Biograhy
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a ‘readymade artist’ and began elaborating a version of neo-conceptual art that often resembles other people’s work. Using neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice is an ongoing interrogation of the political impotency and crisis of singularity that defines contemporary art and life. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box – displaced, deprived of use-value and exchangeable – then there is always the possibility of the ‘human strike’. Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She rises up from the ruins of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements and the production of various devices for sharing intellectual and private property.
