images | text

Claire Fontaine
Artists’ collective, founded in 2004 Fransa / Based in Paris, France

Jens Hoffmann (JH): I see many intersections between Claire Fontaine’s work and that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres—for instance the employment of a minimal form of aesthetic expression to disseminate radical political thought.

Claire Fontaine (CF): One could say that they share a use of metaphors and allusions on a visual and a conceptual level. This can translate into minimal aesthetic forms that capture and tame disturbing things: taboos, political problems, things that cannot be directly addressed without being misunderstood.

JH: Gonzalez-Torres’s lyrical approach was a tool to translate seemingly personal issues and conflicts into more accessible, universal subjects. How does Claire make her work relevant and accessible to audiences beyond the privileged confines of the art world?

CF: It’s an interesting phenomenon that people who share the same sensibility as us, and are outside the art world, reproduce images of our works and some of our texts as fanzines or photocopies. We are very happy that the work can travel without us, free of our company and supervision.

JH: I would be curious to hear where Claire stands politically. I always imagined her as a militant Marxist like the character Véronique in JeanLuc Godard’s film La Chinoise, always the first one on the barricades with a brick in one hand and the Communist Manifesto in the other.

CF: To clarify: Claire is not a fictitious character, it’s the name that we give to a shared space of collaboration. And there is no theatrical dimension to our political position. We are rather serious about what  we do. Our political beliefs are  obviously only partially reflected  in our artwork. Working in the contemporary art space allows us to investigate problems and feelings that don’t even have the right of citizenship within political activism, even the most libertarian one possible, so what we do is certainly not agitprop.

JH: Claire’s political point of view might not be theatrical, but there is certainly a theatrical dimension to her work, one that in my opinion is also somewhat humorous and ironic.

CF: It is inevitable to find a theatrical dimension in a visual work that is exhibited. In the past you have said that our sculptures “perform.” We have since thought about it and although it seems right, we can’t quite explain how it happens.

JH: One of your works consists of a brick wrapped in the cover of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. That seems quite full of performative potential.

CF: A brick is a warning, something that gets thrown through your window with a message wrapped around it, so we are quoting this violent procedure. The actual text of the book is not present in the sculpture, so the recipient must seek out the book elsewhere to read the warning. The enforced encounter between the rough surface of the brick and the archival photographic paper is also very interesting. These two surfaces don’t really want to be together, so one must force them with an elastic band or glue.