Jane Alexander (Artist research)
Artist research:
Name: Jane Alexander
Where are they from and where are they now:
born 1959 in Johannesburg, South Africa
South African artist and sculptor
Growing up, she was not too aware of all the political issues that surrounded her, but upon the time she entered university and moved to Braamfontein she became more aware of the social and political issues that were present in South Africa. Her interest in these issues influenced her future art pieces. (SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME)
Jane Alexander's works revolve around apartheid, history and identity. Under the broader umbrella of the term 'protest art' hers is that of resistance, imbued with deep political and social understanding.
Shifting from the suburb of Johannesburg to the urban space of Witwatersrand was a major change for her. In urban spaces, brutality was more apparent, resistance was more potent. The amount of knowledge and information and the resultant fear one is exposed to in urban spaces is much more imposing. Though she never directly contributed to the Resistance Movement, she became aware of the students' underground movements and organizations and about South Africa's political situation.
Born in Johannesburg in 1959, she witnessed a South Africa under British colonization fractured with racial inequity, repression, violence and struggle for freedom. The decade of the 50s saw increasingly repressive laws against the black people of South Africa. This decade was marked by the Population Registration Act (1950) that categorized people into three separate racial groups- black, white and coloured. A fourth group- Asian- was added later. From 1952 the black people were required to carry passes, the absence of which meant criminal offence. Next year, the Separate Amenities Law imposed apartheid- allotting separate zones for nonwhite people in public institutions, places and transportations- sometimes denying them access to any of the above, thus confining their movement to specific areas. With laws that refused to grant the minimum human rights to the black people, resistance movements acquired momentum.
The situation worsened in the 60s. During this period, apartheid transformed into a separate development policy that divided the black population into ethnic nations with separate homelands thus excluding them from the South African politics and alienating them within their own country. The first year of the decade saw the Sharpeville massacre when during an anti-pass campaign police killed a number of campaigners.
Artwork (for each relevant piece):
1. Name of work: The Butcher Boys,
What is it, and what is it made of:
The Butcher Boys is a sculpture of three men sitting on a bench that have peculiar appearances made out of plaster.
(1985/86)
three life size, oil painted plaster figures with animal horn and bone details, seated on a bench.
The work consists of three lifesize humanoid beasts with powdery skin, black eyes, broken horns, and no mouths sitting on a bench. The beasts are devoid of their outside senses - their ears are nothing more than deep gorges in their heads and their mouths are missing, appearing to be covered with thick roughened skin.
Alexander creates her figures first in plaster and then sometimes casts them in fiberglass before completing them with oil paint. In her early works she incorporated found objects like horns and bones into the figures. More recently she has utilised a wide range of found or commissioned clothing, shoes and other objects to dress and accessorise the figures.
Image:
What does it mean/represent:
her response to the state of emergency in South Africa in the late 1980s. She creates sculptures, installations, and photomontages which are based on her own perceptions of actual events, people, or issues that occur in the world around her. Most of her pieces are based and influenced on the political and social overview of South Africa
The piece represents the bestiality in human disturbance and violence.
Her figures are characterised by their mixture of human and non-human elements and a disquieting presence.
The human figures in Alexander's works are rendered with extreme realism, which makes the distortions that much more gruesome. She takes body casts and the figures are life size as well. The wounded and distorted figures disturb the sanctity of the human body and their right to completeness. The suffering of the nation is communicated through and contained by the violated human body.
The men, women, children and creatures in Jane Alexander's sculptures are life sized and they share the real space occupied by the viewer/s. Yet they have a spectral presence within that space. Exposed to everybody's eyes with all their deformities, wounds and pain they are severely closed within themselves. They are part of a living history and they occupy the space as if silently enacting small tableaux for viewers. They tell their stories but refuse pity. One may ask how relevant are these sculptures, how relevant is the past. But the past is more often never over. It decides the present and moulds the future. Once put into a broader cultural context these sculptures cease to narrate the stories of the Apartheid only. The history of repression, systematic elimination of the so called 'Other' from the mainstream, racial and religious conflicts, gender discrimination, and violence are not relegated to the past. Jane Alexander's sculptures weave the narrative of the continuum of oppressor-oppressed in evolving forms.
