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

D’octobre à février
2010
Wool, clothes hangers, metal
Chateau des Adhemar production
380 x 40 x 180 cm

From the texte « Etat de Veille », by Grégoire Chamayou
But what the etymology of the term also reminds us of is that there is no group without knots, without ties. Plato saw the role of politics like that of a weaver, to which he returned, assembling eclectic threads, to put together a “social fabric”. The claims of weaver-kings armed with abstract models nevertheless contrast historically with another figure, a minority one, treated with contempt, which Julien Prévieux restores life to—the life of knitters or tricoteuses, those “scurrying harridans of the teeming neighbourhoods around City Hall, darning or knitting stock- ings in the stands during turbulent discussions” of the revolutionary Assembly under the Convention. Dickens, who featured one of them in a novel, imagined her offering a hidden meaning in the patterns of her work, secretly writing down the proceedings of revolutionary policies in the stitches of her knitwear: “It is a secret language if ever there was, because nobody knew of its existence; but will we be able to decipher it or, rather, will she still be capable of doing so? [...] Jacques, replied the wine merchant standing tall, my wife probably etched all her accounts in her memory, and never lost a syllable of them. Stay calm, these stitches which, based on a special combination, form a script whose characters are fixed, will never lack clarity for the person who made them.”