Claude Closky

Claude Closky, a French artist who has exhibited widely in Europe, often draws on mass media and advertising strategies as sources for his work. His early works played with that seemingly irresistible desire to construct taxonomic systems, and with the equally ubiquitous wish to identify order to any apparently inchoate or amorphous entity–or, with its converse, an instinctive compulsion to disrupt the systematic by taking it to its logical if absurd conclusion. In one book, for example, he listed in alphabetical order the first one thousand numbers; in another he amassed thousands of injunctions from advertising arranged by pace, going from long suggestions to quick, brief imperatives.

Whether in the form of cheaply printed books, unlimited editions of single-channel videos, posters or wallpaper, multiples are Closky's preferred vehicles. Given its demotic range, ready availability, and relatively low-cost production, the World Wide Web has become an equally appealing medium in which to work. Do you want love or lust? (1997) is a web project he created for Dia Art Foundation that presents a seemingly endless series of questions addressed directly to the website visitors. Taken from such sources as magazines, billboards, and TV commercials, these questions offer a choice between alternative answers, which in turn lead to different sets of questions.The site is meant to suggest the seductive, yet necessarily inconclusive and even futile tenor of the questions we are confronted with daily, questions which, though superficial, flippant, and often repetitive, are somehow enjoyable.

Closky has had solo exhibitions at Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d´Art Moderne in Paris, Akbank Art Center in Istanbul, and Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne in Vitry-sur-Seine. His work has been included in group exhibitions at MKG127, in Toronto, Casino Luxembourg, and Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane.

Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation