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

“Drawing workshop - B.A.C. of 14th district of Paris”
2011
Ink on paper
26, 2 inches x 20,3 inches
Serie of 7 unique pieces and 7 draft

In May 2011, I set up a drawing workshop with four police officers from the 14th arrondissement in Paris: Benjamin Ferran, Gerald Fidalgo, Blaise Thomas and Mickael Malvaud. The goal of the workshop was to learn to draw “Vorfonoi diagrams” manually from maps identifying recent crimes. These diagrams, used in the U.S. but not in France yet, are among the mapping analysis tools used to visualize crimes in real time to deploy patrols accordingly. Usually they are made by computer, but I offered the French policemen a chance to draw them by hand, taking the time to execute one by one the different steps of the algorithm. The exercise is slow and laborious and requires a precision that is difficult to obtain. With this technique of traditional drawing, the optimization tool is stripped of its primary function by invariably producing the results too late. But what you lose in efficiency is certainly gained in other areas: intensive drawing practice at weekends and holidays, in-depth exploration of the technical division of surfaces into polygons, discussions about Police processing systems(?) and introduction of new management methods, and production of a series of very successful abstract drawings.