Università degli Studi di Padova, Paris VIII / Glasgow School of Art
Known for
Conceptual art, Human Strike, ready-made artist
Notable work
Foreigners Everywhere (Arabic), 2005, In God They Trust, 2004
Website
www.clairefontaine.ws
Claire Fontaine, Untitled (on vous intoxique!) (2018)When women strike the world stops (2020)/ Newsfloor (Le Monde Pixelisé) (2020)Claire Fontaine, In God They Trust (2005). Twenty-five-cent coin, steel box-cutter blade, solder and rivet.Claire Fontaine, Untitled (Negative) (2016)
Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo who declared themselves her assistants.[1] Since 2018 Claire Fontaine lives and works in Palermo and has a studio in the historical centre of the Kalsa near Piazza Magione.
After lifting her name from a popular brand of French school notebooks and stationary, Claire Fontaine declared herself a readymade artist[2][3] and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Claire Fontaine translated into English means "Clear Fountain" and can also be conceptually linked to the artwork Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, known as the most famous readymade.[4]
Work
Claire Fontaine uses the concept of the readymade as a way of criticising "production" disguised as a creation of more and more artefacts that are desirable because they superficially appear as new. Generally she works with appropriation on a formal level and she hijacks contents, using sculpture, installation, video and painting to create an emotionally loaded criticism of the author and the forms of authority at this stage of capitalism. This aesthetic approach that she describes as "expropriation", a way of giving an existential use value to pre-exisitng objects and artworks, also addresses the general crisis of singularity, which she describes as the individual and collective impossibility to give a meaning to one's life under the current political circumstance and the systematic surveillance, repression and countless limitations of our freedom. Claire Fontaine prefers to integrate the existing art circuit to create complicities and foster change which entails partaking in the mechanisms and subjects of the art industry including collectors, dealers and institutions.[5]
In an Interview with Circa Art Magazine in 2008 she states: "I think forming gangs, mafias, collectives, networks, bands of people is a way to survive in the hostile capitalist system and then eventually a way to become a pressure group, in order to transform these particular conditions."[6]
Writing and text based pieces play an important role in Claire Fontaine's work. She distributes texts in her exhibitions and she uses different registers in her writing such as poetry, critical theory, essays and manifestos. The artist criticises the hierarchy between visual and verbal expression.
In February 2020 she was invited by Maria Grazia Chiuri to create the mise-en-scène for Dior's Autumn/Winter 2020 collection for Paris Fashion Week which took place in the Les Tuileries. The artist used the catwalk to perform an operation of Institutional Critique investing the floor and the ceiling; she presented Newsfloor (Le Monde Pixelisé) (2020) and several large suspended LED signs stating for example: Patriarchy Kills Love, When women strike the world stops, Feminine beauty is a ready-made or Patriarchy = Climate emergency.[7][8]
Towards a Theory of Magic Materialism[22], Vers une théorie du matérialisme magique, Diaphanes, Issue 8/9 Winter 2019/20
Making Life (im)possible in Jens Hoffmann, In the Meantime. Speculations on Art, Curating, and Exhibitions, Sternberg Press, 2020, ISBN9783956794919[23]
The Visitor as a Commercial Partner: Notes on the 58th Venice Biennale,[24]E-flux Journal No. 102 – September 2019
L'anno in cui la paura andò in sciopero in È solo l'inizio. Rifiuto, affetti, creatività nel lungo '68[25], edited by I. Bussoni, N. Martino, Ombre Corte, 2018, ISBN9788869481079[26]
If our Lives are Black. On Angela Davis and Gina Dent's conference at La Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris, May Quarterly Journal,[27] #.17, 14 March 2017
The Emancipated Reader, May Quarterly Journal,[37] #.1 06. 2009
Human strike within the field of libidinal economy, Descent to Revolution,[38] edited by James Voorhies, pp. 144–151, Bureau for Open Culture, ISBN0979747643[39] 2009
Preface to Coco Fusco, Petit manuel de torture à l'usage des femmes-soldats,[40] Les Prairies Ordinaires, Paris
Interviews
L’immanenza del linguaggio: un dialogo con Claire Fontaine,[41] Anita Chari, Simone Ciglia, Flashart Italia, June 2020
L’arte di essere libere[42], Interview with Eva Morletto, Grazia, no. 23 21.05.2020
Claire Fontaine Collective Capital,[43] Interview with Evrim Oralkan, Collecteurs, March 2020
