That South African art is in crisis hardly needs expounding. Two important international events, the Johannesburg Biennial and the Rugby World Cup, that took place in Johannesburg in 1995, when compared, illustrate some of the problems confronting art in South African art. The former attracted an unprecendented 5000 people to its opening, while the Cup Final attracted 62000 spectators with a conservative estimate of an additional 3,000,000 television viewers from South Africa alone.

The realization that art is not a priority for most South Africans is neither new nor profound. In fact, more people visit the Randburg waterfront on a Friday night than visited the Biennial during the entire three months that it was open. On the other hand, I can't blame them, personally prefering a good cup of coffee to attending another exhibition of bland, predictable art. Life is so much more interesting than art...

Modernism distilled into formalism has been the dominant language informing South African art production since the 1960s. This formalism, however, is not the 'hard' language that became known as Minimalism, but a 'soft' formalism perverted by sentimaent. Under isolation, taste, style, nostalgia, and sentiment developed into the primary criteria informing the production and assessment of art. Isolation later degenerated into xenophobia and by implication an ignorance of international developments in the language of art transformed into fundamental mistrust and rejection of the course that art history in many parts of the world was taking. The sentimental foundation that South African art was built upon became conducive to the proliferation of stereotypes, generalizations, and myths about the nature of art itself.

"Good " art was not judged according to international precedents, but according to the "morality" of the maker.

There is a fundamental difference between the 1970s generation of conceptual artists and the loose affiliation who were represented in the 1993 "Aperto". Where the former remained unavoidably bound to the principles of the formalist tradition they sought to escape, the later were cynical towards every transcendental, essentialist aspiration, whether it be expressed politically or culturally.

The majority of South African conceptual and installation artists confuse the recent international abandonment of form as simply another formalist style and have returned conceptually to the 1970s projects for easy solutions. Their works as a result remain preoccupied with aesthetics and formal material transformation. Without a stringent conceptual framework to work from, their work degenerates into a state of "monkey see, monkey do". The problem with contemporary South African art is that it has become too easy to formally emulate and at the same time there are far too few critics, dealers, curators, and collectors prepared to isolate and interrogate the work's conceptual framework.

There is a difference between finding a meaning for an object and finding an object to express a meaning. Contrary to popular myth, conceptual art is not the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Based in Johannesburg where he was born in 1968, Kendell Geers is among the most influential figures in the South African art world. He has been described as an anarchist, a con-artist, a no-gooder, all of which epithets he almost relishes. Truth being that, whatever he is called, Geers is also among the leading conceptual artists practising on the international scene today.

With representation in the biennials of Habana in 1994 and Venice in 1995, studio practise in both Africa and Europe where he has worked in residence in England and the south of France, Geers locates his work within the current trends in international contemporary art while drawing--and signing--on his immediate environment in South Africa.

Geers's work straddles the banks of the political and the apolitical, just as his art criticism threads the thin tight-rope of the controversial. Undoubtedly, Geers has led the battle to draw South African artists and audiences into an awareness of the hard edges of contemporary international practise, and sometimes this has earned scepticism and cynicism from both the art scene and the public. Yet Geers continues to live up to his calls by producing challenging work.

When he is on his money, Geers is able to plot his way into that rare location where meaning is possible and yet form is admirable. Most of his installations leave the viewer with  an inescapable feeling of discomfiture and exposure, a chilling discovery of complicity to which, often, there is an almost convulsive reaction. There is an element of the trendy, alright, yet there is an undeniable depth and urgency, and this is the strength of Mr Geers's work.