Claire Fontaine
19 Jun - 01 Aug 2009
CLAIRE FONTAINE
“Recessions”
Opening 18.06.2009 Duration 19.06.2009 – 01.08.2009
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. 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 life. Recessions is her first exhibition at galerie Gabriele Senn - it departs from the contingency of today’s political and economical climate to reach the representations and the metaphors adopted to depict desire. The machines as a trope of human sexuality densely populate the history of art of the twentieth century. They present the lack of sensibility, the compulsion to repetition and the permanent temptation to be defunctionalized. The two Recession Sculptures from Claire Fontaine display machines that are freely inspired by the subterfuge that poor consumers invent in order to reduce their electricity or gas bills, they remind us that fraud has been and will remain an essential tool of survival as long as economy will be a murderous machine. Bijoux de famille (Family jewels) is a sculpture composed of crystals and a container for cat litter that evokes the space of inheritance as a neurotic and undesirable one. The two orgasm neons are visual transpositions of two graphics drawn by Italian feminist philosopher Carla Lonzi* in her essential book Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s spit on Hegel), 1970 that schematise the different possible trajectories of masculine and feminine orgasms. The insistency on the clitoral and the vaginal orgasm in women was the main topic of her second book La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale (The clitoral woman and the vaginal woman). The political implication of the complexity of pleasure keeps coming back in her writings and Claire Fontaine pays homage to her lesson by transposing it into two monumental and luminous works. Given the proximity between the curve of the extinction of pleasure in both sexes after the orgasm and the graphics displaying the economical catastrophe that the world is going to encounter in the next months, the link between libidinal economy and the monetary one raise as a question that the exhibition leaves open.
“Recessions”
Opening 18.06.2009 Duration 19.06.2009 – 01.08.2009
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. 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 life. Recessions is her first exhibition at galerie Gabriele Senn - it departs from the contingency of today’s political and economical climate to reach the representations and the metaphors adopted to depict desire. The machines as a trope of human sexuality densely populate the history of art of the twentieth century. They present the lack of sensibility, the compulsion to repetition and the permanent temptation to be defunctionalized. The two Recession Sculptures from Claire Fontaine display machines that are freely inspired by the subterfuge that poor consumers invent in order to reduce their electricity or gas bills, they remind us that fraud has been and will remain an essential tool of survival as long as economy will be a murderous machine. Bijoux de famille (Family jewels) is a sculpture composed of crystals and a container for cat litter that evokes the space of inheritance as a neurotic and undesirable one. The two orgasm neons are visual transpositions of two graphics drawn by Italian feminist philosopher Carla Lonzi* in her essential book Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s spit on Hegel), 1970 that schematise the different possible trajectories of masculine and feminine orgasms. The insistency on the clitoral and the vaginal orgasm in women was the main topic of her second book La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale (The clitoral woman and the vaginal woman). The political implication of the complexity of pleasure keeps coming back in her writings and Claire Fontaine pays homage to her lesson by transposing it into two monumental and luminous works. Given the proximity between the curve of the extinction of pleasure in both sexes after the orgasm and the graphics displaying the economical catastrophe that the world is going to encounter in the next months, the link between libidinal economy and the monetary one raise as a question that the exhibition leaves open.