Demand Acknowledgement

by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Director and Chief Curator

 

Claire Fontaine—a Paris-based collective artist founded in 2004—is a conceptual device, an experiment that arose out of a desire to share intellectual and private property, an effort to dismantle the concept of artistic genius. The people who serve as assistants to Claire Fontaine help foster participation, discussion, and collaboration. Claire Fontaine takes her name from a popular French notebook maker whose factory was located next to her assistants’ studio. By misspelling the popular brand, they turned it into a proper name. Translating the two new words from French into English, the names become “clear fountain,” a reference to American artist Bruce Nauman and his signature performative photographic work Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1966), a picture of the youthful artist posing as a classical nude spouting water.

 

She calls herself a readymade artist, referring to the “difficulty in believing that what you do is unique, and that your inspiration and your art belong in a magical and sacred space.”¹ As Anthony Huberman wrote, “She understands that making art can’t oppose or rebel or subvert the political condition of late capitalism, so she presents herself as… a hole in the landscape through which a revolution might creep, arriving from elsewhere.”²

 

Claire Fontaine specifically chose a female name to address the gender bias female artists have historically faced. The majority of Claire Fontaine’s creative output is expropriationist, taking existing art forms or concepts and infusing them with political content. The strategy works against both self-promotion and viewer expectation. She borrows from a wide range of avant-garde practices, surprising the viewer by creating something that looks familiar, but with a subversive twist.

 

The title of the Aspen Art Museum exhibition, After Marx April After Mao June, is a slogan taken from a 1977 political movement in Italy. At the time, the slogan was used to undermine radical dogma that signified “revolutionary” practices, thus stating an urgent need for discovering other (new) strategies. Claire Fontaine has noted that these “revolutionary references” are “dictated much like those of fashion, and come and go in nonsensical and capricious cycles.”³ The “time of lead” in Bologna, Italy in 1977, despite being given this derogatory associative term, was in fact characterized by vast creativity, including the utilization of the street as a continuous performative space. Claire Fontaine has created and installed in the exhibition a hand-cut cardboard stencil of the slogan that could be used to spray paint the text. It is a fragile and minimal work that relates directly to the political space of the street.

 

After Marx April After Mao June is a text-heavy exhibition. Another form Claire Fontaine appropriates is the work of Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, who since the 1960s has explored the nature of art by focusing on inherent, as well as peripheral ideas, that surround art. Claire Fontaine and Kosuth are both deeply influenced by the work of Marcel Duchamp, another artist appropriated within the exhibition. Kosuth has said, “The ‘value’ of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.”⁴ Claire Fontaine’s This neon sign was made by... (2009) directly references Kosuth’s Five Words in Blue Neon (1965), in which the artist forwards tautological statements and thereby allows the work to be literally what it says it is.⁵ Like other works in the exhibition, This neon sign was made by… is part of a larger series. The work describes a transaction that usually happens in private, thereby making it public. The information can produce a feeling of discomfort, especially when presented in a commercial context, as the amount of the payment to the technician for the work’s fabrication differs significantly from the price paid to the artist and gallery.

 

The other neon sign included in the exhibition is site-specific and located on the exterior of the museum building. Illuminated 24-hours a day, it reads “Foreigners Everywhere” in a written version of the Native American Ute language. The work acknowledges that the concept “foreigner” is dependent on context. The light emitted from the neon is also a silent reminder of a time before colonization when the woods were only inhabited by indigenous people.

 

Claire Fontaine’s six drawings are based on the joke paintings of Richard Prince and are, in fact, studies for paintings themselves. Claire Fontaine appropriates the work of Richard Prince, himself a well-known appropriator. Prince has utilized the joke as a form of ready-made, saying, “I’ve always used… structures as a way to let the… joke, be what it was originally. I can point to them and at least say they’re jokes, which they are.“⁶ The text in Claire Fontaine’s works is lifted from an article in the British paper The Guardian in which a former detainee at the Guantanamo Bay Prison, who was found innocent, describes photographs that document his personal torture. That the detainee had to describe in detail what happened, and thereby relive the embarrassment and shame, is significant to Claire Fontaine. The brutality of that gesture evokes the brutality of racist jokes, some of which are used by Prince. The inexplicability—of the torture, the destruction of the documentary photographs, and all sorts of other implied associations including America’s war on terrorism—is emphasized. Prince too embraces inexplicability, saying, “I’ve used jokes which I don’t get, so I don’t know if they’re funny or not. I’ve used a joke which I don’t really understand.”⁷ Employing the newspaper story as the subject of an artwork also extends its life and highlights its existence.

