Fine art
Sue Williamson
`Breaking open the mind,” commented writer Andr Brink in the visitors book for Jane Alexander’s exhibition Bom Boys and Lucky Girls at the University of Cape Town Irma Stern Museum. “Shivers down my spine”, wrote someone else, and another: “Sleepless nights ahead.”
If the function of the artist is to cast an altered light or a different perspective on to life as we already know it, then Alexander fills this role. She always has. The eerie, disquieting figures of the Butcher Boys with their horned heads are arguably the most powerful artistic representations of the apartheid society of the Eighties.
In the mid-Nineties, the early work was followed by the alienated figures of the Integration Programme series, lifesize figures, sometimes hooded, set into disturbing tableaux. At the end of the decade, Alexander’s Boys have shrunk to child size, a scale initially more disarming, certainly more ambivalent.
Bom Boys and Harbinger, in the main gallery at the Irma Stern,is an installation, on a base of grey wood squares reminiscent of a game board, of nine Bom Boys and a strange little running animal with an ominous name skittering between them.
Each of the Bom Boys has been cast from the same mould and stands with the arms slightly away from the sides of the body, fingers extended, like an old fashioned shop window dummy used to sell schoolwear. This is not a representation of a healthy little body, however – the legs are a bit stunted, slightly bandy, the calves underdeveloped.
The “Bom boys” derive their name from a piece of graffiti seen by the artist on a wall on Cape Town’s Long Street, the gritty, bustling street where she lives. Alexander assumes it was the name of a gang, or an aspirant gang. But there is none of the street camraderie or the jostling, shoving interaction of the group in Bom Boys. Each figure is alone, standing stiffly, staring – if not blindfolded, or with covered face – straight ahead through glass eyes. To engage with this gaze, viewers at the Irma Stern are seen sinking on to the floor, to sit eye-level to eye-level, one to one, spending long minutes in contemplation of a small masked figure.
These masks might perhaps be seen as the equivalent of the animal horns of The Butcher Boys: at the same time a disguise and an expression of the psyche. Most children love getting into costume for a party or a play, and some of the masks of the Bom Boys are disconcertingly charming, almost cute, striking sharply on the memory chord of the uncomplicated childhood pleasures of dressing up. Adhered to the small grey faces of the Bom Boys, there can be no such reading. It is the playfulness of the masks which is at the heart of the disquiet provoked by the figures. For these masks are not donned by choice but through need. Denied an ordinary childhood, a Bom Boy is both persecutor and persecuted, alternately begging and threatening in order to stay alive. At the same time, Alexander’s work should not be read as simply about street children – the Bom Boys are symbolic of an entire dysfunctional society trying to recover from abuse.
Alexander does not care to comment directly on her own work – but in an interesting artistic practice, gives her sculptures their own history by composing photo montages in which individual pieces are placed in a constructed setting. The rabbit-masked figure is seen against a bridge of hurrying workers, a helicopter hovering overhead. Another Bom Boy is seen in close-up against a background of the graffiti-laden garden wall of a Cape Flats street scene.
And the role of the mythically named Harbinger? The precursor, the bringer of messages? The tone of the “sleepless nights ahead” comment suggests that Alexander’s message is one which warrants our urgent attention.
The exhibition closes on July 31