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

2009
The totality of True propositions (Before)
Books, bookcase, chandelier, inkjet printings
Variables dimensions
Unique piece

Illustrating the artist’s interest in the organization of know-how and the accumulation of knowledge, Julien Prévieux’s work on view at La Force de l’Art 02 is a bookcase holding numerous books on historically outmoded subjects that are nowadays obsolete. This new database, resulting from a lengthy task of information gathering in public and private library collections, also brings together manuals and handbooks, such as Le Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré (1959) and Windows 95 pour les nuls by Barrie Soskinsky and Christoph Benz (Sybex, 1999), as well as historical and theoretical volumes like URRS., Le pays où le soleil ne se couche pas by Emil Schulthess (Albin Michel, 1971) and La guerre secrète moderne by William V. Kennedy (Bordas, 1984), whose ideas have not survived the inexorable passage of time. Overlooked, scorned, on the sidelines of state-of-the-art knowledge, these books, once reorganized in this library of linguistic, technical and historical puzzles, still make sense. On the walls there is also a strange diagram which, devised by means of data mining, a tool making it possible to analyze databases, transforms the themes of these works into a set of crazy oracles. Like a cartographic exercise, it traces the outlines of a completely u-chronic parallel future, not without wit. Through this work, Julien Prévieux strives, based on the concept proposed by Michael Foucault, to open up heterotopias, those “other spaces” which suddenly make utopia tangible, plunging the viewer into a journey to the heart of the history of knowledge and ideas.