Text entry taken from the journal of Tony Cappi
In 2005 Claire Fontaine released her text Ready-Made Artists and Human Strike: A few Clarifications . Similar to my last entry discussing Shoji Yamaguchi, Claire Fontaine is a pseudonym, although she differentiates herself in a few key ways. Fontaine is the pseudonym of an artist collective, describing herself as a readymade artist, crucially this is made clear from the get go, unlike Yamaguchi, Fontaine is no dupe.
“The construction site of the self has always been a collective matter”
This quote lies central to understanding the function of the pseudonym of Claire Fontaine, that the agency of ones own identity does not belong to the individual. If identity is built upon selections of discrete categories, we shall inaccurately refer to the mas labels, and the unique ways they intersect each other, then many of these labels are simply out of our control, i.e. race or sexuality.
The presence of categories that we do have control over i.e. hobbies or friendships, things that we choose to spend our time on, things that we do, could be construed as an argument for agency over our own identity. But this argument would not acknowledge that the extent of this agency is inconsistent across people, and not something that an individual has control over. Furthermore, the very question “what do you do?”, under capitalism, means “what is your job?” or “what discrete labour do you spend your life doing?”, cementing that any illusion of continuous choice is overruled by the discrete tasks of doing that are available to us.
Agency over who we are and what we do therefore stands on shaky ground, but even if a hypothetical person did exist, with complete agency over the decisions that are provided to them and what the choose of those options, Fontaine’s idea of the self still stands. Fontaine argues that the identity of the self goes beyond what we do, and lies within what is perceived in what we do/are. I may be able to decide to be xyz, but the subcontext inscribed into the label of xyz is a “result from a social negotiation to which we were not even invited”.
Thus, it is clear that the idea of the self is constructed by the social mass. The identity of the individual exists within the negative space of the collective.
It seems easy now to make the leap that Claire Fontaine exists through this structure, that Fontaine is the identity moulded by the collective of artists behind her. But this would only serve to reference the social structure of the self, rather than subvert it. This way of viewing Fontaine might reject ideas of singularity, by disguising work of individual artists through her name, but would support the value given to authorship under capitalism. By linking the collective so linearly to Fontaine, we undermine what she stands for. So what is it that we are missing?
One of the simple tricks of Fontaine, perhaps her greatest work, is her. Frieze art magazine states “She describes herself in her biography as a ready-made artist” important to Fontaine is that we personify her, that we accept the wishes of the art collective and refer to them as something that they are not. Fontaine allows us to believe that her pseudonym is important within itself, she makes us feel as though we are accepting of something contemporary, of the next big thing in the art world. Yet in 2006, she releases some instructions of the sharing of private property in which she advocates for theft, illegal entry and the destruction of the concept of private property. This work was met with rejection, the rejection of the work for advocating for illegal actions, but more importantly the rejection of its concepts through our continued existence within, and therefore support of, the structure of private property.
By luring us into acceptance of her and then forcing our hands into a rejection of her, Fontaine is positioning us around her, along with the artists who create her work, and generating a social mass that negotiates what exactly she is. Via us, the viewer or consumer, Claire Fontaine becomes a fully actualised self, forcing onto us the responsibility of the contradiction of the very values that she advocates for, subverting the idea of the self by paradoxically becoming it.