 

Even Passe-Partout (Aspen-Leurre) (2009), a sculpture composed of a set of handmade lock-picks—potential tools for break-ins—and a comprehensive set of the fishing flies, lures, and hooks used locally, includes a text. The work is a collaboration with a passionate fisherman and connoisseur of the local environment. The flies are presented from biggest to smallest, representing their use through the four seasons. Flies are objects conceived to catch an animal with a lie, presenting themselves as something that they are not. This posture is the opposite of the visual strategies used by Kosuth. The flies are created to be understood by fish. Some are abstract, others are representational, and Claire Fontaine is interested in how this range of stylistic presentation mirrors styles of painting. Passe-Partout (Aspen-Leurre) also functions as a non-traditional journal for Claire Fontaine and her experiences of a specific place. The included “YES on 1” pin evokes an Aspen memory, as Claire Fontaine’s assistants were here during the May 2009 election.

 

First Flight (2006) is a sculpture made from two twenty-five cent coins, minted in 2001 to commemorate the Wright Brothers’ historic “first flight,” modified by adding retractable box cutter blades. As an artwork—and a weapon—that has traveled on airplanes and passed through security detectors, the work references the events of September 11, 2001. First Flight is a starkly unmonumental work that addresses monumental concerns, including political and economic warfare. The work can be read as a diptych, displayed elegantly, splayed in a highly protective Plexiglas vitrine.

 

Rotobalance (2009) relates to Marcel Duchamp’s roto-reliefs, in which flat disks were attached to a motor that made them spin like pinwheels. The name ‘roto-reliefs’ refers to optical illusions that appear as three-dimensional forms when displayed on a rotating surface.⁸ The original Duchamp works were conceived to rotate on a record player. One featured words, the other a series of spirals. Duchamp’s works apparently failed to be appreciated when submitted to a banal technical fair. Claire Fontaine has used Duchamp’s Japanese fish, but replaced his player with a domestic scale, and his spinning image with a fluctuating needle.

 

The upper gallery of the Aspen Art Museum can feel like a domestic space. With two doors positioned nearly opposite each other about three-quarters of the way down the gallery, the assistants to Claire Fontaine noted a distracting energy pattern crossing the space. Using a principle of Feng Shui, they hung two separate crystals, one in the place of this energy stream and the other in the entry doorway. Oddly, as I walk in the gallery, the doors seem to have become less visible.

 

Claire Fontaine’s assistants explained that their collective notion of meaning expands to include everyone who sees and subsequently thinks about the work. Stating that the work belongs to all people that see it, they ask solely that viewers have a sense of its history. They allow that the truth of the work resides within each individual, wherever the resonance occurs. Claire Fontaine has stated that, “the problem is determining how an aesthetic interruption can transform our lives,” and continued by asking, “how this gap can or cannot provide us with weapons to fight our problems.”⁹

 

The work of Claire Fontaine does not let the viewer off easy. It uses beauty as a lure, then points out inconsistencies and assertively demands acknowledgment of elements of culture that polite society struggles to overlook. Her work is brave. It creates a fissure—if not a hole—though which modest solutions to large problems can be contemplated. As Spinoza said, and Claire Fontaine reminds, life attempts to last and fights for doing so.¹⁰ Like the readymade taken from life and realized in art, this is another apt explication for Claire Fontaine herself.

 

NOTES

1 Anthony Huberman, “Claire Fontaine,” interview with Claire Fontaine, Bombsite, Fall 2008, http://bombsite.com/issues/105/articles/3177.
2 ibid.
3 Claire Fontaine, email message to the author, Fall 2009.
4 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” 1969, http://ubu.com/papers/kosuth_philosophy.html.
5 Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, MIT Press, 1999.
6 Marvin Heiferman, “Richard Prince,” Bomb 24/Summer 1988, http://www.bombsite.com/issues/24/articles/1090.
7 ibid.
8 Michael Betancourt, “Precision Optics/Optical Illusions: Inconsistency, Anemic Cinema, and the Rotoreliefs,” Tout-Fait The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, April 2003, http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/betancourt/betancourt.html.
9 Anthony Huberman, “Claire Fontaine,” interview with Claire Fontaine, Bombsite, Fall 2008, http://bombsite.com/issues/105/articles/3177.
10 Niels Van Tomme, “Acts of Freedom: Claire Fontaine,” Claire Fontaine in conversation with Niels Van Tomme, Art Papers, artpapers.org.

Thanks to the assistants of Claire Fontaine