default

Jan Fabre is one of our most important artists, to this idea most people can easily subscribe. But where that importance lies isn’t always that clear. It is just as unclear as how the multiformity of his practise is to be approached as a whole. Is Fabre a visual artist who also makes theatre, opera and dance? Is he a theatre artist who also draws, makes sculptures, installations and films? What is his importance as an author; as a choreographer,…? The exhibition at the M HKA wishes to form a basis from which Jan Fabre’s entire oeuvre can reassessed.

How is the view on Fabre formed? Fabre catapulted himself out of obscurity in 1982 and simultaneously placed himself in the international spotlights with his Het is theater zoals te verwachten en te voorzien was [it is theatre as was to expected and foreseen] and consolidated this view two years later with De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden [The power of theatrical follies]. He moreover became an appreciated artist in the visual arts world where he began to make his presence felt in prestigious galleries and museums.

Whereas his theatre work has since been exhaustively studied, and his later visual work has been given a sound basis by numerous monographs and essays, everything that Fabre had done before remained in the dark. It was even erased by the visual arts system’s manner of functioning. Mentioning solo exhibitions in a sales gallery such as The Curiosity House, where Fabre exhibited three times, is hardly impressive fare on a CV, nor are the artist’s own initiatives in a hangar by the Kempish Dock. The performances too, which were cannibalised by the early theatre work, and of which the energy lived on in the stage productions, weren’t easy to place in a biography, nor could it be incorporated into any account of the artist’s work’s origins.

Here and there a few old works were brought to the attention again, such as the Theezakjeskamer [Tea bag room] (1978) in Watou; the series of 8 mm kortfilmpjes [short films] (1980-82) in an edition for the VMHK in Gent; the Neuslaboratorium [Nose Laboratory] (1978-79) in his parents’ garden, or the de Wetskamer [The Law Room] (1979) and Wetskelder (Law Basement) (1979) with his preserving jars in Fondation Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon and MAMAC, Nice. The breadth of the visual art story behind Fabre was also suggested in the recent exhibition at the Flemish Parliament. But the image of the whole was never re-adjusted. Where Fabre as theatre maker is continually interpreted on the basis of his entire theatrical itinerary, the visual artist Fabre up to now has remained the recent visual artist, with particular attention paid to the monumental sculptures such as the bronze turtle Searching for Utopia, the Tivoli castle, Heaven of Delight at the Royal Palace in Brussels, the needle-with-beetle Totem in Leuven or other installations with glistening beetles.

Being barely documented - in a documentation in which order was established only recently - the first ten years of an enormous visual art practise just disappeared from view. This is how a view evolved of theatre, dance and opera on the one hand, and drawings, sculpture, films and installations on the other; and it was seemingly difficult to get them to make coherent sense. An order and indexation in this sense is definitely possible. It is also used for the book by the Mercatorfonds that is being published on the occasion of this exhibition. At the same time such a categorisation can also stand in the way of an understanding of Fabre. It could lead to an image in which Fabre’s art works are approached and interpreted as products which stand alone. 

The M HKA believes that the importance and the singularity of Fabre as an artist are primarily linked to his continuous movement. The objects as such can have a varying status in this, although they look like ‘art works’. They can be relics of actions (the blood drawings), or instruments (the foot mats with a scissor underneath them), or be a framework for them (the film The Problem of 2001). An exhibition can be a trigger for a series of large sculptures, with the same dexterity as tiny sketches… A nuclear derivative of complex thoughts… Large-scale productions can carry aphorisms through and bring about an artistic spark; conversely, a small drawing can contain a whole world. The ‘doing’ can be the result of a possibility, such as the castle Tivoli (1990), or a reflexive action, as in many of the performances.

The M HKA has also sought, together with Fabre, for a presentation form which can express this. Paying attention to images which have not become art works but which are art, to documentation as the only remaining access to actions, and to fragments of sound and text. The M HKA sees Fabre as an ‘oeuvre artist’ as it were: an artist whose work is significant as one large, cohesive whole. The individual works, as they now relate to the masterpieces of the art of the past in the KMSKA, obtain their energy and coherence out of that broader movement with its many stakes. Because Jan Fabre is a ‘homo faber’, a doing human being, the title of an early exhibition Homo Fabere (1981) is picked up again and re-utilised. 

