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Item: Action: The Man Measuring the Clouds

Jan Fabre

1997-2000

Performance, various.
Materials:

Different locations
Duration: various 

In homage to his dead twin brother Emile Fabre, the artist attempts to measure the immeasurable: the clouds. This action, which led to the famous bronze sculpture, is based on a quote from the prisoner and ornithologist Robert Stroud after his release: ‘I’m going to measure the clouds’.

 

'I'm in a poetic hell!
Today I installed a new work in a window display
box in Offerandestraat (the only-free pedestrian
shopping street in Antwerp, masses of pf people pass
along it).
I modelled a little man measuring the clouds, in clay.
And above him hang clouds of expanded
polystyrene.
I painted it all light grey-blue.
It is an offering, a tribute,
to my dead brother, Emile Fabre'

(Jan Fabre, Antwerp, 3 December 1978)

 

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