Jane Alexander at the SANG
by Sue Williamson
Now at its final stop on the 2002 DaimlerChrysler Award for Sculpture route, winner Jane Alexander's haunting work fills three interleading galleries of the South African National Gallery with sculptures and photographic collages.
Alexander is the only South African artist with work illustrated in The Oxford History of Western Art (OUP 2000, ed. Martin Kemp). For the viewer, the passage through this exhibition provides an in depth experience of the work of this most notable of South African sculptors over the past five years. Newly returned from their sojourn around Germany and the United States as stars of 'The Short Century' exhibition, The Butcher Boys, as chilling as ever, have been included and sit like gruesome guards on the right, as one enters. In this room, the walls are taken up with elongated photographic prints from the African Adventure series.
In the second room, the Bom Boys, last seen in Cape Town at the Irma Stern Museum some years ago, seem smaller and even more isolated now on their game board of concrete slabs in the centre of the large high ceilinged gallery. The greyish, stunted child-sized figures with their animal masks were informed by Alexander's daily experience of the street children of Long Street, the pawns of a society which has failed to accommodate them.
It is in the third gallery that local viewers will find the new work specially made for the DaimlerChrysler show, a large and many faceted installation entitled African Adventure. In the excellent catalogue which accompanies the show, the installation is shown in the British Officers' Mess of the Cape Town Castle, mounted there especially for the purposes of photography. It seems an appropriate setting for what can be read as a somewhat bleak post-colonial panorama.
In her charged landscape, Alexander's tableau sets out the ambiguous creatures a modern day traveller through South Africa might expect to encounter: Everyman, the worker, his waist wrapped with ropes attached to sickles, pangas - knives used to cut sugarcane - and toy tractors; a boy, dressed as businessman in suit, hat and spectacles; seated on a stool, a girl with an antelope mask, a gold and diamond ring standing proud between the horns and no hands; a round eared mongrel with a jackal skin flung over his back; and, standing on a red oil drum, leaning forward slightly to make a point, an orator with the neat head of a young baboon.
Three more figures - the animal masked street children-sized Bom Boys - now in suits, stand on boxes of explosives on one side, surveying the scene. The whole is set out on a carpet of red earth, raising questions of ownership of the land. Disturbing and essential viewing.
Opens: April 26
Closes: July 27
South African National Gallery, Government Avenue, Company Gardens, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 481-3823 from 8:30am-1pm
Fax: (021) 461 0045
Email: ebedford@iziko.org.za
Website: www.museums.org.za/sang
Hours: Tues - Sun 10am - 5pm
