Notes

This sculpture exemplifies Alexander’s political awareness and sensitivity. Produced contemporaneously with Untitled and the Butcher Boys at a time when South Africa was at the height of its domestic turmoil. The combination of goose wings and a flamingo skull, coupled with the modelled humanoid torso and legs contribute to the layers of irony described above. The strange figure, despite being perched on a bicycle, is immobile, condemned to be stationary and motionless. Though the bicycle could move it would shatter the figure’s legs. The wings on the torso allude to flight, though the figure is stuck fast to a bicycle, shaft in place of its neck, denying take off.

J.M. Coetzee, who has been described as Alexander’s literary counterpart, describes the evolution of South African literature (and Williamson and Jamal observe its appropriateness to South African art) as follows: “The deformed and stunted relations between human beings that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life. All expressions of that inner life, no matter how intense, no matter how pierced with exultation or despair, suffer from the same stuntedness and deformity.”¹

¹ Coetzee, J.M. in Williamson, S. and Jamal, A. (1996) Art in South Africa: the future present, Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip Publishers. page 24

Literature

Sobopha, M. (2011) ‘Representing the Body: In search of a postcolonial moment’, in Goniwe, T., Pissarra, M. and Majavu, M. (eds.). Visual Century: South African Art in Context, volume four, Johannesburg: Wits University Press. page 97

“The body dominated Alexander’s installations. The characters in her works oscillate between human and animals, victims and vanquishers, young and old. Alexander is also preoccupied with human bodily forms outside the standardised boundaries of attractiveness…[She] creates layers of irony explored in human-animal figures, while emphasising human trauma and suffering caught in the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid South Africa.”

Powell, I. (1995) Jane Alexander: Sculpture and Photomontage, Johannesburg and Cape Town: The Standard Bank National Arts Festival and The Goodman Gallery. page 19

“In West Coast African Angel (1985/6) the figure has a flamingo’s skull for a head and wings instead of arms. Yet the dialectic is of a different order; a shaft growing from the steering column connects up with the skull/head, suggesting a different kind of dialectic, one which brings the first and the third world, technology and natives of Africa into conjunction; by the same token, the device of painting the legs of the figure a flamingo pink gives a different value – one in which different associations are being invoked. The piece is not a racist characterisation of the African as an inferior being; it is a sympathetic and nicely observed personification of a particular but more or less irreducible energy in third world culture.”