P.I.G.S. by Claire Fontaine

Finally I got my explanation to a post published a year or so ago on this blog, a caricature of a pig on which was written "Greece". It came from a (group of) artists - Claire Fontaine, and art critic Ecaterina Degot, and not from the magazine who published that caricature. For those of you who still wonder about it, here is the explanation: P.I.G.S is the acronym for the 4 EU countries deeply indebted to EU. P stands for Portugal, I - Italy, G - Greece, S - Spain. Claire Fontaine showed a work entitled P.I.G.S at the recent Moscow Biennale. It was an installation made out of matches closely thrust to a wall in fairly large shapes of these 4 countries' geographical maps. The matches were lately burned. (Perhaps, in an attempt to get rid of the problem, but also it is an indicator to a great explosive potential in these territories.) Interestingly, it was one of the most problematic works presented in Moscow. Apparently, it was very difficult and time consuming to build. See the middle video below... (The explanation is made in Russian.) Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, 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." 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. She is now preparing a book around the concepts of ready-made artist and human strike. Paris, June 2009 http://www.clairefontaine.ws/index.html