DIMITRI OZERKOV
Curator of the exhibition
Onlyimaginationis left alive *
Glass and bones are the oldest materials in human culture and the two basic mediaof Jan Fabre, two solid elements of his materia prima. Modern glass is a humaninvention while bones are a crucial part of all human and animal beings. Glass istransparent and pure, bones are opaque and full of complex individual informationpreserved in their vegetative shapes. Jan Fabre builds up surfaces out of cut bone, asin the Tools series from 1991, which look almost as flat as glass. Or he shapes boneforms out of glass, as in The Future Merciful Heart for Men and Women (2008).The combination and juxtaposition of both glass and bones in his art creates humanmeanings that play with various levels of history and examine basic cultural values.For instance, when Fabre makes a skull rather than a cup out of the mass of glass,this glass skull immediately becomes a cultural inversion of the ancient tradition ofmaking drinking-cups out of real skulls. This operation refers back to the Tibetankapala, a cup made from a skull, with its European analogues including the earliestritual skull cups found in Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge in the UK, as well as inother sites. The earliest written source is the text of Herodotus in which he describesthe Scythians making drinking-cups out of their enemies’ skulls. “Having sawn off theportion below the eyebrows, and cleaned out the inside, they cover the outside withleather. When a man is poor, this is all that he does; but if he is rich, he also lines theinside with gold: in either case the skull is used as a drinking-cup. They do the samewith the skulls of their own kith and kin if they have been at feud with them, and havevanquished them in the presence of the king.”
Skull cups predate glass cups. Nevertheless, glass and bones are two materials thatare very close to each other historically, and very different at the same time. One canfind parallels both in nature and culture, the most famous European image combiningthe two being a skeleton holding a hourglass, symbol of human death. The transparentglass shows how much sand is still left inside the bulb, telling how soon death willovercome the perfect body drying it to the bone. Death in the form of a skeletonpresents us a glass clock in order to indicate the approaching end of our humanappearance.
(…) Human bones have specific shapes. It is quite easy to draw or sculpt them correctly,it is only a question of the draughtsman’s ability. On the contrary, it is very difficultto draw glass. Hot glass is a mass in chaotic motion that cannot be represented as ashape by a visual artist unless he is a glassmaker and works directly with the glassitself. A created glass piece immediately becomes an object, something that has itsown meaning apart from the material it is shaped from. One can see a glass object,or a piece of artwork made out of glass, or a reflection on a glass surface. One seesthrough glass but can hardly see the glass itself unless the glasswork is combinedwith other materials, or it is imperfect and has bubbles or other extraneous elements.Glass is created to be missed by looking through it. In Christianity it was often usedto preserve parts of the bodies of saints. Their bones were put inside glass reliquariesto be observed through the glass and venerated, becoming part of the eternal world ofdeath after their pious lives.
(…)Glass must be clean, clear and transparent. By its nature it is completely differentfrom death, which is often symbolized by dirty, decaying bones. Jan Fabre createsthe inversion of this by using Bic-coloured glass to represent dirty, dying doves in hisinstallation Shitting Doves of Peace and Flying Rats (2008). Even when representingtrash and decay, glass paradoxically remains clean, clear.
(…)Bone and glass are both objects of creation that can be described as having flexiblequalities. For Jan Fabre, the relation between glass and bones is rooted in his earlymemories: “My philosophical and poetical reason for bringing glass, human and animalbones together comes from the memory of seeing my little baby sister playing with asmall glass object. This made me think of the flexibility of human bone structure andthe flexibility of the way glass is produced. Some animals, and all human beings, comeout of the womb like molten glass out of a melting oven. They can be moulded, bentand shaped with an amazing degree of freedom.” This statement allows us to betterunderstand the strong initial relation of all those elements in Fabre’s oeuvre.Fabre never makes long descriptions of his works. In his exhibitions, he putsviewers in a situation in which the artworks are immediately present. The strongmeanings of his art lie in the power of display, in which natural and artificialmaterials are mixed and combined in a very unique way. Such a presence engendersthe question: what appeared first, the objects or the relations between them? Andwhat is more important? Are we thinking in objects or in relations? Are we dealingwith different people or with the world? With artists or with art? These questionsabout primordiality become even more complicated when they refer to the biologicalmaterials that Jan Fabre uses extensively and that he always puts in the artisticcontext of his imagination. How do we experience other people’s bodies? How dowe experience our own body, as a whole or as a collection of parts? Brain, heart,penis, vagina: are they ours or do they belong to the human tradition of proliferation?Do we have a clear or still very dim reflection of ourselves? We have bones and thisbiological fact makes us part of something we cannot imagine in full. While part of what we call biology, we still only understand the world through cultural narratives.Fabre asks all these questions without answering them. Through glass he builds a specific form of transparency of ideas, he makes a clear symbolic situation wherethe imagination is free to ask and create, as in his early theatre project Das Glasim Kopf wirdvomGlas(1987). In the imaginative context, his glass bones can beseen as objects of crystallization, both directly and indirectly. According to Stendhal,“crystallization is the operation of the mind which devices from all that happensthe discovery that the object of love has new perfections.” Such an interdisciplinarysearch for perfection is definitely one of the characteristics of Fabre’s imagination.Fabre crystallizes both bones and glass, and makes them sacral. He sacralises humanexistence in its mystical, timely presence in reality, driven by imagination.
It is the artistic imagination that is the main evidence of human existence accordingto Jan Fabre. He finds it somewhere between bones and glass, body and soul. “Theimagination is a privileged place between soul and body,” says The Knight in Fabre’sHistory of Tears (2005) with reference to MarsilioFicino’s theory of the vehiclesof the soul. According to Ficino, the function of the imagination is not limited to“representing images of sensible objects to the soul, but it also influences and modifiesbodily matter to such an extent that we can fall ill and recover by means of the imagesof illness and healing we have in our mind.” The faculty of imagination is capable ofgiving ever-changing appearances to the forms it produces and can be compared to achameleon or to the Greek sea god Proteus who was able to take any kind of form andquickly change to another. By proposing these two comparisons, Ficino suggests thatthe less solid bodily matter is, the more efficacious the imagination’s power becomesto shape it. For this reason, among all the parts of the body, the spirit is especiallysusceptible to the influence of the imagination that will survive bodily death.Are we living in the world or just imagining it? Sacral fruits of the imagination arecast by Jan Fabre in glass forms in order to let them survive death and decay. Theyimitate the shapes of human bodies, and represent abstract ideas rooted in alchemy.They assume the appearance of a visual reality created by nature and fragments ofluxury materials assembled by humans. They refer to Christianity and to commonEuropean narratives that will be lost and forgotten by future human generations whenthey find other ways to imagine. “The decomposition of one form releases materialfor the preparation of a new form,” says the Doctor-Philosopher in Requiem for aMetamorphosis (2007). The new times will create new histories that will fade andbreak down present ideal forms. And strong new living bones will grow out of them.
Venice, 21 April 2017
* Extracted from the catalogue published by Forma Edizioni