Pretend to be dead, An Interview with Claire Fontaine,[44] Kyra Kordoski, White Fungus, 2015
Giving Shape to Painful Things,[45] Interview Andrew Culp and Ricky Crano, Radical Philosophy, RP175 (Sept/Oct 2012)
Claire Fontaine.La nostra Italia bruciata che non-cambia mai, Laura Larcan,[46]La Repubblica, 3/2/2012
Grève humaine (interrompue), a conversation between Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, May Quarterly Journal,[47] No. 4 March 2010
In Life There is No Purity, Only Struggle, Interview with Bart van der Heide, Metropolis M magazine (February/March 2009)
Acts of Freedom, Interview with Niels Van Tomme, Arts and Papers[48] 33.06 (September 2009)
The Glue and the Wedge: The Cases of Claire Fontaine and Canell and Watkins[49], Isobel Harbison and Ilaria Gianni No. 124, Circa Art Magazine[50] 2008
Macht Arbeit, Interview with Stephanie Kleefeld Texte zur Kunst, Issue 73, 2009
Claire Fontaine by Anthony Huberman,[51]Bomb Magazine No. 105, 10.2008
Requiem for Jean Charles de Menezes[53] : Notes on the state of Exception (2005). Text pile or window announcement, A5 double-sided photocopy, no copyright.2005: Requiem for Jean-Charles de Menezes, Tratari, Graz AT
2005: Étrangers Partout, 21 rue Ste Marthe, Paris FR
2006: Siamo tutti singolarità qualunque, Il piccolo Museion, progetto Garutti, Museion Bolzano IT
2006: Couvrir Les Feux,[54] Zoo Galerie,[55] Nantes, FR
2007: The 00's, The history of a decade that has not yet been named, Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon 2007, Institut d’Art Contemporaine, Villeurbanne, Lyon FR
2009: Is freedom therapeutic?, Barock: art, science, faith and technology in the contemporary age (curators: Eduardo Cicelyn, Mario Codognato), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Napoli[60]
2011: No Family Life[61], Air de Paris,[62] Paris[63]
2012: Généralités[64], La Douane, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris[65]
^Harbison, Isobel; Gianni, Ilaria (2008). "The Glue and the Wedge: The Cases of Claire Fontaine and Canell and Watkins". Circa (124): 48–53. doi:10.2307/25564920. ISSN0263-9475. JSTOR25564920.
^Katrib, Ruba. (2010). Claire Fontaine : economies. McDonough, Tom, 1969–, Claire Fontaine (Artist collective), Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami, Fla.). North Miami, FL: Museum of Contemporary Art. ISBN978-1-888708-38-7. OCLC652540968.
^FONTAINE, CLAIRE. (2020). LA GRVE HUMAINE : et lart de crer la libert. [Place of publication not identified]: DIAPHANES. ISBN978-2-88928-046-9. OCLC1145103636.
^È solo l'inizio : rifiuto, affetti, creatività nel lungo '68. Bussoni, Ilaria,, Martino, Nicolas (Prima edizione ed.). Verona. ISBN978-88-6948-107-9. OCLC1090171407.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
^Fontaine, Claire (Fall 2009). "Toward an Imageless Political Education". Diacritics, A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Johns Hopkins University Press, No.23. 39: 7–19 – via Project Muse.
^Descent to revolution. Voorhies, James Timothy., Bureau for Open Culture., Columbus College of Art and Design. Columbus: Bureau for Open Culture. 2010. ISBN978-0-9797476-4-9. OCLC649513797.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
^Harbison, Isobel; Gianni, Ilaria (2008). "The Glue and the Wedge: The Cases of Claire Fontaine and Canell and Watkins". Circa (124): 48–53. doi:10.2307/25564920. ISSN0263-9475. JSTOR25564920.
^Independent Police Complaints Commission (England and Wales) (2007). Stockwell one : investigation into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell underground station on 22 July 2005. Independent Police Complaints Commission. OCLC191242302.
^Considine, Liam (2018-09-20). "Claire Fontaine, Redemptions". In Dossin, Catherine (ed.). France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 269. ISBN978-1-5013-4154-0.
A Companion to Feminist Art, Hilary Robinson (Editor), Maria Elena Buszek (Editor), Dana Arnold (Series Editor) The Hidden Abode Beneath/Behind/Beyond the Factory Floor, Gendered Labor, and the Human Strike: Claire Fontaine’s Italian Marxist Feminism, (p. 369) Jaleh Mansoor, Wiley-Blackwell, 2019 ISBN9781118929155[7] 2019
Collettivi di artisti, sul mercato l’unione fa la forza,[8] Silvia Anna Barrilà, Il Sole 24 Ore, 04.08.2019
Claire Fontaine: la borsa e la vita[9] in Il primo amore, Umberto Sebastiano, 23.03.19
^Vishmidt, Marina. (2019). Speculation as a mode of production : forms of value subjectivity in art and capital. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. ISBN978-1-64259-051-7. OCLC1088740454.
^Frantzen, Mikkel Krause (29 November 2019). Going nowhere, slow : the aesthetics and politics of depression. Winchester, UK. ISBN978-1-78904-215-3. OCLC1124609251.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)