NO SOUL FOR SALE a Festival of Independents
Tate Modern, London
May 14-16 2010
For “No Soul For Sale” Lucie Fontaine has transformed her booth into a winter garden. Echoing an artwork she made for “Sign In / Sign Out,” her solo show at The Front Desk Apparatus, Lucie Fontaine has covered the floor with green eco fur to simulate grass. Botanists define grass as a “rhizome,” a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the Introduction to their masterpiece, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which was deeply influential for Lucie Fontaine and for her two* art employees.
In “No Soul for Sale,” Lucie Fontaine hosts contributions by Italian artists Mauro Bonacina and Corrado Levi. Bonacina (born in Milan, lives and works in London) presents two new works. As part of his insatiable desire to experiment with new forms, mixing his creations with readymade objects, Bonacina exhibits LONDON.ENGLAND.29_03_2010.17-54pm, a bicycle wheel onto which he has tied a banana skin and LONDON.ENGLAND.15_03_2010.17-36pm, a snowman whose body has been substituted with clay. Levi (born in Turin, lives and works in Milan and Marrakech) premieres a new version of a work he conceived for “Il Cangiante,” an exhibition about Italian art he organized at PAC in 1986. For the show at PAC, Levi’s contribution consisted of 24 fresh red roses for each day of the show. At Tate Modern the work will be restaged and Levi will “enrich” it with pictures of Italian artists of whom he is fond. Standing barefoot on the grass, Lucie Fontaine’s two* art employees will exist in the space as living sculpture—a post-capitalist version of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe [The Lunch on the Grass].
Lucie Fontaine is an art employer who lives and works in Colmar, France. Describing herself as an “art employer,” Lucie Fontaine avoids harnessing her practice to a specific figure in the art field, preferring to cultivate a modus operandi driven solely by her relationship with two* employees, a concept of self-generated labor similar to the Master-Slave dialectic presented by Hegel. In 2007, Lucie Fontaine opened a space in Milan, which was intended as a meeting place for the artistic community.
On June XX she will open a new space on via Larga, in the heart of Milan.
* “L'Anti-Oedipe was written by the two of us, and since each of us was several, we were already quite a crowd.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1. Introduction: Rhizome
