Claire Fontaine is an artist collective that was founded in 2004 and lives in Paris. Having derived its name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine has self-declared a “readymade artist” and began to develop a neo-conceptual art that often looks like release of work other people.
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 emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, diversion, and development of various devices for the sharing of intellectual property and private property.
