Claire Fontaine
Italian-British conceptual visual artist
Claire Fontaine is a feminist conceptual art persona created in Paris in 2004 by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill, an Italian-British artist duo who declared themselves her "assistants". Since 2018 Claire Fontaine lives and works in Palermo and has a studio in the historical centre of the Kalsa near Piazza Magione.
After lifting her name from a popular brand of French school notebooks and stationery, 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. Claire Fontaine translated into English means "Clear Fountain" and can also be conceptually linked to the artwork Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, known as the most famous readymade.
Work
Claire Fontaine uses the concept of the readymade as a way of criticising "production" disguised as a creation of more and more artefacts that are desirable because they superficially appear as new. Generally she works with appropriation on a formal level and she hijacks contents, using sculpture, installation, video and painting to create an emotionally loaded criticism of the author and the forms of authority at this stage of capitalism. This aesthetic approach that she describes as "expropriation", a way of giving an existential use value to pre-existing objects and artworks, also addresses the general crisis of singularity, which she describes as the individual and collective impossibility to give a meaning to one's life under the current political circumstance and the systematic surveillance, repression and countless limitations of our freedom. Claire Fontaine prefers to integrate the existing art circuit to create complicities and foster change which entails partaking in the mechanisms and subjects of the art industry including collectors, dealers and institutions.
In an Interview with Circa Art Magazine in 2008 she states: "I think forming gangs, mafias, collectives, networks, bands of people is a way to survive in the hostile capitalist system and then eventually a way to become a pressure group, in order to transform these particular conditions."
Writing and text based pieces play an important role in Claire Fontaine's work. She distributes texts in her exhibitions and she uses different registers in her writing such as poetry, critical theory, essays and manifestos.
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This entry incorporates text from “Claire Fontaine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.