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| Author, performer, member of Men With Home Hardware Appliances and cofounder of the QQists, Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf has, from the beginning of his career, occupied a place as one of the most irreverent actors on the Montreal contemporary art scene. Using humour, the found object and literature as his main artistic drivers, and a sharp and effective cynicism as medium, Phaneuf works to divert the foundations of the art world while using its codes, its accessories and its players. From somewhere between ultra-chic and trash, or at least an abrasive mix of them, Phaneuf seeks to rethink the codes of popular culture (and increasingly its written traces) through the image of the artist. The project presented here is the fruit of a meticulous harvest of the classified ads found on bulletin boards in which errors of syntax, spelling and “just plain pathetic” presentation become rare collectors’ items. These simultaneously awkward and richly poetic notes form the beginnings of a subjective social fresco and of its trivial accounts. These artifacts of micro history, removed from their original context, beyond the elitist gaze one could bring to them, interrogate first and foremost their own status. In the context of a gallery, transformed for this event into what could be a giant bulletin board, the written notes line up with art, to be presented here as a kind of unique – and unheralded – social ready-made. The objects are used in this context for their literary potential. They are – in their materiality – narrative and fictional, and above all, they literally and perniciously infiltrate the art world. The work takes its sense here at the cost of certain people’s linguistic precariousness to be understood and appreciated by an art-loving public. The social collision is successful.
[YP, trans PdB]
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