Claire Fontaine

Conceived in 2004 as a "readymade artist," the Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine presents itself as a fictional artist in an ongoing conceptual project critiquing the art market. Appropriating the name of a popular brand of French notebooks, the group's members use this construct to approach the notion of artistic identity itself as being the equivalent of Warhol's Brillo Box or Duchamp's Fountain—a preexisting object that can be transformed by recasting it in a new context. Work created by Claire Fontaine often intentionally recalls that of other artists, exploring common contemporary tropes with the goal of "interrogat[ing] the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today," according to an artist statement.

Issues of labor, production, and commerce are often central to the collective's work: in the video The Assistants (2011), conceived as a kind of "self-portrait," the poet Douglas Park reads from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's text of the same name, which considers the position of the "assistant" in folklore and literature. Likewise, in the series Trust, Fontaine obtained signed blank checks from each of the galleries representing "her" work internationally. Displayed as aesthetic objects, they highlight the commercial underpinnings of the contemporary art world, but also theoretically allow a collector who purchases one as an artwork to transform it back into a financial instrument by depositing it into his or her own bank account.

Claire Fontaine has been the subject of group shows internationally, including Economies at North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (2010), After Marx April, After Mao June at the Aspen Art Museum (2009), and Instructions for the Sharing of Private Property at the Kitchen (2008). Fontaine has also been included in notable group exhibitions such as the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), Manifesta 7 (2008), and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Click here to read about Claire Fontaine's show about spiritual recycling, "Redemption," at Metro Pictures.