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Geers, Kendell

Having been a passionate opponent of apartheid in his home country of South Africa, Kendell Geers’s highly political, confrontational and often iconoclastic sculptures and installations examine power structures, social injustices, and establishment values. Monument (Fired Up) is a public work consisting of a bronze cast pile of old and discarded car tyres – each a different kind - with a gas flame spurting from the top. On the one hand it is reminiscent of an industrial chimney at a power plant or an oil refinery, while on the other it recalls Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture Column of the Infinite (1938) at Târgu Jiu in Romania. While Brancusi’s column commemorates the Romanian heroes of the First World War, Geers’s column is a monument to several antithetical things, at once utopian and dystopian. On the one hand it pays homage to the workers in the former coal mines of the Campine region and the Ford factory in Genk, thus connecting the industrial past of the region with its present. On the other hand it reminds us of our continuing reliance on oil, of the polluting effects of the motor industry, of accumulating material waste and of continuing toxic emissions into the atmosphere. Monument (Fired Up) can thus also be read in symbolic terms as a discredited beacon, and a warning light for skewed notions of ‘progress’ in the continuing industrial age. KG