Lot 45: Claire Fontaine (Active since 2004)

Claire Fontaine (Active since 2004)
If you See Something, Say Something
leather rucksack and 15kgs of 'assorted party pack' childrens candies
14 x 13 x 12in. (35.5 x 33 x 30.5cm.)
Executed in 2005

New York, Reena Spauling Fine Art, Foreigners Everywhere September-October 2005.
San Antonio, Artpace, Power Play, May-June 2007.

BUIA Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Artist's Resale Right ("droit de Suite"). If the Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer also agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
Exhausted by the ruins of authorship, of political activism, of the May 68 rebellion in Paris, and of strategies of opposition, Claire Fontaine prefers what she calls the human strike, 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 cant 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.

Anthony Huberman, Claire Fontaine, BOMB 105/Fall 2008.