Clearly, one would have to connect this to the political events of the mid-1980s in South Africa and the artist’s response to the violence of the times. But beyond their specific political reference, the figures have an enduring impact because they arouse our fears of physical deformity, the decay of the body, and physical mutation over which we have no control. Like many of Alexander’s works, Butcher Boys revolves around the theme of the wavering line between humanness and bestiality, intactness and decay. The work is the stuff of our dreaming mind and its primitive fears. These works link Alexander to a Romantic fascination with ‘animal man’, the body deformed by grotesque desires, a theme explored by late-18th-century artists such as Fuseli, Blake and Goya. But if those early artists often envisaged the animal straightforwardly as symbol of the bestial, our attitudes to the animal world have become far more nuanced. We are now as likely to view animals as mute, powerless victims of human aggression as we are to fear the danger they pose. One of the key undercurrents of Alexander’s animalised body imagery is perhaps that it taps into our sense of the unknowability of animals, whose means of communication we do not share and who are therefore condemned to suffer us in silence. From this arises Untitled, 1985-86 Reinforced plaster, oil paint, bone, found wooden armchair, leather, rubber Crown Mines stretcher strap 132 × 64 × 80cm
Domestic Angel, 1984 Synthetic clay, oil paint, found bird wings, twine 40 × 14 × 17cm
Untitled, 1982 Reinforced plaster, bone, watercolour, wax 220 × 160 × 100cm Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg
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