Meat Architecture

Jan Fabre's artworks refer back to the Netherlands vanitas tradition; he's obsessed with those perennial Northern European themes of life, death, metamorphosis, and the physicality of corporeal existence. In other words he covers wire mesh and Zimmer frames and skulls with shiny green scarab wings,* and in 2000 he wrapped smoked ham around the columns of Ghent University. In other other words he's the morbid sensationalist Belgian artist who's not Wim Delvoye, and don't get them mixed up, or they will weep bitter salty tears into their 9% Trappist beers. This is not good for the flavour. Salty tears are better with a glass of Bamberg Rauchbier, or at a pinch with a Gose Ohne Bedenken. But I digress.

Imagine my delight, then, when the Great Google informed me that Fabre and a team of assistants once created an exhibition called Temples of Meat at the Ghent City Museum of Art, including "a coat made of steaks and a tent of bacon with sleeping bags of steak". DISTURBING IMAGERY POSSIBILITY, I thought, before passing out from hyperventilation. Complete with suitably wankerish quotes from Fabre: "Meat is a very erotic material. A lot of my work is about the cult of decay and death."

But further inquiry [i.e. scouring the Intertubes for disturbing pictures] revealed that though there are many references to this story -- including a number of outraged vegetarian websites -- they all link back to the original Ananova.com story (sometimes confounding it with the earlier Ghent University ham-wrapping episode). Ananova's source in turn is the Belgian tabloid newspaper De Morgen. And IT IS A COVER-UP the Ghent Art Museum website only mentions Fabre's 2003 retrospective!

I am shocked, shocked! that a tabloid newspaper would make up a story of the "modern artists are pretentious poseurs who are stringing us all along for a ride" genre.

I am also shocked that an artist might work in diverse media -- beetle wings, bronze, ball-point pen, rotting vegetables (when he's not designing for the theatre or dance) -- but you wrap ham around ONE LITTLE UNIVERSITY and for ever after in the minds of the world you are "that guy who wraps ham around things".

* Somewhere in South-East Asia there is an entire industry devoted to farming scarab beetles so that their wing-covers can be exported to supply the green shiny needs of the Western world. Under humane conditions, I hope; none of this battery-beetle business. Such are the wonders of globalisation. There are possibilities here for a novel, involving a humble Malayan beetle-farmer who strikes up an e-mail correspondence with a customer in Belgium... which slowly blossoms into long-distance love... and then they both die after catching a rare fungal disease.