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Further afield with Jan Fabre
By Kimberly Bradley
In Paris, additional controversy and fewer direct references to sacrifice and death were generated by the Louvre, which invited the energetic Belgian artist Jan Fabre to "intervene" with paintings from the German, Flemish and Dutch schools in the museum's Richelieu wing. The artist was given carte-blanche to install his own work -- typically sculptural self-portraits, often bizarre, or works using sculptured beetles, bird heads or other creatures, all serving as the artist's alter-ego -- between and among works by Rubens, van Eyck, Rembrandt, van der Weyden, Metsys and Bosch in 40 vast halls.
Running until July 7, 2008, Fabre's "Angel of the Metamorphosis" drew more than 8,000 people to the Apr. 11 opening and, according to the press corps, has since attracted a "younger" crowd into the wing. It's also produced a few scathing editorials in publications like Le Figaro: "The absence of artistic content in so-called contemporary art abolishes the distinction between culture and lack of culture, and flatters the ego of those most ignorant in art and history. But why this mania to bring this farce into classical museums, and in particular the Louvre?"
Okay, okay. The "mania" seems to be a logical progression of the Louvre's effort to integrate contemporary art into its halls in the past few years, with the Fabre show being by far the most extensive to date. For contemporary-art viewers who've seen dialogues between old and new before (or even work including bodily fluids), nothing is particularly shocking, although there's plenty to ponder.
The show presents about 30 Fabre works, and opens with a nearly life-size self-portrait sculpture of the artist butting his nose against a medieval painting, with blood pooling at his feet. I Let Myself Drain, as it is called, is about Fabre -- who's also a theater and performance artist, set designer, "editor," activist and more -- feeling "defeated by the talent of his predecessors."
Other works, some dating to the late 1970s, include drawings in the artist's own blood or semen, his famous blue-ink Bic drawings, sacrificial lamb sculptures in 24-carat gold displayed in vitrines on beds of ground human bones, monk's outerwear rendered in sliced human bone, or work made of iridescent scarabs or insect wings. A slab of sculptural "meat" hanging from the ceiling, which echoes a similar slab in a Rembrandt van Rijn painting across the room, is all bugs.
The eerie human eyes peering from owl heads in Messengers of Death, Decapitated apparently refer to the animals' appearance in Bosch's work and represent madness and wisdom. And in Peter-Paul Rubens' vast Maria de' Medici room, Fabre has installed 400 Belgian-granite gravestones upon which a huge silicon earthworm with Fabre's face breathes and speaks. Fabre seems obsessed with vanity, reincarnation, death and a dark brand of spiritualism; he explains the bone monks' robes as representative of a spiritual body, a kind of exoskeleton. "The future person would have an outer shell. Then, the person can't bleed anymore."
On Apr. 22, Fabre's per formative bent was featured in the museum's Daru gallery, a wonderful space filled with carved sarcophagi and antiquities like the Winged Victory of Samothrace. For four hours, the artist disguised himself with beards, wigs, eyeglasses and lab coats, shouted cryptic messages like "Art kept me out of jail!" (the performance's title), gave haircuts and raced through the hall with indefatigable energy, always closely followed by an in-character camera crew whose live feeds ran on three screens on the building's facade.
However appealing the idea of not bleeding might be, and however contagious Fabre's quirky energy is, one can't help but wonder where all this is going. The relation of Fabre's objects (and the ego they represent) to the classical works in the Louvre is uncertain, ambiguous, arbitrary. Why did the Louvre choose Fabre? A conversation with a Louvre press officer suggested that on reason was to boost traffic in the Richelieu wing, which generally gets fewer visitors than the packed halls containing the Mona Lisa and such. A little confrontation, a little provocation and the people will come.
