa, the first

thing he did was remove blood from his arm and wash himself in it.  The ritual of dowsing and 24

! Ibid.20

! Trinh Minh-ha, “All-Owning Spectatorship” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender 21

and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991, 93.! Ibid.22

! Kendell Geers Studio, “Kendell Geers talks about his work at ‘Kendell Geers 1988-2012,” Haus der 23

Kunst, Munich http://vimeo.com/69337876! Ibid.24

!13

marking white skin has definite implications, given this work’s broader historical context. Geers

explicitly cites that his bloody baptism “was also me trying to take away this white skin. It was

me trying to understand what could I become. And of course the more you wash, the dirtier you

get. The more you try to clean yourself with blood, the worse it gets.”  As such, “washing with 25

blood” seems contradictory. Blood traditionally signifies guilt in western literature and visual

culture, which in this case holds especially complex conceptual ramifications. While Geers at-

tempts to dislocate himself from his Afrikaans heritage with an unconventional ritual cleansing,

the method prevents a true “cleansing” or escape from the identity markers from which he un-

justly benefits in the system of extreme racial segregation; the artist is perpetually caught in a

loop. Bloody Hell can be interpreted as a visualization of white guilt and the hardly “clean”

process of grappling with the desire to self-construct one’s identity. As one photograph in a series

of self-portraits, this image sets the conceptual precedent for Geers’s constant iterations of self-

representation that can be understood to a greater extent through Minh-ha’s theories of engaging

viewers, radical consciousness, infinitely learning. A consistent production of varied self-por-

traits is crucial to Geers’s approach and the articulation of representations that foreground their

necessarily partial and changing nature.

Five years later, Geers continued his experimentation with unconventional self-portrai-

ture with found object Self-Portrait (1995) (Fig. 3). It consists of a broken glass bottleneck of a

Heineken beer, meant to simultaneously evoke several contradictory meanings in typical Geers

fashion. In an Art Basel video posted online that featured the artist speaking extensively about

the development of his career, Geers notes that in all his work he aims to include elements that

! Ibid.25

!14

are both “attractive and repulsive” to his viewers, as seen in Self-Portrait.  The broken beer bot26 -

tle is an object of both pleasure and pain in the South African context; of course it is a vessel for

beer, but it is also used as a marijuana pipe and a violent weapon in Apartheid society. It refers to

South Africa’s Dutch colonial and post-colonial history.  As a carefully crafted Dutch product 27

imported into South Africa (implying that foreign influence is superior to the local), it eventually

loses its aesthetic and use value, and becomes an object with contradictory uses.  In this senti28 -

ment of recycling and changing meaning, Geers’s Self-Portrait is a by-product of his attempt to

reinvent his identity and reconcile the heritage he desired to dialectically acknowledge and dis-

tance himself from. As South African writer and artist Sue Williamson notes, “Geers has fre-

quently used the phrase ‘the perversity of my birth and the birth of my perversity’ to elucidate

how being brought up during Apartheid formed his fundamental and radical beliefs about art.”  29

This circular logic about his background pervades the pleasure/pain paradox inherent in Self-Por-

trait. Defying all conventions of self-portraiture, this broken beer bottle definitively constitutes

Geers’s desire to destabilize expectations and actively engage his viewer. This work refuses to be

dismissed on aesthetic and political levels. As one of the most explicit iterations of Geers’s radi-

cal conception of white South African selfhood, Self-Portrait thoroughly prompts the viewer to

reconsider preconceived knowledge of the artist as a South African white subject. He enacts a

challenge to oppressive regimes of truth and representation that dictate “proper” depictions of a

white South African post-Apartheid identity.

! Salon, “Artist Talk/Manifesta 9: FIRED UP by Kendell Geers,” June 16, 2012, https://www.youtube.26 -com/watch?v=MGJDXFKIz0U ! Ibid.27

! “Kendell Geers 1988 -- 2012”28

! Williamson, South African Art Now, 294.29

!15

Along with Geers’s 1990s experimentation with foregrounding of whiteness, the end of

Apartheid coincided with the emergence in the early 1990’s of the field of Whiteness Studies—in

the United States, South Africa, and throughout the world.  In addition to South African art his30 -

torian Liese van der Watt, South African scholar Melissa Steyn also locates English scholar

Richard Dryer’s analyses as pivotal to the growth of whiteness studies.  His analysis (1988) of 31

the representation of whiteness in Western visual culture caught the attention of academic dis-

courses on race. He pointed out that conventional approaches to whiteness practically necessitate

a lack of critical attention and articulated what is now a generally accepted fact in academic dis-

course: that white people dominate Western representation to a degree that their experiences are

persistently situated as both the norm and the ideal.  Whiteness studies scholarship developed 32

and grew to expose the extent to which racial hierarchies exist to serve the convenience, comfort,

and superiority of whites on every possible psychological and structural level.  In “Rehabilitat33 -

ing a Whiteness Disgraced: Afrikaner White Talk in Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2004), Steyn

concluded that, in spite of how white people occupy and perceive their social movements and

spaces as neutral and individually determined, whiteness has definite cultural content comprised

of pervasive systems and structures—institutional and cultural that inform white people’s self-

understanding.  Apartheid is certainly among the most dire and extreme examples of the insis34 -

tence on catering to the advantage of white people at the cost of all other racialized groups. Much

