Claire Fontaine: Economies

Claire Fontaine, CHANGE, 2006, 12 twenty-five cent coins, steel box-cutter blades, solder and rivets. Courtesy Galerie Neu, Berlin.

By Sophie Videment

The first retrospective exhibition of the mysterious Paris-based artist Claire Fontaine opened at the MOCA on Thursday, June 3. Fontaine’s works are included in some of the best contemporary art collections, such as the Jumex Collection; one of her works from this collection was on view at the Bass Museum of Art as part of the exhibition “Where Do We Go from Here?”

But you will never read any interview with her, nor will you ever meet her or talk to her. Why? Because Claire Fontaine is not a flesh-and-blood artist. She is a “collective artist.” In 2004, the collective took the name of a French notebook brand and presented Fontaine as a “ready-made” artist. But Fontaine is not just the name of an artists’ collaboration; Claire Fontaine is their identity. Fontaine’s “assistants”-the real artists, Fulvia Carnivale and James Thornhill-use this identity to connect their creativities and take from it a common perspective from which to approach their work.

The idea is not new. Recall the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti, who re-created himself in the 1970s as Alighiero e Boetti (Alighiero and Boetti), a dual persona reflecting the opposing factors presented in his work. Or, even before, Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy (Duchamp dressed up as a woman), whose signature appeared on several of Duchamp’s works and who was photographed by the most adept photographer of glamour, Man Ray.

Indeed, Claire Fontaine creates deliberate links to recent art history. Most of her works are generated through a process she describes as “expropriation.” Her neo-conceptual art often looks like other people’s work and plays with the notion of authorship. “Claire Fontaine’s work asks us to reconsider our assumptions as art viewers as well as members of society and to question daily facets of life that are often taken for granted,” says MOCA associate curator Ruba Katrib. “It is a visual meditation on the concept of ownership today, which is especially relevant in the current economic climate.”¹

The beginning of the show is marked by the sound of a vacuum cleaner. In Recession Sculpture (American Gas) (2009), Fontaine creates a system to reduce the evidence of energy consumption with a vacuum cleaner hooked up to a propane gas meter that sucks air out of the meter, causing its numbers to go backward. Passe-partout is a keychain filled with lock picks, a happy Barack Obama picture and an airplane charm. It depicts menaces and despair behind hope.

One of the most poignant works is the black-and-white video Suicide Stack, which presents the text from the suicide note written by Joseph Stack, the self-employed software engineer who flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, last February. He writes about his desperate attempts to “make it” legitimately, and his feeling that the tax authorities have ruined his life. It’s a cry of disenchantment with the American dream, which ends in terrible violence.

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“Claire Fontaine: Economies” runs through August 22, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

Notes

¹ Press release materials of “Claire Fontaine: Economies,” Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, June 2010.

Sophie Videment is an art critic based in Miami. She is an expert and art consultant on contemporary art, and is member of the Paris-based European Chamber of Expert-Advisors in Fine Art.