by Linda Stupart

This year, the Johannesburg Art Fair’s featured artist is the ever-elusive non art-star, Jane Alexander. Of course, as well as being notoriously hard to interview, photograph or pin down, Alexander is also really really famous. In an art climate where, for decades, collectors and curators have been criticised for always picking the same name from a seemingly very small hat left over from the bad old days of the struggle, it seems almost regressive to introduce Alexander as the featured artist in the Art Fair’s second year. Alexander herself told me that she felt that art fairs were acceptable as they are important for young, unemployed artists who may not otherwise have access to both the market and a broader public engagement. She also noted that her inclusion in the fair was “Gordon Schachat’s thing,” implying that the choice to show the work lay in an agreement between the uber-collecter from whom the work was loaned and the art fair organisers, as opposed to necessarily dealing with the artist herself. (It’s important to note here that Jane Alexander is renowned for never signing with a gallery, maintaining her aversion to artworld dealings.) So why, then, if it seems verging on passé to laud this already much-loved and well respected artist at the Joburg Art Fair, why is it still really exciting to get a chance to see the artist’s Security penetrating the slick white cubes of artists and galleries desperate to be seen and sell?
The answer lies in the work itself, an installation originally commissioned for the 2006 Sao Paulo Biennal, and, like the majority of Alexander’s post-Apartheid oeuvre, as yet unseen in South Africa. The installation features a sculpture of a lonely, yet menacing bird enclosed in a fenced area of germinating/growing/dying wheat, surrounded by a passage created by a double fence with razor wire containing earth, 1000 machetes, 1000 sickles and 1000 used South African workers’ gloves. Five security guards armed with batons guard the work, both keeping people out, and making sure that absolutely nothing can escape. Of course the germinating/growing/dying wheat seems unlikely to do much germinating or growing, let alone dying, over the three days of the art fair. This contextual glitch aside, in a city defined by its high fences and razorwire (similarly ambiguous in their keeping out/in function), paranoia and fear, Security is an important reminder of the world outside the shiny enclosure of the art fair.
Essentially, this is a work well worth looking at. And, of course, Jane Alexander is an artist still well worth watching. So, although it may seem groan-worthy that she be the featured artist at a South African art fair in 2009, particularly after a long and well documented career of ‘featuring,’ it seems that the organisers of the Joburg art fair have made a surprisingly good decision. Because the Joburg Art Fair, as Alexander herself said, is about new opportunities, not only for artists, but also both the art-educated and general public. Certainly, it is a pleasure for South Africans to see this work in their own country.