CLAIRE FONTAINE: IN CONVERSATION WITH THE EDITORS
This interview, here translated into English, seeks to expand on the textual-artistic output of the collective artist Claire Fontaine. Conducted in the winter/summer of 2016, the interview seeks to contextualise the political writings of the collective through questions on their relationship to the academy, to activism, and to temporality, while presenting their position on The Invisible Committee and contemporary art practice today.
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Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004, comprising Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill. After appropriating her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” whose practice calls into question a lack of political agency and the crisis of the singularity of the subject, conditions which according to the collective, characterise contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she terms ‘la grève humaine’ - the human strike.
This interview, forms one part of the book 'Claire Fontaine: Em vista de uma prática ready-made'. The intention of the author and the editors was to clarify without false utopias, in this second moment, the inherent possibilities in the text's dialog between reader/spectator.
Download the interview
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004, comprising Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill. After appropriating her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” whose practice calls into question a lack of political agency and the crisis of the singularity of the subject, conditions which according to the collective, characterise contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s Brillo box – as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes – there is always the possibility of what she terms ‘la grève humaine’ - the human strike.
This interview, forms one part of the book 'Claire Fontaine: Em vista de uma prática ready-made'. The intention of the author and the editors was to clarify without false utopias, in this second moment, the inherent possibilities in the text's dialog between reader/spectator.
auflynn [at] arts.ucla.edu
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is an Assistant Professor at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. Working as an anthropologist and curator, Alex’s practice explores the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of enquiry. Researching collaboratively with activists, curators and artists in Brazil since 2007, Alex explores the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts, prompting the theorisation of fields such as the production of knowledge, the pluriversal, and the social and aesthetic dimensions of form.