FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
IN his lyrical essay accompanying Jane Alexander’s exhibition (now at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg), Ivor Powell writes about the way technology has transformed life into an enhanced virtual-reality show.
This has served, on the one hand, to blur the boundaries between self and simulated experience, evoking a more immediate, almost skinless response to second-hand representations of reality.
Yet, on the other hand, the constant barrage of FX realism via CNN and the tools of cyberspace has reduced humanity to a state of virtual automatism — its essential humanness degraded; tragically disconnected from the symbols and emotions that propel lived
Alexander confronts this murky terrain. Her sensitivity to the conflicts and paradoxes of the human condition makes her work transcendent. Her agility in moving between and beyond the specifics of site and time makes her work soar.
Mention Alexander’s name and The Butcher Boys — her seminal work executed during the mid-1980s, encapsulating the brutality of an oppressive regime — comes instantly to mind. She has since moved into quieter but no less resonant realms, with her photomontages forming the umbilical cord between previous and current output.
The photomontages signify developments in her preoccupation with issues of value, identity, alienation and marginalisation. But while her sculptures occupy the iconic regions of art, her photomontages are personalised snippets of memory and reflection. They are shrines constructed in order to synthesise the “skins” of the past through a poignant process of reintegration.
In the Triumph over Capitalism series, for example, collective inheritance and personal memory coalesce into dream-like montages of fragmented yet related references. Throughout, the image of a boy recurs as both a visual and metaphoric refrain. In a separate — though strangely connected — vein to The Butcher Boys, he suggests the blurred boundaries of identification, between man and woman, man and beast, perpetrator and
Unmistakeably androgynous in appearance, his form derives from an old anatomy book — an obvious reference to the skin-sensitive societies of apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany. For Alexander the latter is a site of inherited memories — her father was the product of a mixed German- Jewish marriage — as well as a place of personal recollection.
In Triumph over Capitalism: fur Deutsche Geschichte, the boy is surrounded by images of memorabilia taken from the old Berlin museum. Yet he stands somewhere between the signs of the past — Nazi military uniforms and war-time mannequins — and symbols of progress — cranes and space ships.
The disembodied uniform and mannequins are shell-like faceless forms. The cranes appear similarly dislocated from any specific identity. They suggest a collective amnesia predicated on the desire to demolish the ghosts of the past under the rubble of progress.
The boy is witness to humankind’s efforts to sanitise, contain and ultimately erase history. But while his expression is confrontational, his body is utterly vulnerable in its nakedness.
Unlike The Butcher Boys, he does not represent rapacity and horror in a semi-human form. Instead, his androgynous presence injects a human element into a history of horror.
Yet just as he is male in identification yet female in demeanour, so too are The Butcher Boys neither man nor beast, yet both. This ambivalent identity reinforces the symbiotic relationship between oppressor and victim, and forms the thematic fulcrum of Alexander’s work.
For in contemplating the debasement of human value, Alexander simultaneously suggests that in the dark tunnel of history there is a glint of light. If horror has a human face, then surely so does hope.
Jane Alexander’s exhibition runs at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg until October 21