! Steyn, “Rehabilitating a Whiteness Disgraced: Afrikaner White Talk in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” 30

144! Ibid.31

! Ibid.32

! Ibid.33

! Ibid.34

!16

of the initial literature on whiteness dealt with U.S. race relations, but the recently published Re-

Orienting Whiteness (2009), edited by Boucher, Carey, and Ellinghaus, demonstrates the need to

make analyses of whiteness temporally and spatially specific, while understanding it within a

transnational framework and with its various power structures fully accounted for. The editors of

Re-Orienting Whiteness write: “Critical studies of whiteness can only be warranted if the oppres-

sion and violence it creates, its effects on those who lost the most from its operations, remains

clearly and explicitly at the center of such endeavors.”  35

Fuckface (Kendell Geers) (2007) (Fig. 3) is a black and white photograph ruled by un-

mistakably literal and conceptual oppositions. It features the artist staring steadily back at the

viewer, his face equally divided into black and white by a repeated typographical design of the

word “Fuck,” which at a distance evokes face painting associated with “primitive” tribal design

and practice. Williamson notes that “under the Apartheid government, Geers’ state-issued photo

identification card carried the word White, affirming his race,” and that this binary logic equally

governs this work’s visual division of black and white.  Here, the artist literally dons these vis36 -

ual markers in a composition that formally mirrors Bloody Hell. Although created twenty-one

years later, Fuckface (Kendell Geers) is another blatant, conceptual confrontation with his viewer

that raises more questions than provides answers. Similarly, the more contemporary photograph

has a stark black background devoid of concrete time or space and is equally tightly cropped so

that only the tops of Geers’s bare shoulders are visible. The three-quarter angle and slightly ab-

stracted pattern makes immediately identifying the word “fuck” difficult.

! Leigh Boucher, et al., eds. introduction to Re-Orienting Whiteness (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009), 11. 35

! Williamson, South African Art Now, 248.36

!17

Geers describes “fuck” as an expression of simultaneous repulsion and attraction that

runs throughout his work; it is a phrase that can be used negatively or positively. This intentional

double-speak complicates the seemingly clear cut opposition between white and black, and

forces the viewer to contend with racialized overtones. Geers’s identity is “caught” between Eu-

rope and Africa, which can be interpreted as representing “white” and “black.” Insistent on his

identity as an African, despite his white skin and Dutch heritage that are read as contradictory to

“African” identity, he conflates and subverts expectations of what it means to be a white South

African. By wearing both colors, he brings to the surface—literally and conceptually—the exis-

tence of what seems to be a paradox—black and white—on a single body. Seen as a counterpart

to Bloody Hell, a contradictory act of cleansing with blood and “rebirth” of Geers’s identity,

Fuckface is a literal embodiment and performance of the false dichotomies that rule race, the

policies of Apartheid, and hegemonic power more broadly. By photographing his own face,

Geers challenges his viewers with his unwavering stare into a self-consciousness and self-aware-

ness of their spatial and metaphysical positions. In his autobiographical monograph Irrespektiv

(2007), Geers shared with curator Jérôme Sans that “‘It was my experiences in the fight against

Apartheid that alerted me to the power of destabilization as a strategy. I am not interested in pas-

sive viewers . . . I try to create pieces in which the viewer has to accept responsibility for their

presence in the work of art . . . then the process becomes an active one.”  37

He further engages an active viewer by choosing “fuck,” a word with multiple possible

meanings, and then invoking it across two different iterations with a human skull counterpart,

made six years earlier, Fuckface (2005) (Fig. 4). This pair, which incorporates another layer of

! Ibid.37

!18

binary opposition between life and death, not only enunciates the multiple meanings of the word

“fuck” but more broadly forges a post-structural conception of language. Transposing Minh-ha’s

theories of knowledge, which similarly foreground the limits of always-partial representation and

the limitless potential of unfixed learning processes, arguably strengthens Geers’s foregrounding

of whiteness or “making whiteness strange,” in Dryer’s words. According to Minh-ha, the notion

of infinite progress affirms the idea that concrete social transformation is always active, and that

the infinite is what “undermines the very notion of (rational) progress.”  This serves as a clear 38

reminder that post-Apartheid is not an end point for racism and the normalization of white supe-

riority.

