ART CITIES:Zurich-Matthieu Laurette

Matthieu Laurette is a media and conceptual contemporary French artist who works in a variety of media, from TV and video to installation and public interventions. In 1993, when asked on a French TV game show to describe himself, Matthieu Laurette replied, “A multimedia artist.” He has since been exploring the relationship between art and society with an œuvre that he characterizes as “IRL Institutional Critique”. His body of work seeks to show inconsistencies or flaws in the systems imposed by late capitalism and Spectacle.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Silicon VIalley Archive

Matthieu Laurette’s first solo exhibition, “Demands & Supplies”, in Switzerland since 1999 at MAMCO in Geneva, fills the space from floor to ceiling at Silicon Malley and spread to an online sales website. Conceived as a retrospective, “Demands & Supplies” (2012- ) picks up the story left off at the artist’s eponymous exhibition in 2012 at Gaudel de Stampa in Paris. It presents a full financial disclosure of all costs and expenses incurred in the past eight years of Matthieu Laurette’s practice as an artist. In contrast to Chris Burden, who made public his profit and loss (Full Financial Disclosure, 1977) as decorative “collages” of canceled checks, bank statements, tax forms which he called “drawings”, Matthieu Laurette is proposing since 2012, through a commercial arrangement, simple two-line contracts that allow his expenses to be acquired. Rather than producing or exhibiting a single material object, Matthieu Laurette generates financial “exhaust” his bills and debts to be paid for by collectors.  As the artist said “Demands & Supplies, consists entirely of contracts — say, a contract that a collector could purchase the cost of my phone deals, the rent of my studio or have a dinner with me and stuff like that”. Matthieu Laurette considers his basic artist’s expenses as production costs that are then doubled to define the selling price of the work, ranging from 207.66 euros for Matthieu Laurette’s 2015 mobile phone bills, up to 31,909.14 euros for the entirety of his 2019 expenses. These works, available for online order and on-site purchase at Silicon Malley, are unique printed contracts in A4 or US letter format which must be signed by both parties (the collector and the artist) to be then framed in an artist’s frame. The project, with a physical” exhibition and a year-long online shop accessible to all, remains exactly the same as planned in 2019 before the pandemic. This project reduces an artistic work to the exhaustive list of expenses necessary to its own conception. Furthermore, it questions the value that any person, including the artist himself, can place on a work, including all that it can be brought to encompass, conceal, or even disguise. Reduced to an increasingly essential data for many artists.

Info: Silicon VIalley, Ave. du Chablais 18, Prilly, Duration: 25/8-20/9/20, Days & Hours: Sat 13:00-15:00, www.siliconmalley.ch & www.demandsandsupplies.art