Jane Alexander's 'African Adventure' - A New Perspective
by Maren Ziese
Part Two
I ended my query into the uniqueness and innovation of Jane Alexander's recent work 'African Adventure' by asking why it is that the artist is still viewed as a dead serious mistress of history, rather than a vigorous visionary with a tricky, experimental attitude. In arguing the latter option, I would like to dwell on the forward-looking, visionary aspect of 'African Adventure'. The artist discusses the notion of South Africa as "closed space" in this work. In an interview she explained her starting point for 'African Adventure' as follows: "I've been interested in trying to understand Africa because we were so cut off from it for all that time, and we didn't have access to anything. Now we have access to Africa and Africans." (5)
This statement touches on important cultural studies debates in South Africa, particularly those that question the South African idea of disconnectedness and dislocation. Some of the theories that have arisen out of this debate point out crossings, transitions and the permeable nature of national and international systems, where previously they were believed to have been separate, even under the ideologically polarised system of Apartheid. (6)
By presenting an open, limit transgressing, process-like work of art, Alexander presents a visionary comment on her environment. The artist presents South Africa as an "open space", and visualises its existence without separation and restricted movement. This contrasts greatly with the situation in her hometown, Cape Town. According to the artist, Cape Town is still very "colonial and still geographically divided according to the apartheid plan".
Through her strategies of connecting Alexander nonetheless manages to create a completely independent world or universe. In that imagined system her figures are emancipated from fixed and tied identities. The artist leaves behind the "politics of visibility" by producing media hybrids, fluid personages that are free to move between her various mediums. Where formerly her characters were painted grey and masked to avoid definition of a specific identity, to rid them of race as a visible sign, in 'African Adventure' they are somehow immaterial. The specific, concrete bodies, the specific places and the specific identities are no longer of importance within the work as a whole.
The endless intertextuality of her new work also makes for excess. According to the post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe, the aesthetics of excess are the basis for expressing "Africa under transformation". In 'African Adventure' Jane Alexander puts up a fight against spatial and social fixedness, discrimination and immobility, raising her voice instead for "fluid geographies". (7) She dissolves the stagnancy of her figures in recognisable contexts and leaves the specific place behind (transgresses the specific). By inventing her own space system, her own universe with her own mythology, Alexander challenges notions of margin and centre.
The artist's multiple, playful inversions of interior and exterior, as well as her transgressions of spatial limits which began with the surface of her original sculptures have been stretched to engulf the total contexts of her new work. Using soil from Bushmanland, for instance, Alexander then places this soil on a mess created with British Brick, the earthy deposits melting Europe and Africa into one.
'African Adventure' is a tricky, perky and mischievous work. It also exemplifies what Hanru Hanou demanded of new art, that it should search for and find new languages, new ways and methods to transmit their messages. Our worlds are changing so quickly due to the new technologies, Hanou wrote, that contemporary art should focus on variety, flexibility, fluidity, immateriality and cultural hybridity to successfully express our cultural zeitgeist. (8) Jane Alexander has answered this call in her recent shifts, the innovation and progress of her latest work proving that she is an artist to be reckoned with.
References:
(5) Garner, J., 'Boys, Girls and African Adventure', The Big Issue, April 2002, Issue 57, Vol. 6, pp. 22-23.
(6) For example: Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies, ed. Nuttall, S. and Michael, C. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2000.
(7) H�ller, C. and Mbembe, A., 'Cosmopolitics - Afrika in Bewegung', Hefte f�r Gegenwartskunst, Bd. 3, Heft 3, 2002, pp. 19-22.
(8) Hanou, H., 'Millennium, Globalisierung und Entropie - Neue Bedingungen f�r die Kunst', Kunstwelten im Dialog - Von Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart, ed. Scheps, M. and Dore, A. K�ln 1999, pp. 337-344.
Maren Ziese completed a Masters in Contemporary Art in Berlin and will undertake a PhD programme in African Studies/Museum Studies in New York. She worked at the South African National Gallery with Emma Bedford. Her thesis on Jane Alexander, which will be published soon, discusses concepts and theories of space in 'African Adventure' and outlines different approaches to Alexander's oeuvre.
Opens: April 26
Closes: July 27
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