The medium of Fuckface (2005) is listed in the 2012 Haus der Kunst exhibition catalogue

as “spray paint on human skull,” a deceased African who was murdered by a gunshot behind the

ear. The word “Fuck” is similarly spray-painted onto the skull in the same black and white typo-

graphical text as Geers’s later Fuckface self-portrait. The skull makes clear reference to the

Western art historical tradition of the vanitas still life, which is meant to offer a moral message

on the inevitability of death and the meaninglessness of earthly life and material possessions.

Geers purchased the skull at a flea market in Brussels, his current home, presenting disturbing

evidence of how colonial imperialist consumption and production has perpetuated and trickled

into a contemporary context. The fact that Geers would have access to a commodified human

skull is indicative of its chilling late capitalist context and decisively foregrounds his position in

diaspora while still maintaining strong ties to his country of origin. Both of these works were

! Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Cotton and Iron” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cul38 -tural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991, 15

!19

made after his move to Brussels in 2000, and raise questions about conventional conceptions of

national “authenticity” while living in diaspora. Does his diasporic experience change the mean-

ing or relevance of his work to South Africa? Given that on multiple occasions Geers has resisted

his simple categorization as a South African artist whose work deals exclusively with South

African content,  I argue that this resistance lessens the need to rigidly distinguish works made 39

in diaspora. Like the markers of racial identity he seeks to destabilize, it would be inappropriate

to strictly uphold notions of national belonging while living in diaspora. At the same time, my

interpretation necessarily locates Geers’s art within a particular socio-historical framework and

reads it as deeply informed by a South African context. This does not serve as a totalizing gesture

that assumes a singularity of meaning in his work but rather seeks to discover the productive

ways he hopes to foreground whiteness and dislodge its power.

Geers’s mixture of the personal and the political in Fuckface opens up multiple possibili-

ties for meaning. The chillingly absent element from Fuckface is obviously the skull’s face, the

“personable and subjective aspect that is rendered mute as a result of the violence, suggested by

both the language and the object.”  The skull further references a Yoruba folktale that tells of a 40

man who came across a talking skull, but when he tried to share the marvel with the King, the

skull remained silent, resulting in the man’s death. This intersectionality of multiple narratives

and meanings within a single work speaks to the complex approach that Geers embeds within his

deceptively simple-looking conceptual works. Together, the two iterations of Fuckface produce a

seemingly endless number of paradoxes and dichotomies: life and death; black and white;

! van Der Watt, “Witnessing Trauma in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Question of Generational Re39 -sponsibility,” 35.! “Clive Kellner: Kendell Geers 1988 -- 2012.” http://www.hausderkunst.de/en/agenda/detail/kendell-40

geers-1988-2012-1/

!20

African and European; repulsion and attraction; primitive and contemporary; negative and posi-

tive; good and bad. By not offering an easy resolution to these polarizations, Geers illustrates

how structures of power inform the ways in which we come to know, categorize, and fix our-

selves, the Other, and the world at large. He does not allow for an easy or obvious consumption

of his work, reflecting his desire to actively engage the viewer, destabilize the status quo, and

address a theoretical concern with unhinging oppressive meanings of South African identity

while maintaining an awareness of his privilege. His conceptual approach highlights a relation-

ship to Minh-ha’s understanding that radical consciousness is the knowledge that representations

are simply representations of the human desire to represent. He refuses a rational teleology, and

deploys a constant shifting that for Minh-ha subverts the very idea of modern progress. Geers’s

challenge to and dialogue with his viewers works in tandem with these concerns by posing ques-

tions and foregrounding the “reality” of representations.  41

South African artist Candice Breitz (b. 1972) is also keenly aware of the limits, chal-

lenges, and potential of visual representation. She is perhaps best known for her elaborate pho-

tography and video installations that explore identity production through mass media sources.

Like Kendell Geers, she has created art since the 1990s that delves into race, representation, and

her position as a white South African artist. Her Rainbow Series (1996) (Figs. 5-17) inspired con-

troversy with its portrayals of race and representation. The series is made up of fourteen surreal,

collaged figures that are crafted into a unified form, despite drawing from disparate sources:

pornographic photography of white women and stereotypical tribal imagery of black women

! Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Cotton and Iron” in When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cul41 -tural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1991, 15.

