Work, management, economics, politics, control systems, state-of-the-art technologies and the culture industry are the many ‘worlds’ that Julien Prévieux’s activities involve. As in the Lettres de non-motivation (Letters of Non-Application) that he has been sending out to employers regularly since 2004 – in which he responds to newspaper advertisements and details his reasons for not applying for the jobs in question – his work often appropriates the vocabulary, mechanisms and modus operandi of the sectors by which it is informed, the better to highlight their dogmas, excesses and, when all is said and done, their vacuousness.

By shrewdly adopting the stance of an individual facing whole swathes of society that are, in many respects, dehumanised, Prévieux develops a strategy of counterproductivity, or what the philosopher Elie During called, in a recent essay about the artist’s praxis, ‘counter-employment’.

The various crises and scandals that have staked up over the past decade have meant that the arcana of the world economy have become a must – and favourite subject – for Prévieux. Thus, his series of drawings entitled A la recherché du miracle économique

(In Search of the Economic Miracle, 2006) took as its point of departure three excerpts from Das Kapital by Marx, which the artist subjected to the ‘bible codes’, a decoding technique used in different periods in history to bring out hidden meaning in sacred texts. From each of the three excerpts there develops a network of key words – crash, bankruptcy, laundering, downward spiral, monopoly, audit, and so on – prophesying different financial disasters, past or future. More recently, Prévieux’s interest has veered towards what has been described by the media as ‘the swindle of the century’, namely the Bernard Madoff affair. For Forget the Money (2011), the artist managed to acquire part of the disgraced financier’s library, in the wake of the auctioning of goods seized by the FBI.

This collection of 100 or so books, made up mainly of bestsellers, thrillers and airport novels, might be deemed insignificant in other circumstances, but now has a special aura. Perusing the covers, a reading emerges that, with hindsight, cannot fail but see in titles such as No Second Chance, End in Tears and White Shark signs -foreshadowing the fate of their former owner.

Christophe Gallois, curator of the Mudam Luxembourg

A la recherche du miracle economique
2006-2007
Drawings, ink and print on paper
Variable dimensions
Edition of 3

In this series of drawings the iconic texts of modern economic thinking — Karl Marx, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, et al.— are used to predict the future. The chosen mode of decipherment is known as the “Bible Code” and was used by medieval monks to extract hidden meanings from scripture. Thus the artist fills the margins of Capital and The Wealth of Nations with a diffuse mass of dates, facts and names of personalities linked by arrows pointing up kinships and cause and effect relationships; and the result, at the end of a tedious process of decipherment, is images of an obscure, chaotic reality, a succession of financial scandals and economic crises instead of the hoped-for miracle.