A still from Jan Fabre’s “Prometheus Landschaft.”
Once upon a time, I went with a friend to the Busan Museum of Art to pleasantly pass a holiday afternoon. The main exhibit there was by a Belgian hack of the highest order named Jan Fabre. In fact, Fabre’s art is so offensively bad that Wikipedia cites an article that he has been attacked by men with clubs for it [this was over his filming cats being thrown high up, spinning into the air and landing hard]. At this particular installation, The Years of the Hour Blue, all the paintings and sculptures were scribbled over with a blue Bic pen. Occasionally, there was a fragment of representational art, but most of it was nonsense with a blue ballpoint pen texture. You could have released a crazy person, sans art degree, with his own supply of Bic pens into the exhibit for an hour’s stretch, and after he had done his worst the museum guests would have had no idea which was the intended art and which the vandalism.
Anyway, there was a secluded corner room separated by a curtain, and inside a projector played this Jan Fabre short film (about 4 minutes) and other selections on loop. It is the usual bonkers hodgepodge of naked or nearly naked skinny people sitting in a dingy old room and saying nonsense in German as they stare into space and bang their heads against the wall. I felt so ashamed by all the obscenity and nudity of this and the next videos that I walked out. But my friend lingered, waiting for I don’t know what, and my perplexed thoughts scrambled in embarrassment, wondering about her as well as the Korean grandmother and little girl sitting with her, also inside the projection room. That poor grandma wanted to do a kind and educational thing for her granddaughter by taking her to a museum on holiday, and now look at what defilement she’s been exposed to! What did they think! What did they say!
A long moment later, my friend shuffled out of the video room and relieved me of my constraint. As our steps echoed throughout the empty, cavernous galleries, my friend reported just what I wanted to know. “Did you see that grandmother in there?” she asked. Of course I had, how could I not feel for her and the shame of the sordid situation?
“Her granddaughter asked her, ‘Grandma, what are they doing? Why are they doing that?'”
The grandma summoned the wisdom of all her years. “‘Sometimes,'” she said, “‘people just want to be crazy.'”
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The video, Prometheus Landschaft, can be viewed here.
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