!21

from South African ethnographic postcards. The process of photomontage and manipulation is

made apparent in their anatomically exaggerated and unrealistic joinings that prompt close in-

spection. Such a strategy establishes a visual language ruled by differential value, and creates an

uneasy intersection of race and gender. Playing with the signifiers of white and black bodies as

depicted by mass media is especially charged with meaning given its politically pertinent title,

Rainbow Series. This series was made two years after the official end of Apartheid, after the

artist left South Africa to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago after casting her

vote in the first democratic election in her native country. The oddly joined images are reminis-

cent of German Dada artist Hannah Höch’s photomontages. Significant connections exist be-

tween the two artists: Hannah Höch is known for her innovative critique of mass media’s con-

struction of female identity during the rise of advertising and fashion photography and created a

series of photomontages in the late 1920s and early 1930s titled From an Ethnographic Museum,

which, like Breitz’s Rainbow Series, combines the photographs or clippings of white women’s

bodies with tribal masks or ethnographic photographs of black women. These works are typically

interpreted as critiques of Nazi policy of pure racial distinctions or a universalizing feminist ges-

ture that unites the female experience across racial backgrounds. Breitz’s Rainbow Series uncan-

nily imitates many formal aspects of Höch’s art, and both artists lived and worked as white sub-

jects in systems of extreme racial segregation.

Rainbow Series invokes questions of how the so-called Rainbow Nation might literally be

configured in its representation of women—both black and white. The results are not entirely

clear. The conflation of overtly sexualized, pornographic images of white women with the stereo-

typical and essentializing ethnographic postcard photographs of black women call into question

!22

the suddenly forged public discourses of “equality” translated to race and representation. An ear-

lier but related series of images, Ghost Series (1994–96) (Figs. 17-27), equally stirred these po-

larizing questions in viewers and critics. In Ghost Series Breitz used similar tourist postcard

source material that showed traditionally dressed black women in rural environs.  Rather than 42

splice discrete images together, Breitz applied White-Out to cover areas of the women’s bodies,

leaving their eyes, nose, mouths, clothing, jewelry, and the background visible. The figures are

left quite literally looking like ghosts, and similarly to Rainbow Series, these images perform a

sharp visual and metaphorical contrast between the stark White-Out and surrounding color. In

these images, it is difficult to discern possible meanings without consideration of their historical

context. With the recent official end of Apartheid as its political backdrop, Ghost Series was

meant to point to a Saidian-inspired logic in which the postcard source material ultimately re-

veals more about the whiteness that constructs its ideas of blackness than it does about the black

women depicted.  These problematic photographs firmly locate Africa in an unchanging, primi43 -

tive past free of signifiers of contemporary life. In an interview with Sue Williamson, Breitz is

directly asked if her background has garnered criticism that in whiting out the bodies of the

women, she perpetuates the thinking that reduced them to exotic symbols in the first place.  44

Breitz responds with a resounding “yes” and cites the controversy sparked by Ghost Series in

which people did not interpret the work as she intended: “I felt I was rendering legible—with

quite a literal gesture—the way in which the complexity of contemporary Africa is elided by im-

! Sue Williamson Interview: “CANDICE BREITZ.” Art in America 100, no. 9 (October 2012): 158-165. 42

Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed December 10, 2013)! Ibid., 163.43

! Ibid.44

!23

ages that suspend the continent and its subjects in the past.”  45

In spite of their apparent united political and artistic agendas, Candice Breitz and Kendell

Geers opposed each other at the center of an explosive post-Apartheid dialogue that partially

dealt with her work. This debate, in both form and content, illustrates the importance of Trinh

Minh-ha’s call for continual learning and knowing, which seeks to avoid fixing meaning that rad-

ical consciousness aims to maintain awareness of: representation is always partial. Controversy

first sparked in 1997 when Okwui Enwezor wrote his essay “Reframing the Black Subject: Ide-

ology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Art,” which was originally published in the

catalogue of a Norwegian exhibition, “Contemporary Art from South Africa.” Enwezor weaves a

complex and layered argument that takes white South African female artists to task for their con-

demnable depiction of the black female body. In particular, Enwezor chastises Breitz’s Rainbow

Series and, to a lesser degree, Ghost Series. Enwezor “refutes the implied racial sisterhood he

detects in her work. ‘White women,’ he points out, ‘metaphorically sodomized and pornographi-

cized black women by using their bodies as functional objects of labour, as domestic workers, as

maids and nannies and wet nurses.’”  46

His argument essentially prompted the politically charged, post-Apartheid questions of

who, in post-Apartheid, decolonizing South Africa, has the right to represent whom?  Enwezor 47

contends that a white female artist who merges black and white female bodies only repeats the

dynamic of whiteness as the voice of reality and truth, whereas the black subject, by contrast, is

! Ibid.45

! eds. Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz, Grey Areas: Representation, Identity, and Politics in Con46 -temporary South African Art (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, 1999), 19! Ibid., 2647

!24

silenced and muted.  Despite his strongly worded criticisms, he acknowledges potentially prob48 -

lematic ramifications inherent to his line of questioning—the fetishization of identity as exclu-

sively belonging to a particular group and the reinforcement of the “wounded black subject” dis-

placed by white, European power who needs protection and advocacy. Enwezor concludes his

essay with a skepticism that there is any clear or possible solution to the problems raised: “I

question the wisdom of enacting any kind of representational corrective or hoping for such reso-

lution. For identity must never be turned into a copyright, an antimony in which ethnicity

through group reckoning stages its authenticity and retains exclusive user rights of its images.”  49

