Strauss & co - 15 March 2010, Cape Town

204 442 Jane Alexander Racework - in the event of an earthquake signed with artist’s initials and dated 99 fibreglass, acrylic paint, synthetic clay, found objects, cotton velvet, synthetic hair, clothing 97 by 133 by 91cm R800 000 – R1 000 000 PROVENANCE Die Kunskamer, 2002 EXHIBITED Jane Alexander. Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town. July, 1999 Sharing Exoticisms. Curated by Jean- Hubert Martin for the Fifth Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyons, France. September, 2000 Jane Alexander: DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Sculpture 2002. South African National Gallery, Cape Town, April-July 2003 LITERATURE: Lucy Alexander, “Bom Boys” and “Lucky Girls” , UCT Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, 1999. Paul Edmunds, ‘Jane Alexander at the Irma Stern Museum’. In Artthrob http:// www.arthrob.co.za/99july/listings.htm ‘Fifth Biennale of Contemporary Art in Lyons’. In Artthrob http://www.artthrob . co.za/00aug/listings-intl.html Jane Alexander: DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Sculpture 2002. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2002, illustrated in colour p71, p119 & 124. Racework – in the event of an earthquake , one of Jane Alexander’s most appealing and affecting sculptures, was made in response to Alexander’s visit to Tokyo, where she was invited to show the Bom Boys on the exhibition, Africa Africa at the Tobu Museum of Art in late 1998. Identical to each other, the Racework figures make reference to preconceived ideas about difference, exoticism, and stereotypes based on visual markers, and with that, assumptions, discrimination and prejudice based on appearance. The ‘Japanese’figure wears flannel trousers under the Kimono and has the same face beneath the mask as does the ‘Western’figure. In notes on this work, Jane Alexander exposes apartheid- era double standards that accorded Japanese people in South Africa ‘honorary white’status for perceived economic reasons while Chinese people were classified as ‘non-white’. 1 Racework was exhibited at the University of Cape Town’s Irma Stern Museum in 1999 where, in a hand book accompanying the exhibition, Lucy Alexander explores the iconography of the work: This pair of boys dressed as men overtly exhibit compliance with social norms, dress, sobriety and restraint: in turn they will be rewarded and given leave to control. One is suited for the West; the other is masked for the East ... The work rests on issues of identity; both figures remake their identity in the cast of another’s more powerful, more controlling set of rules; thus they displace one set of imposed ‘racial’or ‘cultural’stereotypes and replace them with another. ... A shadow being disrupts their calm: a mischief-maker between them, dragging his booty, a tractor and a scythe, symbols of ‘a better era’, a ‘lost utopia’. Affixed to the back of the kimono of one of the figures is a facsimile of a hotel document in Japanese script giving instructions for what to do in the event of an earthquake, alluding to massive underlying forces with the power to disrupt equilibrium and ‘to the well-controlled society which is prepared for all eventualities’. 2 Various elements of Racework recur in Alexander’s African Adventure photomontages produced between 1999 and 2000. 1. Jane Alexander ‘Notes on Selected Artworks’. In Jane Alexander: DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Sculpture 2002. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2002, p119. 2. Lucy Alexander “Bom Boys” and “Lucky Girls”. UCT Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, 1999, unpaginated. Detail Detail