GIACINTO DI PIETRANTONIO
Curator
The Symbolic is our Planetary Identity Card
*
It is known that art is made of forms, but beautiful forms are not enough to be successful because
something becomes art when its beautiful ugly forms are able to convey history, philosophy, poetry, … life in
short.
Forms of time, forms of life and life of forms such as “Ik spuw op mijn eigen graf” “I Spit on my tomb”
(2007), which consists of 250 headstones of black or gray veined granite on which the names of living and
extinct insects are engraved in Flemish, Fabre’s mother tongue, with the date of birth or birth and death of
artists, philosophers, musicians writers, scientists,… written beneath them.
For example:
DRIEHOORN
1866 –1944
OLIFANTSTOR
1926 – 1984
SCHAATSENDERIJDER
1874 –1951
RUPSENDOODER
1887 – 1965
DOODGRAVER
1906 – 1989
SCHRIJVERKE
1871 – 1922
DENNEPROCIESSIERUPS
1954
MESTKEVER
1958 - 2007
...
corresponding to Kandinsky, Foucault, Schönberg, Le Corbusier, Beckett, Proust, De Cordier, Fabre, etc.,
these names are not written on the stones but in a legend that the user may consult.
…
It is like having ideal references, because art, philosophy, music, architecture, theater, literature are
forms of creative thinking that do not die or, if they do, they die to be reborn again (metamorphoses),
continuing to nourish our minds, nutrients for our brain, the body part that is Fabre’s obsession in this
exhibition. It is a work of head stones; it is a cemetery of this century and in ruins; it is the cemetery where
the figure-sculpture-portrait of the artist elegantly dressed in a pin-striped suit spits on his own tomb in
homage to the writer Boris Vian, from whom he borrowed the work’s title, and to his mother Helena
Troubleyn. Literature, art and life, writing that generates art and mother who generates the artist, but who in
addition to the biological act gives him, as Fabre has said many times, a taste for literature. It is a romanticgothic form-image inspired by “The Arctic Sea” (1824), which for Fabre represents death fields and “The
Wanderer Overlooking the Sea of Fog” (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich. It is a representation of the end,
of the sensation of imminent catastrophe; it is the romantic dream of material survival of the spirit begun by
Beuys with “The End of the 20th century” (1983), a work of twenty-one gray basalt stones, stone-coffins,
stone-wombs; it is death and life together; it is fall and rebirth.
However, Fabre adds the provocation of spitting on life that is surely an immoral gesture. Spitting on death is
certainly an extremely provocative act that is even more blasphemous, but it is also a continuation of the
work on bodily fluids (blood of life and death, sperm of being and non-being, sweat of fatigue and pressure,
tears of laughter and sadness) undertaken by Fabre for many years. Spitting is positive and negative like in
Buddhism where one of the Three Principal Energies —rLung— is responsible for mental and physical
activities, breathing, expulsion of urine, feces, fetus, menstruation, spitting, belching, thus giving clarity to the
sensory organs, and thereby supporting life as a means of union between mind and body. There is the
Orient and the origin, while the Occident evolves and involves within the vitality of the cynical Greek
shamelessness begun by Diogenes, and then of the Sadian-Nietzschean negative so dear to the artist, not
to mention the provocative avant-garde Future-Dadaist gestures made to shock the bourgeois, and then the
punk culture that makes spit a means of protest. The energetic gesture of salivating is relegated to hell by
Flemish ancestors such as Bosch. This action creates and offends. But it is also a brazen challenge to death
—and only one who has had several close calls, who having reawakened from a coma at 18-20 years of age
and headed towards death twice and come back from it each time may uphold such a challenge— creating
an artistic-philosophical relationship with death that is now more than thirty years old.
Surely Jan Fabre’s beautiful ugly dense forms are among those that best interpret this condition of
traversing. These beautiful ugly dense strong forms tell us we live in an era that between the end of last and
the new millennium has turned the condition of traversing, mobility, complexity of knowledge and living into
the new being and non-being of existence. In this young and magnificent world where ‘there is no certainty in
tomorrow,’ and of which Fabre’s beautiful ugly dense strong new forms offer crucial evidence.
Thus, as in the white marble sculpture “Antropologie van een planeet” (Marmeren Denkmodel, Studie, I)
“Anthropology of a Planet” (Model of thought, Study, 1), 2007, placed at the entry to the exhibition, in which
an anatomical-muscular man stands on a human brain, also in marble, with all his muscles exposed in the
act of digging the brain beneath him. Here, exaltation of mind and body cohabitate like a dialogue between
life and death, memories that even hail from the film “The Angel of Death” (1996) filmed in the museum of
natural science in Montpellier, where a similar anatomic plaster is seen shoveling. Man works on the centre
of thought production, with a tool and manual gesture for turning over the mind, for seminars or for creating
the foundation of civilization, made of thoughts and actions that are moved by the brain itself. This Cartesian
organ, that is the depository of Cogito Ergo Sum, is the place where the metamorphosis of man from the
animal kingdom to the kingdom of symbolism took place, and during this metamorphosis Man developed his
awareness of the creativity of nature. Whence the meaning of “Anthropology of a Planet” (Model of Thought,
Study, 1) that lent its name to the exhibition: enrichment with symbolic manifestations raises awareness of
personal identity because, as the epistemologist Gianluca Bocchi says, “The symbolic is our planetary
identity card.”
As a matter of fact, Fabre is an artist who metamorphosed the beautiful ugly dense strong new
visionary forms, thus the transition, the transformation of life that dies and is reborn, the meaning of his art,
his life. Thus, at the very beginning of Greek civilization, while for Heraclitus “from earth water is born, and
from water soul,” for Talete di Mileto, αρχή is water, and the earth rests on water, which supports all things.
This is what we see in “De Man die op het water schrijft” (The Man Writing on Water), 2006, a sculpture
made up of 7 bronze bathtubs, where there is a sculpture-portrait of the artist seated in the second one in the
process of writing on the water with his finger. This is a gesture of impossibility, but a metaphor for
metamorphosis of creating, the created and ongoing creation. This act is also referred to in the poetry of the
nineteenth-century Flemish poet Guido Gezelle “Het schrijverke”, in which the insect schrijverke, a water
dragonfly, writes God’s name on the water. Here, writing on the water in the gilded bronze basins, in the
container made of the symbolic color of gold, metal of spirituality and royalty, color of light that shines
gloriously, expresses a will to strive towards the absolute and eternity. That, in addition to being a
biographical element —because the artist has a nearly amphibious habit of writing and drawing at night while
soaking in water in the bathtub— which for the artist is a coffin as recipient for the dead, the work speaks of
creating while immersed in the primordial and vital liquid, in the element that for all cultures in the very
beginning represents the myth of origin, myth of purification, myth of fecundation, myth of prosperity and
H2O for modern chemistry, atomic bond, but is always central and necessary for life. When we are young
our bodies are made up of 90% water, and when we are old that figure becomes 65-60%, and in this work
the artist’s creative action and the creation of the world finished by overlapping and being even more exalted
in a kind of involuntary tautology, in a city like Venice that is created and recreated, bathed in water, and
that, like life, owes everything to water.
Venice, 8 June 2007
* Extract from the catalogue Linda and Guy Pieters Editions