Translated by Ludmila Porto
In a certain moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, two grave-diggers, while working, talk about the injustices of life. Complaining about giving a Christian burial to a suicide, they lament: “And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even – Christian”. The grave they dig is for Ophelia, Hamlet’s love. Then, one grave-digger asks of the other: “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the carpenter or the shipwright?”. The answer: “The gallows-maker, for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.” It belongs to Hamlet, that crazed genius, one of the best practical definitions of irony I know of. Shocked because one of the grave-diggers was singing while digging the grave, the prince of Denmark says: “Has this fellow no feeling of his business that he sings in grave-making?”
Irony is a mark of Fabinho’s work, and we can assert that, yes, he is very well aware of his business. His investigations on themes such as the body or the city are frequently based on the cleft of a grin that gives with one hand and takes away with the other.
This sense of humor can either be explicit, as it is in one of the works from the series Om nibus, in which several glasses are put on movable concrete traffic barriers on avenues in Recife, or in a more implicit manner, as in the project Nosso Romance? (Our Romance?) in which irony conducts a kitsch tone of a body in decomposition that sexualizes itself when it is deformed.
Everybody knows the encumbrances that exist around the poorly repaired holes that bad public management causes to the streets of Brazilian cities. In order to make people aware of the recently opened holes, or poorly repaired ones, circles or squares are often made around them, using wooden stakes stuck in large cans filled with cement, and the stakes are linked by traffic ribbons. When Fabinho photographs one of these encumbrances and ascribes to them an “authorship”, he turns a daily event into an artistic intervention. Irony is complete with a pun on the word “Ring”: its sound in English resembles the word ringue – which means, in Portuguese, prize ring – sonority that is reinforced by the image itself, also similar to a prize ring. That pun is a trigger that points to several possibilities of meaning, emphasizing the feeling that the great urban centers in Brazil are, more and more, tense and conflict zones (but we feel relief as we know that if social tension and bad urbanization do not assure the well-being and security of pedestrians and drivers, at least the holes in the streets are protected by their prize rings).
Ring is performed with a little bit of, let’s say, “hard work”, because it is essentially an aesthetic concept that re-writes a fact contained in the world. Increasingly, to talk about art implies to talk about an intelligent creative gesture. A good artist must think and think. Let’s look at an interesting example, and then we’ll link it to a thought from Artur C. Danto. I was walking along the sidewalk by the beach with my ex-girlfriend when suddenly she asked me to stop. For a few seconds, she looked at a building across the street and said to me; “look at those structures of iron, cloth and rope, I thought for a second that it was a work of art”. She referred to a structure erected to make some repairs to the building. In the essay entitled “Arte e Significação” (Art and Meaning), Danto gives us several examples of daily events that could be considered as installation art, performances, etc. Then, he concludes: “it’s a mark of our time that everything can be seen as a work of art and in textual terms”. It’s as if the whole world breathes a certain potential of poetics. It’s not that nature or cosmos are in themselves sensitive, or poetic, in the sense they have an essence, but that the domains of art imply a tension between the artist and everything around him. Poetry is positioned in a sometimes fragile and always movable relationship between directed creativity of the creative act and everyone who’s inclined to feel. This freedom of wandering in a creative manner throughout the most variable experiences is one of the most important acquisitions of art in the last decades.
An example of that freedom that I’m talking about is in the work entitled Look my face that like you which is a script of a performance-installation of art applied to a brick wall. To read the script is to turn the project itself into a work of art; the performance doesn’t happen in a physical space, but inside the reader’s imagination. The participation of the public is complete with a questionnaire, in which there are questions, such as: “Is it worthwhile performing the work of art or is it enough only to read it? If it is worthwhile, are there chances of performing it and how could it be done?”. If reading a work already implies its construction, then every kind of art (visual art, literature, cinema, dance, among others) is fulfilled when it is experienced. In Look my face that like you this interaction is pointed out to amplify the result of the work.
Another work in which the word fulfills a fundamental part is the series Castigo Divino (Divine Punishment). In this case, the displaced text is not the one of projects of performance but a series of scripts taken from a booklet produced by an Evangelical Pentecostal Church. These scripts are written on five china plates. One of the funniest texts is as follows: “Divine Punishment 3 – The anus is dirty, stinking and has a million bacteria on its walls. It’s a sewer itself. In a sewer there are only rats, cockroaches and beggars. The person who sodomizes someone or who is sodomized by is the same as a pestilent rat. (…) But the worst is when the act is homosexual, then the passport of that miserable creature has already received its stamp in hell”. What was a synonym of orthodoxy and aggression before, acquires a ridiculous tone when displaced from its original context. The words implode in themselves. It’s like a porno movie that only makes one laugh, but doesn’t excite you. In this sense, Fabinho plays the role of a terrorist. In another moment, to appeal to the imagination becomes fundamental, because the flesh of the body is hidden behind the satirized words, and that body is naked only in our imagination. The metaphor of the plates reminds us that many banquet dinners are nothing but a sacrifice, and the origin of the terms “mass” and “cult” is related to that idea. For Bataille, in The eroticism, sacrifice is a “desirable transgression”, because “our flesh is in us this excess which opposes the law of decency” The series Divide Punishment shows that, often, a radical pastor sees a libertine in a mirror: one of them celebrates excess, the other sacrifices it, although both are worried about how to control the body of the Other.
The body, the word and the city are rescued from their initial pragmatic functions and put on a healthy ambiguity. In Fabinho, art engages itself in a sensitive compromise with the other. Without missing the joke.