Fabre’s art is performative art: art which evolves out of action, and which wishes to instigate further action. Through this approach the apparent schism between the theatre maker and the visual artist is cancelled. Fabre’s singularity is precisely this integrality. This becomes really clear through a more scrupulous approach to Jan Fabre’s early artistic practise, even before Het is theater … Here the same diversity as later can be found, but within the field that is classically approached as visual art. In that period too the action-based art is a point of reference. Fabre isn’t picked up internationally by the theatre scene but by the performance art circuit, by institutions like De Appel in Amsterdam, CAIRN in Paris or Franklin Furnace in New York. Johan Pas rightly stated in his recent book about the ICC that the absence of Fabre is one of the greatest shortcomings of the ICC’s programming at that time.

Parallel to this performance activity Fabre developed works which one may call installations, but which are wholly intertwined with this performance approach. In a weekend exhibition at M HKA, Fabre recently showed a series of such works, the meat works: the series of small sculptures in raw prepared minced beef which he once showed at a butcher’s in Boerhaavestreet, works with prepared minced beef on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, presented in 1980 at Gallery Blanco in Antwerp, a dress and a costume made of meat and the works with the steaks.

The opener of the actual exhibition, Objecten om in te breken en te vechten [Objects for breaking in and fighting] of 1978 from the first exhibition at Curiosity House, indicates the street as a frame of reference. That was incidentally also the case, with a VMO-café on the opposite side of the gallery. The drilled-through JFK coin is a spatial version of the performance-installation It Is Kill Or Cure from 1982 in Franklin Furnace in New York in which Fabre offered himself as a target. Installations such as De lente komt eraan [Spring is on its way] (1979, consisting of condoms filled with sprouting onions and potatoes) or Moving Obsessions Giving Light (a remake of the exhibition of 1981 in Artspace Washington, with cupboards and chairs with burning candles on their corners) do literally continue to move but they also make an actor of the visitor, as in the Vliegenvangerskamer [Fly catcher’s room] (1979).

It is not only the reconstructed installations that are exhibited however; there is also a multitude of material that conjoins this: the early 8 mm performance films, documentary tapes of a number of performances, among them the only recently restored registration of the legendary Ilad of the Bic-Art, executed in 1980 at De Appel in Amsterdam; all kinds of texts; songs to words by Fabre by the ‘cold wave’ group M. Bryo & DMT which Fabre recorded with a friend and composed on his little synthesizer; small objects or installation elements such as the foot mats with scissors underneath them in order to avert the evil eye; documentary photographs of performances and photographs which are taken parallel to performances, such as those of Fabre made up as an Arab of the poster in De Prins-Arabier uit de Sprookjes van Duizend en één Nachten [The Arab-Prince of the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights] (1978), or that of the tricolour snails on Fabre’s skin in the Window Performance of 1977. In that sense grand and very tiny gestures are equal in Fabre’s case, and part of a wider flood.

Despite the excess of important early works that haven’t been seen for the last twenty years, and despite the wealth of documentary material that has only now been brought to the light, Fabre’s exhibition at the M HKA is not a ‘retrospective of the early Fabre’. The surprising ‘vintage Fabre’ who pops up everywhere in the exhibition, is connected to the important works by Jan Fabre which the M HKA disposes over. The figure covered in drawing pins Ik, aan het dromen [I, dreaming] (1978), the angel figure Mur de la montée des anges [Wall of the uprising of angels] (1993), the wonderful series of drawings, the famous insect sculptures Fantasie-Insecten-Sculpturen [Fantasy-Insects-Sculptures] (1979) which each carry with them their own miniature story, … these too will be on view, but in a different setting than is usually seen.

The research into the early work provided an instrument for approaching the present from a more accurate perspective. The radical performances which can now be viewed again in documentation are simply a symbol for a broad artistic practise which was and is wholly performative. A subdivision into disciplines – however much Fabre has played on disciplines and continues to do so – is merely useful for a book in which fragmentary reflections can provide additional insights. The main insight could however be this: that Fabre’s oeuvre is an enduring witches’ cauldron of thoughts, words, images, and meandering possibilities that become actions, thicken into works and then meander further.