Jan Fabre

Born in 1958 in Anvers (BE)
Lives and works in Anvers (BE)

  

The grave of the unknown computer

1993
280 wood crosses, blue ballpoint ink
Dimensions variable
Purchased in: 1994

‘Let us therefore forgive this extravagant nation its metal suits.’ Jean-Henri Fabre

Jan Fabre’s work cannot be pigeonholed because it is inextinguishable, exploring all the areas of art’s intermediary role (theatre, opera, video, choreography, performance, drawings, installations). In pursuing his burning quest for beauty and freedom, Jan Fabre does not wish to reveal the labyrinth of his art. He is an exacting man, who allows you to journey towards his imaginary realm, but offers no keys to reading his marvellous world.

Jan Fabre is lyrical and grandiloquent, grasping the world just in the glow of his imagination. ‘The naivety in my drawings stems more from a primary force, because the drawings are almost my glass coffin, where I explore the limits of my self. It’s a direct look at my own death, madness and disappearance. The drawings are a catharsis of a work and a recording of instantaneous times. They are a direct conspiracy of forces that exist in my heart and in my body. This is a quest for a pact between the physical devil and the angel of my thoughts. I am the Lancelot of my own fairy tale.’¹ In his early performances in the late 1970s, Jan Fabre used blue biros – ‘bics’. The most ordinary tool became his favourite medium. Then towards the mid-1980s vague depictions of nocturnal animals are found in his drawings: owls, bats, insects. Jan Fabre makes reference to the writings of Jean-Henri Fabre, the famous French entomologist (1823–1915).

The installation of small blue crosses, carefully arranged using the model of military cemeteries is a moving allusion to the parallel fate of insects and people. On each one of the crosses is carved the Flemish name for a family of insects, a metaphor of the fate of the common man. Like some anonymous, vulnerable shield, ontologically associated with sacrifice, he champions the ideologies and philosophies of a social life that is ordered, hierarchical, violent, cruel and cannibalistic. In the collective unconscious, the insect is the pariah, the creature that is unworthy of divine creation, and yet the oldest living being on the planet. It is the living, seething evidence of our most primitive and bellicose instincts. Fabre chooses the marvellous to describe the abjectness of our desires and senses.

^{Béatrice Josse}

¹ In interview with Jan Hoet, The Warrior of Beauty, L’Arche, Paris, 1994, p. 41.

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