Christian Nerf
Christian Nerf’s Polite Force is both an invitation and an intervention. The invitation: to offer small kindnesses to strangers. The intervention: to instruct volunteer participants in gestures of polite helpfulness for the general public. Dressed in T-shirts, caps, bulletproof vests, and occasional riot gear emblazoned with POLITE (the colours and typeface reminiscent of the South African Police Service uniform), the participants roam the streets or given setting in leaderless ‘units’, offering directions, advice, assistance and greetings. The performance, which was first staged in 2002 outside the World Trade Centre, Johannesburg, with the late artist Barend de Wet as the sole Force member, has been repeated numerous times since –
a sample of subsequent iterations include performances at Tufts University in Massachusetts (2004), in Central Park, New York City, with Kate Fowle (2005), and on Buitenkant Street, Cape Town, by children (2019). Its most recent iteration (2021) saw Dan Halter take Polite Force to the Beitbridge border crossing between Zimbabwe and South Africa, offering cool-drinks, shade, pleasantries and conversation to migrant workers, traders, border officials, smugglers, and citizens of both countries.
Of these, two performances have been held at A4, both during Christian Nerf’s residency in 2019, which included his Summer School for Children.
In addition to formalised Polite Force activations, individuals can don the work’s uniform and embody its values at any given time. One might say that Polite Force is an invitation, an intervention and an attitude.
It is also an archive –
Over the past two decades, Polite Force has accumulated a growing collection of related ephemera, of which A4 is custodian. An incidental history of the performance across time and place, as recalled in the digital inventory of the archive, is available to browse in A4's Special Collections. A selection of the physical archive, first unpacked in our Reading Room in 2021, was shown in A4’s booth at the 2022 Cape Town Art Fair to mark the project’s twentieth year.
b.1970, Johannesburg
A reluctance to category has defined much of Christian Nerf’s practice, as too has a dedication to rule-based experimentation. He is simultaneously a maker of structures and instructions and resistant to established constraints and institutional bureaucracies. This tension – between self-generated and socially expected boundaries – has come to characterise a seeming miscellany of actions, objects, and traces. “What threads, what bookends, what rules have been at work: what accommodates the freedom to play?” He asked in a process project, Archive as Terrarium | Part 3, at A4 Arts Foundation in 2019. “It’s easy to forget that to ‘play by one’s own rules’, one has to first go to the effort to grasp those rules that are already in play.” Collaboration (with people, plants and chance) has long offered Nerf a working logic, where artmaking is reconsidered as a learning exercise in pursuit of 'uncalled-for-newness'. Now in his ‘post-collaborative’ mode, he remains, as ever, hard to pin down – though his studio is no longer itinerant as it once was; the artist now a longstanding resident at Atlantic House. Automated drawings have since become central to his strategy of making, their mechanisms making them endlessly reproducible and shareable.