Claire Fontaine
Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004, currently living and working in Palermo, Sicily. (2023)
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, whose name was taken from a common brand of French stationary. By declaring herself a “ready-made artist” she treats the concept of authorship as an empty, standardized convention perpetuated by contemporary capitalism. Fontaine questions the possible revolutionary use-value of the artwork, and the subjectivization of all contemporary beings as “whatever singularities.” Her works include neon signs, sculptures, videos, light-boxes, and texts. (2018)
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After deriving her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a ‘readymade artist’. (2006)
"The people composing Claire Fontaine are not all the same that were part of Tiqqun. Tiqqun, the magazine, was the concretion of a collective process. Writing somehow wasn’t the focus, we were part of a social movement around 1997 in Paris that questioned the notions of work, employment, the use of time and the distribution of wealth, amongst other things. It was an interesting movement because it assembled lots of subjects with no professional or social qualification, it was a movement of whatever singularities that questioned the organization of society, the class structure, the way people were professionalized and formed inside universities—we used to meet in an amphitheater in Jussieu every day, but it wasn’t a student’s movement at all. There we realized that the practice of our being together and discussing all the time wasn’t creating a common language and that this continuous and daily assembly wasn’t going anywhere in terms of building a political lexicon we could all agree upon. So the first motivation to write Tiqqun was to group a series of concepts such as Bloom, Jeune-Fille, the Imaginary Party to quote some of them—the term of human strike appeared in Tiqqun 2—to define things and phenomena that didn’t have a name but were present. Then the political, social and human situation we lived through changed enormously: Tiqqun 2 reflects this change and a certain amount of despair that came when the times we are still living through announced themselves on September 11, 2001." (2016)
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