The Alexander technique
She’s a South African art superstar — if only she’d talk to her fans, writes Matthew Partridge
When she does choose to speak, her students and colleagues listen with a fierce, almost protective, loyalty
IT might sound naive, but I believe our internationally acclaimed artists should be as revered as our sport stars. They should be household names and role models for the youth, pointing the way forward for how we as South Africans see ourselves in the future.
From a certain perspective this doesn’t seem like such a long shot. After all, artists and athletes are both entertainers.
But let’s be honest, that’s not the way it works. Sports stars are often obliged to sign endless autographs for swarms of fans. They have a social responsibility to make appearances at functions and press conferences. Artists, on the other hand, have it different.
By the nature of the craft, artistic fame seems to bring with it the right to a natural kind of seclusion, with autograph-signing and public contact happening only in the rarefied space of book signings, if at all.
This is not a hard and fast rule, but artworld etiquette dictates a certain stuffy decorum, which reduces the frenzied screams of fans to the softened mumbles of aesthetic appreciation.
An example that seems to typify the reclusive, camera-shy artist is Jane Alexander. Next to William Kentridge, Alexander is perhaps the most famous living South African artist, best known for her menacing trio Butcher Boys, a sculpture of three animal-like figures that sits in the permanent collection of the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
Her work recently broke the record for South African sculpture sold at auction when her piece Untitled, made as a companion to Butcher Boys, fetched upwards of R5-million.
Yet while figures like Kentridge are instantly recognisable, if not necessarily immediately approachable, Alexander’s public profile is barely visible. What’s more, this has been cultivated by her active resistance to any kind of publicity. An example is her latest exhibition at the Stevenson Gallery in Joburg, which doesn’t have a title, instead going by the names of the two works on display, Survey: Cape of Good Hope and Infantry with Beast.
Alexander and the gallery chose to forgo the traditional opening night; instead the show just “opened” to the public, without the usual pomp and ceremony that an artist of Alexander’s calibre attracts.
A factor in this guardedness is Alexander’s genuine humility. A reserved, soft-spoken professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, she is notorious for keeping her opinions to herself. One of the advantages of this position is that when she does choose to speak, her students and colleagues listen with a fierce, almost protective, loyalty.
In a sense Alexander lets her work speak for itself. Yet to local audiences, this doesn’t help much because we get to see so little of it. The work on show in Joburg has already completed a tour of Europe and North America, coming most recently from the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, where it received rave reviews.
Yet in South Africa, Alexander still has a strangely low profile. The one consolation is her inimitable style. “I didn’t know she was still making art,” offered one punter at Stevenson Gallery, “but you can see her work instantly.” While many of the subtleties of Survey: Cape of Good Hope, a series of 54 altered photographs, might escape the viewer, her sculpture Infantry with Beast most acutely echoes the halfanimal half-human characteristics that defined Butcher Boys.
That work made visible the disquieting extent of apartheid violence. But in this sculpture there is something far less menacing.
The viewer is confronted by a series of 27 marching forms that have human bodies and the heads of wild dogs. Arranged in a phalanx, the figures are placed on a red carpet with a tiny dog-like creature or “beast” standing in front of the advancing column.
It is rare for such a sizable example of her work to come to the local gallery circuit; perhaps it has done so because the muchpublicised sale of Untitled has made it timeous for Alexander to show at home.
Yet this begs the vexed question of her participation in the local art world.
Alexander is one of our superstars, but her previous unwillingness to come out and play has forced local audiences to make do with fleeting, rarefied encounters with an artist whose oeuvre has the potential to challenge and deepen the imagination of a changing South Africa.