Jane Alexander The Butcher Boys Essay

Question 3

The “butcher boys” is an artwork by Jane Alexander. The artwork shows three sculptural boys who are sitting on a bench. They have muscular bodies and their faces are disfigured .They are naked hence one could recognize them as human beings but there is something that makes one have a second thought. Their faces are disfigured and have sprout horns from their skulls like that of an animal. They also have a dark vertical scar beneath their snouts which implies that something has been removed. The removed larynx makes the creatures incapable to speak hence each creature is silent. Even though they are sitting on the same bench, each butcher boy seems captured in their own thoughts. However, it has not been easy to come up with the tangible meaning of the “Butcher boys”. A number of people have tried to come up with concepts in order to interpret the artwork. These people are Mercer who applies the concept of the “grotesque body”, Bick the “abject body” and Peffer the “tortured body”. Therefore, this essay explains how these concepts differ and how these difference impacts on the

Alexander’s zoomorphic transformation of human body was meant to evoke the psychological inscription of daily cruelties, torture and injustices inflicted and self-inflicted upon the people of South Africa during the apartheid era. The Butcher boys reveal the inhuman nature of the apartheid society as a whole. In other words all people become violent and cruel towards each other regardless their state, they both possessed that animalistic element within them. The butcher boys personify the abominable hybrid issue from a bestial union of the torturers and the tortured, the oppressors and the oppressed. These opposites formed a single body which led to more violets in South Africa. Peffer further describes the “Butcher boys as the “body of state” thus depicting the entire society as a