“The palace of culture is built with dog shit” wrote, somewhere, Brecht.

An intense blue-violet writing installed on an antique Venetian window with four lights in Campo Santo Stefano says: Kultur ist ein Palast der aus Hundescheiße gebaut ist (The palace of culture is built with dog shit).
Such a Bertolt Brecht's sentence, quoted numerous times even by Theodor Adorno, whose source remains obscure, is stated by the Paris-based collective artist Claire Fontaine. Their neon work is in direct dialogue with the public space outside the walls of the Tognon Arte Contemporanea gallery where from August 27th to November 21st Caterina Tognon presents Claire Fontaine exhibition naturally entitled Unbuilding.
"Claire Fontaine’s work asks us to reconsider our assumptions as art viewers as well as members of society and to question daily facets of life that are often taken for granted" said MOCA Associate Curator Ruba Katrib. The artist, who lifted her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, likes to use the moments she finds herself in to express a visual comment or to give rise to a problem linked to the use and the abuse of power.
Specifically referring to the Venice Architecture Biennale, on the invitation of the exhibition, such a phantom artistic entity made only of assistants that was dreamed up by a pair of French women in 2004, interrogates themselves and people walking around Campo Santo Stefano and Beccafico restaurant, shocked by neon Brecht’s words (if they speak German), on the implication and consequences of building nowadays, stating that culture and creation of forms, when emancipated from the direct experience of the people who should inhabit them and keep them alive, becoming nothing but arrogant gratuitous gesticulations.
Someway German Pavillion by proposing the theme Sehensucht is acheiving almost the same Claire Fontaine's point of view in the Einseman's writings on the book of exhibition : "With the growing presence of internet as a site of social interaction and society's increasing mobility, architecture's formerly central role in making place, and even the need of making place, has been called into question".
Claire Fontaine believes as well as Einseman that what is usually called institutional critique designates a field of action and contestation already overshadowed by the contemporary condition and, although she continues to perpetrate the form of this type of critics, she pushes its limits in a desecrating way. For such a reason she declares herself a ready made artist and her version of new-conceptual art often looks like an already seen work coherently being a work about our impotence.
The exhibition pursues in a representative apartment with very hight ceilings, at the second floor building of the the XIX century where the neon installation similar to the one on Campo Santo Stefano welcomes visitors in the building hall facing the canal. Two floors up, a video Counter- poison shows a journey inside a derelict building enlightened just by a torch installed on the artist’s working helmet walking amongst debris of an abandoned theater of a popular neighborhood in Glasgow.
Images filmed before the arrival of the bulldozers document how working class kids, destroyed without homesickness and without sentimentalism - the German Sehnsucht -, the stage deserted by the public and burn empty seats, as well as at night wild animals use it as a shelter, like us using urban spaces in the contemporary, left to guess what this descent could be the antidote for.
Anyway those images, accompanied by the breath of the cameramen and the noise of his walking paces trampling on the rubbles is the only thing left whilst the building has been demolished."Theaters of our childhood are disappearing, one after the other, but any American way of life, any destructive character demolishes them for giving place to an healthy oblivion -writes the artist explaining how nowadays any transitional object which should bring us elsewhere, is rather leading us anywhere.
Quoting Benjamin Claire Fontaine follows saying ”Humanity got ready surviving to the civilization and dose it smiling”. We shall build from zero and to the people who is asking if we will succeed we should answer as the children of the Australian refugee camp: "we don't want toys, we want freedom."
The afore mentioned text is entitled Nurseryworld like the work made of pasted photograph showing such a word on a public display of a building in ruins: "Nurseryworld -says Claire Fonatine - is the space void of nostalgia of disappearing things" and it is the most important piece of the exhibition because it is the key for understanding all the other works.
The exhibition features some other works still related to the same space, that has along its story, changed more than one his destination: An object trouvé, a Mecca light box from the time the theatre was used as a Bingo hall and three large photographs, printed on paper, of the interior of the same theatre in ruins.
Finally you will find the signature of the artist on passe-partout a collection of wire house-breaking gadget, hacksaw blades, bicycle spoke, light, allen-keys, paper clips, hair and safety pins kept in a pair of keyring hang to the wall of the gallery as well as on San Marco, a fast copy of its keys made with a technique commonly used by the American C.I.A.

Images:
1-2 Kultur ist ein Palast der aus Hundescheiße gebaut ist, 2010
Neon, framework and trasformers.
Dim. 4200 x 125 x 100 mm. 1/5 + 2AP
Courtesy the artists, Galleria Tognon Arte Contemporanea.
Foto Francesco Allegretto.
3-4 Mecca, 2004
Lightbox, perspex and chains.
Dimensions 102 x 54x22 cm. 1/1
Courtesy the artists and Galeria T293, Naples and Galleria Tognon Arte contemporanea, Venice.
Foto Francesco Allegretto.
4-5 Counter-poison, 2004
Production stills, pasted digital prints with cd- rom.
Dimensions variable 1/5 +2A P
Courtesy the artists and Galeria T293, Naples and Galleria Tognon Arte Contemporanea Venice.
Foto Francesco Allegretto.
5-6 Nurseryword, 2004
Pasted Photograph, digital print with cd-rom.
Dimensions variable 1/5 + 2AP
Courtesy the artistsand Galleria Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice.
Foto Francesco Allegretto.
7-8 Passe-partout (Glasgow), 2004-2010
Wire, tape, hacksaw blades, bicycle spoke, light, key rings,allen-keys, hair -pins, safety pins and paper clips.
Courtesy the artists and Galleria Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice.
Foto Francesco Allegretto.
9 San Marco 2746 (17.07.10), 2010.
Five molded alloy elements and finishing cord.
Dimensions 4200 x 125 x 100 mm. 1/5 + 2AP.
Courtesy the artists and Galleria Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice .
Foto Francesco Allegretto.