Exhibit at South African Fort Comes Under Siege

As military strongholds go, Ft. Klapperkop has little to boast about. It is small and poorly situated and, since its opening 100 years ago today, has been of dubious strategic value.

But as powerful symbols go, the brick and brownstone garrison has few rivals in this erstwhile capital of the Transvaal Republic, one of the ill-fated independent states founded in the 1800s by white Afrikaner farmers.

Ft. Klapperkop was opened by Transvaal President Paul Kruger on the eve of the Boer War to ward off the pending British onslaught. Later, during the apartheid era, it became home to a monument honoring South African soldiers killed while serving the white minority regime.

This weekend, as festivities commemorate the fort’s centennial, the revered hilltop redoubt has become snagged in a tug of war between old and new South Africa that has sparked a European diplomatic tiff and raised troubling questions about this country’s newfound freedom of expression.

At the center of the fuss is a single word: guilty.

“I put the word out there, and it is up to the individual to interpret it,” said artist Kendell Geers, 29. “When people suddenly say, ‘You are talking about us,’ then obviously they have something to hide.”

Geers, an Afrikaner with a reputation for the unconventional and provocative, was invited last summer by Pretoria city officials to present a show at this weekend’s commemoration. His two-day “Guilty” exhibit, he later announced, would include a symbolic occupation and closing of the fort as well as a series of lectures and events examining the edifice itself, the Boer War and Afrikaans culture in post-apartheid South Africa and the age of truth and reconciliation.

“My negative space and positive space are social relations,” Geers said. “I am not going to create pretty pictures.”

But the self-critical theme caught so many people by surprise--and raised the hackles of so many Afrikaners interested in honoring, not disparaging, the past--that the City Council last week abruptly canceled Geers’ appearance.

“The city got so much flak that it had to withdraw,” said Lydia de Waal, the municipal director of museums and culture. “The whole [‘Guilty’] idea is opposed by Afrikaner cultural organizations, who went to war over it.”

City officials were not alone in getting cold feet. Radio Pretoria, an Afrikaans-language community station, dropped plans to broadcast from the fort Saturday and today after listeners took to the telephones to protest the Geers exhibit.

It didn’t matter, a station official said, that several Afrikaans cultural organizations were also hosting events at the fort, which on Saturday included people firing antique cannons, dressing in Boer War military uniforms and raising the flag of the Transvaal Republic.

“We don’t want to associate with Geers in any way. This wayward artist has completely left his roots,” said Jaap Diedericks, the station’s operations manager. “He craps all over the Afrikaner and his culture. We need to build up what we have. We are not in government anymore, so we can do just one thing, and that is strengthen our cultural roots.”

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The city’s cancellation came just days after one of Geers’ chief sponsors also yanked its support for the exhibit because the “Guilty” theme threatened to sour diplomatic relations a continent away.

The French Institute of South Africa, the cultural arm of the French Embassy, issued a statement Wednesday saying it would not participate “in an event susceptible of provoking controversy outside the artistic sphere.”

“The French Embassy wishes to emphasize that it was not in its intention to hurt whatsoever either the South African public or its European friends,” said Yves Lo-Pinto, spokesman for the embassy.

In the case of the French, the difficulty was not only Afrikaner outrage over the exhibit but German wrath as well.

The French backed out after the German ambassador to South Africa complained about Geers’ use of a photograph depicting German police officers in riot gear. The artist plastered the photo on invitations to the “Guilty” exhibit and on the Internet.

Geers took the snapshot two years ago in Berlin when President Nelson Mandela opened a South African art show that included some of Geers’ works, which are visible in the photograph. The leather-clad motorcycle cops, he said, were among Mandela’s security entourage.

“I don’t know why the German ambassador took umbrage,” Geers said. “It is a work of art. I am talking in abstract terms. I am not pointing fingers.”

Geers said he plans to defy Pretoria officials today and show up at the fort anyway for his planned occupation and closing of the stronghold. If he finds the gates closed and locked, Geers said, his art will have been completed for him.

“I see myself as a catalyst, and if people respond in a cataclysmic way, then I have succeeded,” said Geers, whose best-known work to date involved a Hustler centerfold.

“In my blurring between art and life, all of this controversy is the work of art,” the artist said. “The right wing fails to realize they are creating my work of art as we go along.”