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

Forget the Money: books from the personal library of Bernard Madoff
2011
Bernard Madoff personal library
Print jet d’encre and sound piece
Voice: charlie Jeffery
Variables dimensions
Forget the Money, an installation made on the basis of the bookshelves in the New York apartment of the (in)famous American businessman Bernard Madoff, responsible for the swindle of the century, estimated at $65 billion, which came to light in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008. Prévieux presents us with a hundred or so books, mainly thrillers and bestsellers, which once belonged to Madoff, and were bought after his belongings were seized by the FBI. These books with their premonitory titles (End in Tears, No Second Chance, The World is Made of Glass, The Investigation, White Shark, K is for Killer,…) seem to work like relics, borrowings from an ambiguous fetishism, based, obviously enough, less on their quality than on the fate of their owner. A little snippet of history erected as an absurd monument, which broaches the scandal from the wings, its lesser details which you cannot help trying to decipher, despite Madoff’s lack of visible interest in literature, harbingers of the drama. Julien Prévieux has fun with this phenomenon by taking from a broad selection of the books any sentences which include the word “money”, the real key to the plot, which gives rise to a sound piece and to photographs reproducing the list of these excerpts of text.