Jan Fabre’s Songs of the Canaries produces a manifest for the senselessness of loss

Fabre’s The Man Who Measures His Own Planet speaks to the impossibility of record: Photo Credit Jan Fabre Studios

By RACHEL BENHAM, October 30, 2024

Jan Fabre’s small son roams the compact back room of London’s Mucciaccia Gallery and lends a playful sense of light and continuity to the exhibition, Songs of the Canaries, built as memorial to the uncle he will never meet. Both the gallery itself and this room where Fabre currently sits are bustling with people and their voices raise and knit together into the kind of noise above which it is hard to make things distinct.

I am asking Fabre how he knows when to stop, how he senses, in his sculptures, that it is enough, and he tells me, of course, that it is instinct, sensation, that calls time on the momentum of creation. He tells me, too, of the process of experimentation, of the things gone awry, of the things that do not make it out of the studio and into the gallery. I imagine these objects not as mistakes or rejects but as a chain of signposts and signals, grouped somewhere else that I will not see but feel a kind of absent wonderment for, knowing that they exist and propelled what is shown here towards their destination.

Fabre tells me also of his late brother, Emiel, and his short life marked by an illness explained, in Flemish, Fabre’s native tongue, as "The canary… singing too loud in his brain”. Beyond this small room and across the exhibition, the brain becomes a motif built in an assertive, fascinated repetition flanked so often by the sentinel of this canary.

Canaries stand as watchful guardians atop Fabre’s delicate sculptures: Photo Credit Jan Fabre Studios

There is an tragic tension in the canary’s historical significance: the soft vulnerability, fragile bones and quiet death as an alarm, nothing like the screaming mechanical warnings we build into modern life to signal danger, to marshal a response. There is, too, the sense of meaning in death, not dying in vain but giving one’s life in the service of others, however unknowingly, that attaches itself to the canary. Found so often in this exhibition, its figure resonates.

Later in the evening, my companion and I stand at the back of the packed gallery, wondering at the medium, the luminous purity of the marble blocks and the brains Fabre has carved into them. We notice both the verisimilitude and the restraint that stops these organs becoming medical specimens, at once detailed and spare. We gaze at the canaries on their perches, accompanying these brains, both guardians and watchmen for coming danger.

With the birds positioned above exposed, displaced brains, we experience both objects as adrift: Photo credit Jan Fabre Studio

Fabre’s monumental sculpture, The Man Who Measures His Own Planet, stands at the core of the gallery. It dominates the room, and given its size, it is enough to simply spend time in its shadow, watching the human figures who circulate and mingle in a pattern around this towering form. Fabre’s Man is held immobilized in an endless stretch, his hands grasping and reaching, the wide frame of a ruler held aloft. The ripples of a t-shirt tucked into casual pants affirm the status of a figure pressed into the struggle and passion of labor, and while Sisyphus rolls his vast stone uphill, Fabre’s creation is simultaneously both the man and the stone, held in perpetual effort, with all the same grace and dignity Camus endowsin his his own hero at work. A sense of the absurd feels useful in this space of birds and brains and bodies, of items hewn in a material that looks snow-soft and which we may not touch to affirm the solidity that we know, logically, exists.

I circle Fabre’s taught sculpture, squeezing myself past the warm bodies who also jostle for perspective before I rejoin my companion in the back corner of the gallery. Arguably, the marble body is more arresting, more unsettling from our vantage point set behind him, where we can observe how the colossal figure’s brain protrudes coolly from the skull with no hint of injury or excision, tipping backward unshielded, as vulnerable and unprotected as the canaries which also populate this space. The exposure of the brain, both here and in the individual sculptures held on their separate plinths, meets the theme of measurement and creates a resulting sense of taking stock, of laying bare in order to give an account of what has been lost and what still remains.

The theme of measurement and the uncanny removal of objects repeats across the exhibition: Photo credit Jan Fabre Studio

In an exhibition dedicated to Fabre’s late brother, themes of absence and exposure make sense. Brains without skulls beg the questions of why and where and how, and they speak of a removal from their rightful home, existing in a state without belonging. The brain, too, the locus of making sense, is regularly divorced from the input that makes this possible, producing the senselessness that loss is articulated by. In this way, marble is the ideal medium to produce a facsimile of that which should both lead to meaning, and cannot. Cold and bloodless, these brains, this measuring body, exist after the fact: not direct products of the event but monuments to that which has already passed.

This senseless removal and manifest of loss again repeatedly reinforces the absence that permeates this exhibition, perhaps never more explicit than in The Man Who Measures His Own Planet, where his invisible globe can be produced only in our imaginations, and invokes, through its vacancy, an unmeasurable distance or remoteness which neither we nor the figure’s proffered ruler are likely to resolve.

If what is unable to be held on to or defended is recorded and itemized by Jan Fabre in Mucciaccia Gallery, then his work speaks to the tremendous scope for art to both memorialize and to reproduce both event and sensation, speaking to the personal and to sentiment, and expressed in a medium within which its integrity is only able to be maintained through nurture. WM