The Last Piece by John Fare
Experimental exhibitions abound these days, so it’s hard not to feel jaded when confronted with yet another curatorial ploy intended to shake the foundations of the sentient world. ‘The Last Piece by John Fare’ made no such explicit claims, but I was still sceptical when I learned of this group tribute to legendary Canadian performance artist John Charles Fare. Fare’s story has been circulating since the early 1970s, when a certain Tim Craig wrote about his antics in Studio International.
He is known for having staged his own dismemberment on a robotic operating table, which randomly selected body parts for amputation: his pre-frontal cortex was the first to go; the final blow took his entire head. Raimundas Malasauskas, curator and acting executor of the John Fare Estate, which he has legally registered, insists there is a 99 percent chance John Fare existed and a 99 percent chance he didn’t. An homage to a hoax? It sounded contrived to me, but I decided to suspend my disbelief for the duration of the show.
I could not have been more pleasantly surprised. As I entered the gallery, a voice boomed: ‘Hello, my name is Gabriel Lester, and I am John Fare’s avatar’. Invited to serve as Fare’s earthly representative for this instalment of the exhibition, Lester gave daily guided tours in which he wove together different strands of Fare’s biography, invented stories and interpreted the works on show. A few were attributed to Fare (an incomplete carousel of slides, Performance Intro. No. 1, c. 1958, and No. 4, c. 1967), but most were provided by artists eager to explore the inter-subjective and inter-discursive potential of an essentially fragmented, if not empty, centre. ‘Dying is an art like everything else,’ Fare allegedly claimed, and this exhibition deftly interrogated issues of artistic influence and lineage, post-mortem celebrity and collaboration, with a refreshing lack of cynicism and much good humour.
Since everyone was focusing on the absent Fare, individual egos seemed a remarkable non-issue. Lester’s talent for improvisation ensured that no two visits were alike. Sometimes he began by indicating The Birth Certificate of Gabriel Lester (2007), a nod to Fare’s habitual display of his own during appearances, or he might lead the visitor to a flat filing cabinet occupying the floor of the main space. This contained extant documentation on Fare, some buttonholes chopped from garments donated by designer Maaike Gottschal, Stefano Graziano’s Photos from Bartlett College (2007), which Fare supposedly attended, and other objects. A tour of the surrounding Fare-inspired works included: Mariana Castillo Deball’s glossy-white porcelain amputated hands hung vertically on circular mirrors (Doorknockers, 2007), interpreted by Lester as ‘fiction and reality knocking on each other’s doors’; Mario Garcia Torres’ reel-to-reel recording, Recreation of John Fare’s Phantom, Fingers Snapping, According to the Notebook of the Late Marja Erbeckt (2007); Juozas Laivys’ Bratz (2007), a spookily blank cast of the interior of a doll’s head, reminiscent of a funereal mask; and Lester’s Tony Clifton Suit (2007), a gold brocade jacket, which Lester donned on occasion, modelled on one worn by the infamous lounge singer invented by the late comedian Andy Kaufman (a key reference for the John Fare Estate).
Throughout the course of the show, performances were staged both in and out of the gallery, usually accompanied by specially commissioned texts relating to Fare. For Ana Prvacki’s Tent, Quartet, Bows and Elbows (2006), a string quartet shut themselves in a small white tent to play a score Ignas Krunglevicius composed in Fare’s honour. An enchanted audience watched as body parts poked out and the tent heaved and wobbled like a giant, melodious pudding. Later, Aaron Schuster sat high on a podium before a giant reproduction of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1535–41) in the chapel of the École des Beaux-Arts while delivering an entertaining, if phallogocentric, lecture on the history of levitation. His argument: Fare, through the principle of subtraction, was the lightest artist to have ever existed.
On the penultimate evening, René Gabri treated a packed house to an against-the-grain reading of the John Fare Estate’s project as a critical-philosophical exploration of the ontological status of art. After starting with the post-lecture drinks reception, Gabri navigated in reverse through audience questions and texts by Giorgio Agamben and Maurice Blanchot, before launching a power-point presentation encompassing Sylvia Plath, Br’er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby, Virginia Woolf, and others. Gabri’s ability to seem utterly spontaneous while he mapped a presumably calibrated course through seemingly disconnected trajectories was a performative tour de force that opened up even more pathways for collective and individual Fare-inspired creativity. I suspect (and hope) we have not heard the last of John Fare.
Vivian Rehberg