In a review titled “Dangers Inherent in Foreign Curating,” Kendell Geers responded to

the Norwegian exhibition and Enwezor’s catalogue essay. Geers sets out to articulate his agree-

ment with Enwezor and concludes that artists like Pippa Skotnes, Lien Botha, and Candice Breitz

are “essentially racist” and “patronizing” in what he calls “their exploitation of the perceived si-

lence of black Africans by speaking on their behalf.”  Breitz, Botha, and Skotnes, all featured in 50

the exhibition, responded to this strongly worded accusation with open e-mail letters that aimed

to address the issues raised by Geers in myriad ways.  An email debate quickly began, which 51

involved 42 participants based in South Africa and internationally. It dealt with the specific texts

and the implications these had for the production of contemporary art and with the question of

how representations “should” look.  As a well-known provocateur Geers’s reactionary and pre52 -

! Ibid., 3848

! Ibid, 3949

! Ibid, 30750

! Ibid.51

! Ibid., 30752

!25

scriptive response is surprising.

Breitz followed the publication of an abridged version of her letter in the Mail &

Guardian with a longer essay, “Some Dangers Inherent in Wearing Too Many Hats: A Response

to Kendell Geers,” which was also distributed via e-mail.  She questioned his problematic con53 -

flict of interests in his simultaneously occurring roles of artist and art critic, as well as those of

curator and consultant to a corporate collection.  She objected to the moral propriety and pre54 -

scriptive ways in which Enwezor established who may use which images and to what end.  She 55

claims that while Enwezor’s essay begins strongly, his arguments soon wobble when he makes

logical leaps that confound “this structure of racist fantasy and desire onto the work of several

contemporary ‘white artists.’”  Further, she criticizes his assumption that “artistic intention is 56

easily retrievable from the art work by the critic/historian”  and his conflation of artistic inten57 -

tion, as perceived by the critic/historian, with the “meaning of the art work.”  The explosive 58

controversy led to crucial discussions about the nature of race, whiteness, representation, and

politics at the dawn of the radical and problematic post-Apartheid era. Such a forceful response

is to be expected from a debate that strikes to the core of issues that pervade the violent and pro-

foundly personal experience of Apartheid. And yet, such seemingly strongly opposed viewpoints

might lead to the deceptive conclusion that there is one clear and “correct” approach to visualiz-

ing the post-Apartheid body politic in a productive, self-aware, and critical manner. Rather, the

! Ibid.53

! eds. Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz, Grey Areas: Representation, Identity, and Politics in Con54 -temporary South African Art (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, 1999), 20! Ibid, 2055

! Ibid.56

! Ibid.57

! Ibid.58

!26

fiercely articulated poles of this debate, and everything in between, are indicative of the need for

continuous discussion that does not assume a definitive or absolutely defined end. Certainly

well-founded criticism should not be abandoned in favor of an “everything goes” solution, but to

discount an artist’s credibility or to blatantly call her racist because her work causes significant

or uncomfortable ripples in the art world falls into a dangerous trap. Art that deals with race and

representation, especially the problematic of whiteness in post-Apartheid South Africa, will nec-

essarily divide its viewers. That is the power of a system structured on the basis of fundamentally

differential value; binary logic depends on its ability to set ideas or people in opposition to each

other. The type of work that triggers its audiences in this way forces the viewer to self-reflexively

consider how that response might rest on fixed or problematic preconceptions of art, race, or rep-

resentation. In the specific context of post-Apartheid South Africa, this forced contemplation is a

necessary affront to the denial common to the multicultural vision promoted by the “Rainbow

Nation” logic.

In an attempt to take an active role in the controversy surrounding her work, Candice

Breitz and Brenda Atkinson put out a call on June 30, 1997, for contributions to their book Grey

Areas: Representation, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary South African Art, which was

eventually published in 1999. As Liese van der Watt noted, a white South African artist’s perfor-

mative response, rather than simply documentary or representational, is crucial to the efficacy of

that artist’s confrontation with the trauma of Apartheid’s history and its continued effects.  She 59

characterizes this performative gesture as actively trying to engage with and work through their

! van Der Watt, “Witnessing Trauma in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Question of Generational Re59 -sponsibility,” 26.

