Foot hits floor.  The whoosh of a vacuum cleaner startles.  The vacuum is hooked up to the gallery gas meter.  Writ large, “Greve humaine” or “human strike” is spelled out with over 50,000 unburned matches.  The matches are coated with flame retardant.  Checkmate.  Alarming possibility of gas explosion is deflected by the reassuring deferral of circularity, echoing the material circulating system of the pipes of vacuum cleaner and gas meter.  Succinct.  Neat.  Very neat.  Vacuums extract, gas expands, matches ignite, retardant extinguishes.

This is the objective correlative for “human strike” described by Fontaine as “an unarticulated refusal,” unlike a workers’ strike, not “a means to an end” but a “pure means,” a “double bind.”  A human strike can be work stoppage or an excess of work, unremunerated, like mother’s love.  And so this created space is domestic, not just by virtue of the vacuum cleaner, but there are domesticated plants, basketed, hung, slowly revolving.  More circles in a decentralized practice full of them.  “Claire Fontaine” is a Paris-based collective of artists, founded in 2004.  Works in other venues have featured phrases such as “the educated consumer is our best customer” and “the true artist produces the most prestigious commodity” scrawled in snail-curled shapes.  “Claire” has declared herself a “readymade artist.”  So the fondness for the linguistic spirals of Duchamp is come by honestly, in homage. Fontaine is allegedly fond of Brecht also and it is the physical engagement of the viewer—the shiver of apprehension of gas seepage, the mental relief of fire insurance—that breaks down the fourth wall of the proscenium stage of the gallery here.

Christopher Freed