The declaration, forced on visitors at the door, that this “exhibition contains distressing content” as good as guarantees that it doesn’t. Show Less purports to subvert the politics of visibility. Yet even its most ‘shocking’ component – the neon FATHERFUCKER, hung in the gallery’s window – upsets absolutely no one. Still more disappointingly for the emotion-seeker, a series of commercially produced copies of L’origine du monde, adulterated by the artists with bright spray paint, lack the frisson to add anything to Courbet’s 1866 original.
Are we so lost today that we need to paint over the man’s jest, twelve times, and call that an act of extra-special feminist reclamation? Claire Fontaine – the duo behind the FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE neons, which inspired last year’s Venice Biennale’s title – opt for memes in lieu of substance. Their forms are easy to ‘get’ and their comforts compelling. Why, they covered the gallery’s very floor with hundreds of sheets from the Guardian, as though to elevate viewers from the plane of even that subjective reality.
But the show bestows freedom selectively: a series of declarations made in a childish hand cuts off their maker from the past and their ancestors’ sins. “I am free”, it proclaims, staking a claim on history’s ‘right side’ and #kindness. Repeat these mantras enough, and the lie becomes art.