!27

inherited sordid legacy.  Breitz’s involvement in the publication of this anthology could be read 60

as such an attempt. Atkinson and Breitz aimed to compile a collection of writings that document

debates around cultural production that marked South Africa’s political landscape from a range

of locally and internationally based contributors who engage the controversial issue of imaging

identity in South African artistic production.  They hoped to offer a diversity of perspectives 61

that will develop further dialogue and will remain pertinent to an ongoing and productive critical

debate in post-Apartheid, and future, moments.  Unfortunately, both Geers and Enwezor refused 62

them permission to publish their writings in Grey Areas, which may not signify mal intent per se

but rather elucidates the difficulty in navigating the political nuances of discursive debate. The

polarized opinions on the use of the black female body in art has fundamentally framed the cri-

tique of Breitz’s work, perhaps resulting in interpretations predicated on a false dichotomy. It

seems that the binaries Breitz critically enacts in her Rainbow Series aesthetic are performed in

her works’ reception, which only highlights the absolute importance of both her conceptual inter-

rogations and a critical theory of race that rigorously examines whiteness. While the scope and

depth of this debate is much larger and more complex than is possible to describe here, the basic

arguments from the directly involved parties bring crucial context and deeper understanding of

the development of race, representation, and whiteness in post-Apartheid art.

Despite their history of complication and opposition, the art of Candice Breitz and

Kendell Geers communicates a strong commitment to the unrelenting interrogation of how their

! Ibid.60

! eds. Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz, Grey Areas: Representation, Identity, and Politics in Con61 -temporary South African Art (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, 1999)! Ibid.62

!28

own positionality is entangled with oppressive structures of power, and how visual and concep-

tual languages can subvert or reify the power they aim to confront. The 1997 debate reveals the

ways in which intention and reception of meaning are often necessarily framed in polarized

terms by critics, art historians, and viewers. What follows, then, is the need for the deployment of

a critical analytics of race that is equipped to theorize and criticize images that deal with notions

of blackness and whiteness specific to the multi-dimensional contexts of contemporary South

Africa. While the exact and thorough development of one such framework is beyond the scope of

this paper, bringing together diverse approaches to representation, knowledge, and whiteness

helps to enhance a richer understanding of Breitz’s and Geers’s art. More recently, Candice Bre-

itz’s single-video installation and subsequent production stills, Extra (2011), is exemplary of how

her contemporary work suggests a definitively “performative” response, and thus, per van der

Watt’s view, holds the possibility for a more politically transformative result. Extra can be best

understood against the matrix of complex factors evidenced by the controversy caused by the

much earlier work Ghost Series and Rainbow Series. Ghost Series was the earliest work featured

with Extra at Breitz’s 2012 Standard Bank Gallery exhibition in Johannesburg.

For Extra (2011), Breitz produced a series of photographs and a single channel video in-

stallation showing the artist inserted into a variety of scenes from Generations, South Africa’s

most popular soap opera, which first aired in 1994 and features an all-black cast. This work was

commissioned by the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg and the Iziko South African Na-

tional Gallery in Cape Town for a 2012 exhibition of Breitz’s work—the first in her native South

Africa since living in diaspora for the past twenty-one years. She was invited to make a work that

reflected on contemporary South Africa, a task the artist found both “exciting and

!29

intimidating.”  The commission that resulted in Extra necessarily foregrounded Breitz’s experi63 -

ences in diaspora: “Having lived away from South Africa since 1994, I was apprehensive about

whether I would be able to meaningfully engage what is a very complex context from a some-

what removed vantage point. My instinct from the outset was that the work would need—in

some way—to have built into it an acknowledgement of my externality, of my outsider status,”  64

notes Breitz to Sue Williamson.

Generations first aired the same year that Apartheid officially ended and Breitz left to

pursue her Masters degree at the University of Chicago. The end of Apartheid prompted the

South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) to make fundamental changes and radically

reconsider its function as the mouthpiece of the Apartheid government.  In an attempt to address 65

a broader audience, the SABC began to use the complete range of eleven languages spoken in

South Africa, and the creation of Generations fulfilled its desire to air “something aspirational,

something that would make suitable viewing for the emerging black middle class of the new

South Africa.”  Generations portrays the daily ordeals of two rival advertising agencies, one 66

owned by a Xhosa family and the other by a Zulu family.  After the cast finished a shoot for 67

broadcast purposes, Breitz worked with the cast and crew to insert herself into the mise en scène,

and the scene was shot once more, with the actors told to ignore her as best they could despite

! Sue Williamson Interview “CANDICE BREITZ.” Art in America 100, no. 9 (October 2012): 158-165. 63

Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost, 164! Ibid., 16464

! Ibid., 16365

! Ibid., 16466

! Ibid., 16467

!30

the subtle and obvious ways she was incorporated.  68

The photographs depict Breitz as an extra whose task, like extras on any TV set, is to

remain a background player and “not be noticed or distract attention from the primary plot.”  69

Obviously, by virtue of her physical placement and the color of her skin, her presence has the

exact opposite effect. As Breitz observes in response to the title of a local press story, “The White

Elephant in the Room”: “Whiteness is very much the elephant in the room in contemporary

South Africa; that which is not spoken about terribly much but nevertheless exerts an influence

that is unavoidable at best, obstructive at worst.”  Despite her simultaneously amusing and 70

awkward intermingling in the various mise en scène, she seemingly goes unnoticed by the cast.

