For her very first New York exhibition, this Paris-based artist presents examples of a symbolic practice that begins by questioning its own use-value in a world increasingly resistant to the actions of its inhabitants. By calling herself a “ready-made artist,” Claire Fontaine suggests that she is an imposter in her own role, and that the practice of contemporary art is no longer destined to act directly on reality. Early signs of this disconnection between the problem of representation and the question of how to use our lives can be glimpsed in the increasingly aestheticized politics of the twentieth-century avant-gardes.

Translated into Arabic, “Foreigners Everywhere” is the title both of the show and of a neon work that Claire Fontaine has placed in the gallery’s front window. A second neon work, Father & Son (Hooded Prisoner with Child), is a line drawing based on a popular news photograph depicting an Iraqi detainee and his son, a mediatized glimpse of the sort of “naked life” the endless war on terror constantly produces. This work has been roughly blacked-out with paint, negating its own light and questioning the link, in a world become image, between visibility and imperial violence.

There is also a text on the ceiling written with the flame of a cigarette lighter. I HAVE NO WORDS TO TELL YOU HOW MUCH I HATE THE POLICE is a quotation from the film Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard,1966). A black leather rucksack stuffed with assorted candies (If You See Something, Say Something) appropriates Felix Gonzales-Torres’s “spills” while removing it from the spectator, hiding its contents, and giving a threatening translation to a generous, public-interactive gesture that opened the way to “relational aesthetics” in the early-90s. “Public,” says Claire Fontaine, is now nothing but a noun used to name order and an adjective to describe the audience.

“In God They Trust,” is an actual American twenty-five cent coin that hides a fold-out box cutter blade.

The tension between forms and their contents, between visibility and opacity, etc, points to the fact that the price we pay for our celebrated freedom to manage symbols is the impossibility of effective political action in a democracy today. But it is only by treating and acknowledging our shared political impotence that we can begin to find our way out of an impasse we already know by heart.