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LES READY MADE APPARTIENNENT À TOUT LE MONDE®
Il suffit de dire oui, 1988
READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE®
You can change it all by saying yes, 1988
Photographs, 58.5 x 42 cm (x 2)
Hervé Acker collection, Paris
The agency of the artist Philippe Thomas, “Readymades Belong to Everyone®”, offers its clients an opportunity to play in the world of art. Publicity posters, a green plant, a leather armchair, a slogan (“don’t wait until tomorrow to enter history”), constitute some of the basic elements of work inspired principally by the application of the aesthetics of a tertiary economy to the world of art. The diptych formed by You can change it all by saying yes, which shows, as if reflected in a mirror, an empty meeting-room, is symptomatic of the activities of a tertiary economy such as meaningless production. As often seen in the work of Philippe Thomas, the absence the human figure reinforces the ridiculous aspects of tertiary economics, where we find neither people nor real activity, but rather a fascination for triviality and empty slogans. Industry has been replaced by the emptiness of administrative logic. In relation to the real economy, this positioning is meta-representative, even reflective - a representation of the representation of activity. The company, empty of activity, also represents one of the last possible sites of fiction. In this way, the ‘story’ in which Philippe Thomas offers us participation might be interpreted here as a new romantic frontier or a kind of script - close your eyes and imagine what is happening in this scene.
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