Rather than fill the role of a “naturalistic extra,” Breitz didn’t want to occupy a single position,

both literally and figuratively. The still photographs depict her in a variety of positions, ranging

from being given a piggy-back ride by one of the characters (Fig. 25), sitting cross-legged front

and center on a table surrounded by the cast, to being out of sight save for her hand resting on the

shoulder of an actress (Fig. 1), sitting barely noticeable on the periphery of a scene, or with her

legs resting on the couch between two characters engaged in conversation (Fig. 30). Aside from

her abrupt or subtle physical interjections, the sets otherwise appear normal. This diversity con-

stitutes her desire to defer the fixing of meaning or conclusions and rather to offer a productive

range of possibilities; she came to understand the set of Generations as a microcosm of broader

South African social dynamics.  “There are moments when I seem to participate and moments 71

! Kerr Houston. “Absent Presence: Candice Breitz’s Extra,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 68

32.1 2013): 50-60. Access given by author himself.! Ibid., 16469

! Ibid.70

! Ibid.71

!31

when I am an obstacle, an obstruction, inhibiting what would otherwise be a relatively straight-

forward narrative. At other times I look on almost melancholically or voyeuristically from the

background as if longing to be a part of something it’s hard to interject oneself into,”  Breitz 72

notes. This physical and metaphorical variety in position can further be understood in terms of

Minh-ha’s notion that the process of constantly relearning offers the possibility for subversive

change. Breitz prompts the viewer to attempt the conventions of narrative, cohesion, and contex-

tualization with the soap opera’s familiar visual cues. By not allowing a cohesive relationship

between her physical positionings, Breitz actively challenges us to consider why her presence

stands out: is it her unexplained placement in the center of a scene that seemingly goes unno-

ticed, or is it her skin color?

Breitz’s insertion into Generations in particular allows its broader South African social

implications. Her role as an unusual extra in the country’s most famous soap opera does not iso-

late this work in the traditionally cloistered realm of “high art.” As a work that aims to consider

the artist’s positionality as a white South African artist, the incitement of questions is invigorated

by the photographs’ widely accessible context of the Generations set. Her engagement with Gen-

erations marks a profound revisiting that allows her to take up delicate and complex lines of in-

quiry without the assumption that she can offer straightforward answers. Rather, she aims to em-

phasize the viewer’s role in drawing his or her own conclusions.  I contend that her intention to 73

critically raise questions without providing decisive answers is accomplished in Extra. Her phys-

ical positions and skin tone signify her extra-diegetic awkwardness and beg the question of what

! Ibid.72! Ibid, 165.73

!32

“improving” or “normalizing” her relationship to the cast of Generations would look like. On the

one hand, for the viewer to feel uncomfortable and wish for Breitz to take on an integrated and

balanced role highlights problematic implications. The “solution” to experiencing discomfort

should not be the invocation of the Rainbow Nation ethos that might picture a romanticized and

successful overhaul of South African race relations. Breitz truthfully honors her position not only

as a white South African but as one who has lived in diaspora for nearly twenty years. She is able

to take every measure possible to honestly, critically, and meaningfully engage with the problem-

atic of whiteness in a post-Apartheid context.

The meaning her medium imparts on the work is crucial. By using South Africa’s most

popular soap opera as her context, she manages to comment on how popular representation

deeply informs conceptions of race and points more broadly to the incredible contemporary per-

tinence of developing a critical understanding of whiteness. Because some of her best-known

work deals with popular Western media culture and its role in the construction of identity, Extra

is not ostracized from the rest of her oeuvre. In 2005, she asserted that “there is no point in imag-

ining an escape from the nondescript cultural landscape that has been mapped for us by Holly-

wood, MTV, and CNN. Rather, it is necessary to invade the operating system that designed the

landscape—to inject oneself into the mainstream media as a viral presence.”  It is thus not sur74 -

prising that Breitz’s initial idea was for five of the re-shot scenes to appear in five consecutive

broadcast episodes of Generations over the course of a week.  The SABC was hesitant to con75 -

fuse viewers and potentially alienate advertisers, which shifted Extra’s potential public art status

! Kerr Houston. “Absent Presence: Candice Breitz’s Extra,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 74

