If you See Something, Say Something

Exhausted by the ruins of authorship, of political activism, of the May 68 rebellion in Paris, and of strategies of opposition, Claire Fontaine prefers what she calls the human strike, a subjectivity that gets rid of itself, a whatever singularity. By exemplifying readymade and stereotypical identities imposed by social or cultural superstructures, she becomes an empty vessel. Despite her state of exhaustion, Claire Fontaine creates an art that seeks to transform political crisis into subjective emancipation. She understands that making art cant oppose or rebel or subvert the political condition of late capitalism, so she presents herself as an artist on strike, a readymade subjectivity, a hole in the landscape through which a revolution might creep, arriving from elsewhere.

Anthony Huberman, Claire Fontaine, BOMB 105/Fall 2008.