Connection to culture:
The mix of culture and race is treated as different ‘species’
Connection to collonialism:
Adapting the hybridity principle to produce original insights into the postcolonial condition, moreover, her practice - like a mutant strand of art historical DNA that claims multiple parentage - demonstrates how fitting the grotesque is as a means of questioning once-familiar notions of "race."
Made in the mid-Eighties, the Butcher Boys were a response to the dehumanizing effects of Apartheid. The effects of power and domination over the individual is a major theme in Alexander’s work, and has carried through much of her work, from the state-sponsored terrorism of Apartheid through to colonial and post-colonial exploitation.
Critique/response to artwork:
In an article in the New York Times, Holland Cotter describes that "their bodies, white-skinned and muscular, are superb, but with suture lines running from navel to throat, also disturbing".[
"...Jane Alexander arrived at the humanimal during a crisis period of uncertainty and transition in South Africa - the state of emergency declared in 1985, when she created Butcher Boys as part of her graduate studies, was renewed each year up to 1990 - indicates the farsighted choices by which her sculptural practice has revived the grotesque as a counterdiscourse of our times.
However, Alexander’s work is notable for its absence of direct political signifiers –even her figures are mostly rendered in a powdery grey– leaving it with an ambiguous edge that remains open for interpretation.
Jane Alexander is) an accessory to a truth and a history which force her, even against her will, to think within the terms of a sick society Writer and art critic Simon Njami
But in their unlikely combination of human and inhuman natures, Alexander’s poetic monsters are simply messengers…the humanimal [sic] sends out warnings about the consequences of history, while also carrying future promise about what our fragile world may yet become. Kobena Mercer is professor of history of art and African American studies at Yale University
“The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life.“ -J. M. Coetzee
Alexander was well aware of the exceedingly disturbing elements in her works. While evaluating the works of this period she said, “I discovered that the more horrific my work, the more readily people looked at it.
Artist further/other work/development:
Other major sculptures and installations include Bom Boys (1998), which alludes to the displaced children living on Long Street in Cape Town in the 1990s,
and African Adventure (1999-2002), which references colonial residues around labour, migration and land. The same sarcasm is at play in her work African Adventures (1999-2002). The title suggests that the artist is looking at Africa as foreigners do. For them it is the other side of the modern urban civilization, the other side of the mirror. It is the land of national parks, safaris and adventures. Once the land of gold and diamonds that lured fortune seekers to risk their lives for the sake of the unknown, it is still the land of the exotic. Thus a continent rich with all its people, heritage, culture, history of repression and survival becomes a mere tourist spot. The work consists of thirteen figures arranged on a surface of red sand. The centre of this work is a pale skinned man with African features. Around his strapped hips farm and industrial tools and machines such as knives, sickles, toy trucks and tractors are attached which trail behind him. The figures that surround him are mutants, hybrid creatures from nightmare, immobile and isolated from each other and the viewer/s. Like all the mutant creatures in Alexander's work they act eerily like humans. The work contradicts what the title suggests. In the eyes of the outsiders Africa is the land of the exotics while the truth is exactly the opposite. It is a place where men become silent machines, half-men, half-beasts rule them and the country itself like the patch of arid red sand where no form of life can grow is bled to death.
These themes continue in later work:
The sacrifices of God are a troubled spirit 2002-2004,DANGER GEVAAR INGOZI (2004), Security2006, Security with traffic (influx control) 2007,Infantry 2008-10, Frontier with church 2012-13, and Nativitywith detail in polyester suits and industrial footwear
(“beyond safety”) 2013, 2016-tableaux concerning social organisation, borders, security, displacement, and faith.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Alexander_(artist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butcher_Boys
http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jane-alexander
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/who-is-jane-alexander
http://www.artnewsnviews.com/view-article.php?article=the-art-of-resistance-the-works-of-jane-alexander&iid=31&articleid=895
What I have learnt:
I am a hybrid
I could make myself out of materiality from different places (like the masks) – a hybrid version of myself
Keeping out any political signifiers – but still gets message across.
I noticed the mouths are shut/not existent maybe I could do that to represent that I have no place to talk about any of these cultures.
A lot more information on apartheid (READ and add to apartheid paragraph http://www.artnewsnviews.com/view-article.php?article=the-art-of-resistance-the-works-of-jane-alexander&iid=31&articleid=895
