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arbeit macht frei - 01

Intervention realized on June 19, 2015 on the Messeplatz in Basel (Switzerland), at the entrance of the international contemporary art fair Art Basel, which was held there from June 18 to 21, 2015.


First part of the series of interventions "Arbeit Macht Frei", which I developed around the idea of work, of the value of work in a time of crisis and in our society of performance, with a mise en abyme on the valorisation of the work of the artist, his visibility, on what he has to do to exist through the eyes of others. Is the artist's work the only guarantee of his freedom or is it a delusion in the face of the diktat of the art market? The title "Arbeit Macht Frei" refers directly to this ambivalence between art/work/market/freedom. The expression "Arbeit macht frei" comes from the title of an 1873 novel by the German philologist Lorenz Diefenbach, in which gamblers and fraudsters find their way to virtue through work. The quotation was adopted in 1928 by the Weimar government as a slogan for their desired large-scale policy of public works planned to end unemployment, and then found its way into German nationalist right-wing circles, which explains its later adoption by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933, and its display at the entrance to some concentration camps. This expression is also found in the Gulag: in the 1920s, an inscription proclaiming "Through work, freedom!" can be seen at the entrance to one of the camps on the Solovki Islands. ". Picked up by the totalitarian regimes, this expression extolling the virtues of rehabilitation through work eventually became the archetype of cynicism applied to individual freedom.


The major art fairs tend to present the public with a vision of art limited by the constraints and mercantile imperatives of this type of exercise. The galleries present tend to select for the fairs only those works that correspond to what is expected by the greatest number of people, applying a form of self-censorship to themselves (hence this impression of déjà vu that one can have when regularly visiting the major art fairs). A concentration of the market around a limited number of artists, with works tending towards homogeneity and the widest possible acceptability. The artist and his or her work fade away in favour of the "work-product" that people come to see and consume like the latest fashion. However, through their hyper-mediatization, international art fairs today convey to the general public the image that Art-that-is-worthy-is-all-about-what-they-present, resulting in a self-reinforcement of the market around a limited number of artists. These few international events tend to define the normative framework of what is expected in today's society in the same way that the Salon in Paris once dictated the acceptable standards and agreed expectations of the Art of the time.


This intervention was the subject of photos and videos for documentation purposes.

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