CCQ magazine issue 9

Knight of the Night Belgian artist Jan Fabre’s creative experiments have taken him on a 35-year, genre-defying journey: from his 1970s actions on the streets of Antwerp and Amsterdam, to later this year, showing at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Ric Bower met up with him as his first show in the UK for 20 years, Knight of the Night, opened at Ronchini Gallery.

Knight of the Night is a collection of Fabre’s work from 1992 to 2013. It is curatorially focused by his 2004 film Lancelot, in which he enacts a gruelling four-hour battle against himself with broadsword and heavy armour. The materials he uses to create objects are often borrowed from the natural world and then combined with motifs usurped from Catholic ritual, seemingly for the purpose of feeding an insatiable curiosity as to what it means to be human. I began by asking him about Knight of the Night, and what it is that draws him to the pageantry of the middle ages.

Jan Fabre: I was brought up in a very poor family, my father was a Flemish communist and my mother a French-speaking Catholic. They would impart certain spiritual values to me at the dinner table. When I complained that my friends had something that I did not have, for instance, my mother would say to me that money was not important, that words are far more beautiful. For my birthday, rather than buying me Matchbox cars, my father might make me a fortress out of planks of wood. I would then make a shield, which I would draw on with my mother’s leftover lipstick.

These values became a doorway into a whole world of imagination.

Ric Bower: I understand you are influenced by tradition in art too.

JB: That was my father again. He took me to Rubens’ house in Antwerp when I was very young to copy his drawings. After working as an artist in New York for a year, when I was 20, I returned to Antwerp and proudly told them I had met Andy Warhol and I had been to The Factory. My Father looked at me and said, “Come with me again to Rubens’ house”. He then pointed out to me that Rubens had had his own ‘Factory’ 400 years before Warhol, he had many assistants, he made set designs, he was a writer…

RB: …and an ambassador…

JF: …yes, and an ambassador. I am a dwarf born in a country of giants, you see. I am still stealing today from Rubens, Van Dyck, Bosch and Van Eyck.

RB: But stealing itself has a fine tradition in art: Rubens stole from Michelangelo and Michelangelo stole from the Greeks. Hieronymus Bosch seems to be out on his own though; where do you think a mind like that comes from?

JF: It’s funny you should ask this because, when all his work is shown together this year for the first time (in his home town of Hertogenbosch, 500 years after his death), I will be showing in the contemporary responses section of that exhibition. On the one hand, his work is deeply Catholic and on the other, it is deeply subversive. Take the Ship of Fools, for instance, it is attacking the church and challenging power structures. The Flemish were constantly oppressed by the Spanish, the French and the Germans… the British never came over though.

RB: Give us a chance, we’ll get round to it!

JF: It is the sense of irony born out of oppression that makes Flemish art so great. Bruegel celebrated the body – drinking, dancing and feasting – whereas British or French work of the time focused on power.