CLAIRE FONTAINE

CLOSED FOR PRAYERS
2006
neon sign, 130 x 36 cm

Closed for prayers is a bilingual neon sign that comes from a sticker conceived for shop windows or doors. The Arabic text inevitably evokes the dramatic situation of the conflicts that profoundly trouble the Middle East. Prayers come when action becomes impossible and the struggle seems desperate. Interrupting work in order to pray is an action comparable to a form of strike, to an impossibility to keep doing business during times of disasters. The prayers mentioned here are also incomprehensible to non-Arabic speakers; they can be perceived as the irrational threat that more violence could be perpetrated in the name of a foreign god.

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. She often describes herself as nothing but the “nth ready-made artist, tenth meaning-transmitter in the general buzz”. Yet they want “to create images for a mutiny to come, to transcribe symptoms of the crisis, visually, and conceptually.” She is born and has grown up in the time of totalitarian democracies, where terms like “power” and “work”- which had led us in the past to imagine radical transformations of the society - have been progressively turned against themselves. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box - as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes - there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.” Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property. The wasteland left by the disappearence of the author is Claire Fontaine’s playground and her laboratory of desubjectivisation.
CLAIRE FONTAINE (2004, Paris, FR). Based in Paris.
Recent shows include Claire Fontaine, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Perplexed in Public, Lisson Gallery, London, Counter-Poison, Komplot, Bruxelles, Revolutions - Forms That Turn, 16th Biennale of Sydney, Valeurs Croisées, Les Ateliers de Rennes - Biennale d’art Contemporain, Rennes, Peripheral Look and Collective Body, Museion, Bolzano, Claire Fontaine, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Unmonumental - the object in the 21stcentury, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Irresistible Force,Tate Modern, London, The history of a decade that has not yet been named, Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary - Optimism in the age of global war,10th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul and Capitalism is not working, Gaga Galería de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico D.F. She is now preparing a book to be published by les Editions La Fabrique, Paris around the concepts of ready-made artist and human strike.