Claire Fontaine

I have been looking around a lot for art that engages critiques of consumption, and have found a lot. But nothing like this.

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based art collective, founded in 2004. Her name was taken from a popular brand of school notebooks, and allows her declare herself a “readymade artist.” Thinking of Duchamp’s Fountain, which was a readymade urinal, one can begin to understand the concept of a “readymade” artist. The artist herself is displaced, deprived of its use value, and undisguised but probably modified. Claire Fontaine works in neon lights, video, sculpture, painting, and text usually appropriating objects and images and experimenting with detournements.

Here’s the catch: Claire Fontaine is not a person- she only exists as a concept. Her “assistants,” Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, physically create her artistic output and speak for her in interviews. Anthony Huberman from Bomb Magazine says:

“By exemplifying readymade and stereotypical identities imposed by social or cultural superstructures, she becomes an empty vessel…She understands that making art can’t oppose or rebel or subvert the political condition of late capitalism, so she presents herself as an artist on strike, a readymade subjectivity, a hole in the landscape through which a revolution might creep, arriving from elsewhere."

The latter half of this quote is clearly in line with the logic of culture-jamming in its admission of the lack of power to single-handedly subvert capitalism. Both Claire Fontaine and culture-jammers rely on individual tactics in the hope that some revolutionary thought will be sparked, or even just a critical approach to capitalism and consumption. Claire Fontaine’s work is also very much in line with Roland Barthe’s declaration of the death of the author.

Claire Fontaine’s work is even more in line with Guy Debord’s notion of The Spectacle as it relates to authenticity and inauthenticity. These two elements function as material in her work. Much of her work appropriates, or expropriates, objects and images. For instance, a Debord film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) is downloaded to play on a customized iPod or PlayStation. La Societe du Spectacle is turned into a brick by covering the brick with the book cover via rubberband and is then placed on a commercial gallery floor:
Christopher Mooney from Art Review says:

“At some level, then, Claire Fontaine sees herself as a Robin Hood of the contemporary art scene. A culture-jamming trickster and radicalizing figure of aesthetic stealth and conscientious objection. A biopolitical activist engaged in a war of liberation against the disciplinary institutions that subjugate our bodies and control our minds. True to her self, true to art, true to her ethics. But not true.”

Claire Fontaine’s existence as a concept, not as a person, is a total spectacle. Categories of human identity are irrelevant because if used, Claire Fontaine would be fiction. She has completed Debord’s process of value moving from being to having, and finally appearing to have. Her name tricks people in thinking that she is a person, a single artist. One relates to Claire Fontaine as Debord claims one would relate to advertisements: an inability to have real relationships with her, but the ability to have relationships with the representations of her, or her art objects.

Mooney poignantly finishes: “That she has named herself after a French stationary brand is appropriate. Claire Fontaine is a blank page: empty, yet full of promise.”