32.1 2013): 50-60. page 53. Access given by author himself.! Ibid., 5375

!33

to that of a more traditional museum installation. Had the SABC allowed Breitz’s public media

intervention, the possibility for “making whiteness strange” in a performative, and not purely

representational, way would have perhaps been more profound. In spite of its conventional mode

of artistic display, Extra manages to render the platform of Generations as simultaneously famil-

iar and estranging. It lacks its opening sequence and advertisements that change its rhythm, and

it is isolated from preceding or subsequent episodes.  Generations is rendered strange and dislo76 -

cated from its formal conventions, which can be analyzed through art historian Kerr Houston’s

understanding of Stuart Hall’s terms, where “the dominant code gives way to an opposition code,

within an alternative framework of reference.”  In destabilizing the familiar formal elements of 77

a massively popular television show, Extra deconstructs the show and its genre, which reveals

how both rely on otherwise transparent conventions.  78

By challenging the very ways in which we come to learn and know, these artists offer a

new mode of thinking that relates to Minh-ha’s idea of radical consciousness and explicit en-

gagement with the viewer; one that meets the demands of complex contemporary thought based

in postmodern and postcolonial understandings. Using distinct modes of photography, video,

self-portraiture, and conceptual found object sculpture, both artists forge their own way to re-

spond to Apartheid’s past by insistently visualizing whiteness and what that identity means in the

present. Drawing from van der Watt’s interpretation of a confrontation with whiteness, their per-

sistent engagement with these interwoven problematics can be read as enacting a performative,

rather than simply commemorative, function of art that could lead to change. While they risk the

! Ibid., 5476

! Ibid., 5577

! Ibid.78

!34

reification of their privileged positions, I conclude that instead their work successfully fore-

grounds their necessary exploration into their identities in a post-Apartheid context. Understood

through literature on critical theories of whiteness, representation, identity, and knowledge, their

contributions to a more complex imaging and theorization of what studies of whiteness can offer

is brought into sharp relief. As a direct affront to the way criticisms of race and representation are

so often plagued by knee-jerk, binary thought, which in itself mimics and perpetuates the oppres-

sive logic of Apartheid and racism, Minh-ha’s framework effectively unhinges fixed notions of

art, identity, social order, and political leanings, opening up regimes of power, truth, and repre-

sentation to potential changes.

!!

!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!

!35

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!Steyn, Melissa. “Rehabilitating a Whiteness Disgraced: Afrikaner White Talk in Post-Apartheid

!37

South Africa.” Communication Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2004): 143-169.

!van Der Watt, Liese. “Witnessing Trauma in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Question of Gen-

erational Responsibility.” African Arts 38 (2005): 26-35.

!Williamson, Sue. “CANDICE BREITZ.” Art in America 100, no. 9 (October 2012): 158-165.

Accessed December 13, 2013.

!—South African Art Now. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

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!38

! Figure 1 Kendell Geers Title Withheld (Kendell Geers) 1968-? Performance/Situation Work will be auctioned upon the death of the artist !!!!!!!

!39

! Figure 2 Kendell Geers Bloody Hell 1990 !

!40

! Figure 2 Kendell Geers Self Portrait 1995 Found object (original destroyed on TWA Flight 800) 5.5 x 11.6 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!41

! Figure 3 Kendell Geers Fuckface (Kendell Geers) 2007 C-print 150 x 111 cm !!!!

!42

! Figure 4 Kendell Geers Fuckface 2005 Spray paint on human skull !!

!43

! Figure 5 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #1 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!44

! Figure 6 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #2 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!

!45

! Figure 7 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #3 1996 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!46

! Figure 8 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #4 1996 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!

!47

! Figure 9 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #5 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!48

! Figure 10 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #6 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!

!49

! Figure 11 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #7 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!

!50

! Figure 12 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #8 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!51

! Figure 13 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #9 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!52

! Figure 14 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #10 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!

!53

! Figure 15 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #11 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!

!54

! Figure 16 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #12 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!55

! Figure 17 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #13 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!56

! Figure 18 Candice Breitz Rainbow Series #14 1996 Cibachrome Photograph 152.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!

!57

! Figure 19 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #1 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 101.5 cm x 68.5 cm !!!!!!!!

!58

! Figure 20 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #2 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 101.5 cm x 68.5 cm !!!!!!!!

!59

! Figure 21 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #3 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 68.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!! !!

!60

! Figure 22 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #4 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 101.5 cm x 68.5 cm !!!!!!!!

!61

! Figure 23 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #5 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 68.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!62

! Figure 24 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #6 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 101.5 cm x 68.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!

!63

! Figure 25 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #7 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 68.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!64

! Figure 26 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #8 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 68.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!65

! Figure 27 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #9 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 68.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!66

! Figure 28 Candice Breitz Ghost Series #10 1994-6 Chromogenic Print 68.5 cm x 101.5 cm !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!67

! Figure 29 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!68

! Figure 30 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!69

! Figure 31 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !

! Figure 32 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!

!70

! Figure 33 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !

! Figure 34 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!!

!71

! Figure 35 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!72

! Figure 36 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!73

! Figure 37 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!74

! Figure 38 Candice Breitz Extra 2011 !!!!!!