Claire Fontaine lives in Paris. Her \u201cassistants\u201d are Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo. With a readymade name\u2014taken from a popular brand of French stationery\u2014Claire Fontaine also describes herself as a readymade artist who finds herself working within the context of a politically impotent contemporary society. As her assistants, Carnevale and Thornhill make her objects, paintings, neons, videos, and, in the case of this interview, answer questions about her work. Written texts are also at the core of her work and accompany each exhibition.<\/p>\n
Exhausted by the ruins of authorship, of political activism, of the May \u201968 rebellion in Paris, and of strategies of opposition, Claire Fontaine prefers what she calls the \u201chuman strike,\u201d a subjectivity that gets rid of itself, a whatever singularity. By exemplifying readymade and stereotypical identities imposed by social or cultural superstructures, she becomes an empty vessel. Despite her state of exhaustion, Claire Fontaine creates an art that seeks to transform political crisis into subjective emancipation. She understands that making art can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Claire Fontaine lives in Paris. Her \u201cassistants\u201d are Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo. With a readymade name\u2014taken from a popular brand of French stationery\u2014Claire Fontaine also describes herself as a readymade artist who finds herself working… Continue Reading