2014 : SOFT SHOCK, ELI PING FRANCES PERKINS, NEW YORK

Lucie Fontaine is glad to present “Soft Shock,” at Eli Ping Frances Perkins. The opening will take place on June 26th from 6 to 9 pm and will remain on view until July 27th. The gallery is located at 55-59 Chrystie Street, Suite 202, New York.

Over the years Lucie Fontaine coined herself an art employer with two* employees, a multiple singularity, a pseudonymous collective, and a fictional character. Trying to embrace and at the same time refuse all these classifications she has mainly worked through two channels : she invites artists to exhibit in her project space in Milan and she is invited to create artworks, exhibitions and books by different people in Europe, United States and Asia.

For her project at Eli Ping Frances Perkins, Lucie Fontaine has focused her attention on a controversial phenomenon : Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency introduced as open source software in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, a fictional identity whose constituent identity remains unknown. It is a crypto-currency, so-called because it uses cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money. Conventionally, Bitcoin (capitalized) refers to the technology and network whereas bitcoins (lowercased) refers to the currency itself.

An important reference to the project is “Why Bitcoin Matters,” an article written by Marc Andreessen for the January 21 2014 issue of The New York Times. Andreessen, who invested $50 millions in Bitcoin-related start-ups, writes : “Much like email, which is quite traceable, Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous.” He continues : “One immediately obvious and enormous area for Bitcoin-based innovation is international remittance. Every day, hundreds of millions of low-income people go to work in hard jobs in foreign countries to make money to send back to their families in their home countries – over $400 billion in total annually, according to the World Bank.”

At Eli Ping Frances Perkins visitors will experience the following situation : the gallery space, located in a building in New York’s Lower East Side hosting companies of various kinds, will feature a temporary office possibly and randomly activated by Bitcoin connoisseurs, artists and scientists.

Beside the numerous correspondences between the way Bitcoin functions and the structure behind Lucie Fontaine, this project continues the connections between money and art. In fact the so-called gold standard was interrupted in 1971 when Richard Nixon decided to suspend the direct convertibility of the dollar into gold. This act – which is concurrent to the inception of conceptual art – is known at the “Nixon Shock,” a term that inspired the title of the show – “Soft Shock.”

In order to reinforce the aforementioned ideas, the entire office space created inside Eli Ping Frances Perkins will consists of works by other artists. Some artists are contributing with works related to the issue of value exchange (Claire Fontaine and Michal Helfman); some are related to immateriality (Agnieszka Kurant and Ana Prvacki); while other works are made by artists from Lucie Fontaine’s entourage (Bruce Sherman and Max Pellegrini). Of the works created especially with the fictional framework of the show, some will engage in the representation of different levels of reality (Rita Sobral Campos and Sean Paul), while others were included in exhibition to set the atmosphere (Josh Tonsfeldt in collaboration with designer Levi Murphy, Mika Tajima, Gareth Long, Andy Coolquitt and Boško Blagojević.) Some are related to all these issues; some will be a new discovery.

Among the works exhibited there will also be a portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto commissioned of Miri Segal by Lucie Fontaine. In fact the entire project started from a conversation between the artist and one of Lucie Fontaine’s two** employees. The portrait will consist of a lenticular print featuring two images. If you look from right to the left you will see the face of an Asian man, an image that has been already used online as Nakamoto’s official portrait. Segal discovered that the image was originally created by the National Geographic in an attempt to generate a face whose features would embrace and sublimate all the different racial characters of today’s global population – in other words the middleman par excellence.

If you look from left to right you will see Afghan Girl, an award-winning photograph taken by journalist Steve McCurry*** that was on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic magazine. The photograph has been called “the First World’s Third World Mona Lisa.”**** While superimposing the two faces in order to have their eyes coinciding, Segal also included two inscriptions : If you look from right to left you will see the logo of the National Geographic while if you look from left to right you will see the bitcoin symbol “฿“ with the motto “in code we trust,” a reinterpretation of the inscription “in god we trust” found on the US twenty-dollar bill.

In addition, the exhibition will include two plants and ceramic vases originally created by Lucie Fontaine for her first project in New York – “Sing In/Sign Out” at the Front Desk Apparatus – and then displayed again at “Estate,” a project Lucie Fontaine curated at Marianne Boesky Gallery on the Upper East Side space of New York.

Lucie Fontaine was born in 1982 in Colmar, where she currently lives and works. Her project space in Milan is currently hosting the group exhibition “Cali Gold Rush.” If you would like further information about her activities please go to www.luciefontaine.com or email employee@luciefontaine.com.

* “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 Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1. Introduction: Rhizome.

** “And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here I have made two talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’” Matthew 25 : 22-24

*** 17 years later McCurry decided to look for her and came back to the same refugee camp in Pakistan with the mission to locate her. He believed that the afghan girl was Alam Bibi, although her eyes were brown; an iris analysis showed that Bibi was not the real Afghan Girl. The photographer had to abandon the search, but in light of a new clue the National Geographic sent correspondent Boyd Matson to Peshawar. After several investigations he achieved to identify the name of the afghan girl: Sharbat Gula. The National Geographic ordered an iris comparison, and it was established that the images showed the same person.

**** “The reunion between the woman with green eyes and the photographer was quiet. On the subject of married women, cultural tradition is strict. She must not look – and certainly must not smile – at a man who is not her husband. She did not smile at McCurry. Her expression, he said, was flat. She cannot understand how her picture has touched so many. She does not know the power of those eyes. Such knife-thin odds. That she would be alive. That she could be found. That she could endure such loss. Surely, in the face of such bitterness the spirit could atrophy. How, she was asked, had she survived? The answer came wrapped in unshakable certitude. ‘It was,’ said Sharbat Gula, ‘the will of God.’” Cathy Newman, “A Life Revealed : Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on our cover in 1985. Now we can tell her story,” National Geographic Magazine, April 2002.