Claire Fontaine

For their exhibition “Arando el mar” (Ploughing the Sea), the Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine lowered the ceiling of this gallery, and on it, they wrote a fragment of text from Lidia Falcón’s book Letters to a Spanish Idiot (1974) with the smoke from a candle. The piece, Untitled (como si hubiese arado en el agua . . . ) (Untitled [as if it had plowed into the water . . . ]), 2011, offers something of an inventory, a description of the number of times that a housewife set and cleared a table for meals during a ten-year period. According to the text, each setting took seven trips to the table and seven visits back to the kitchen. The seven-line paragraph (nearly fifty-two feet long) is laid out across the length of the ceiling. To read it in its entirety, one must walk back and forth fourteen times, and in doing so, viewers replicate the invisibility and immateriality of the action described.

Many of the works in the show allude to the eternal incompatibility of male and female desires and dreams. Violence is implied in Untitled (Missing), 2011, which comprises the barrels of several shotguns; sexual pleasure is industrialized in Untitled (Black Dildo Washer), 2010, a domestic dishwasher filled with black latex dildos. Finally, Untitled (Money Trap), 2011, a safe fitted in the wall with a hole cut out in the middle of its door, recalls a monkey trap. Throughout, this exhibition evokes the curse of fruitless operations and eternal vicious cycles that plague contemporary life, finally bringing to mind (as implied by the title of the show as well) the myth of Sisyphus and his endless task: to roll an enormous rock eternally up a hill.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.