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 to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box - as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes - there is always the possibility of what she calls the "human strike." Only two years old, Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property. Recent shows include, Grey Flags, The Sculpture Center, New York, Group Therapy, Museo d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Bolzano, Incipit, Espace Paul Ricard, Paris and The Look of Law, University of California, Irvine. Claire Fontaine is represented by Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York. She is now preparing a book to be published by les Editions La Fabrique, Paris around the concepts of ready-made artist and human strike. - Paris, September 2006.

http://clairefontaine.ws