ROME.- Philippe Thomas declines his identity is the first exhibition that an Italian institution has dedicated to piecing together an expanded portrait of the figure of Philippe Thomas (1951-1995). The show, which will run through February 26th, 2023 at MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, takes its title from that of a book connected with a lecture-performance by the French artist best known for his research connected to the concept of authorship. The latter led him to eventually annihilate his own presence.

He operated within a conceptual approach driven by the practice of making the buyer of an artwork at once its owner and its author. In a tension between reality and fiction, the process of writing his biography – in artistic and personal terms – becomes all-encompassing.

The first years of Thomas’s career involved a focus on the material aspects of signs in relation to surfaces, and the redefinition of the act of reading. In 1984 he created the group IFP (Information Fiction Publicité) together with Jean-François Brun and Dominique Pasqualini. The year after he carried on with his own personal career by founding a service agency named readymades belong to everyone® (1987-1993). Established in 1987 at the Cable Gallery in New York in its English version and then in Paris at Galerie Claire Burrus in the corresponding French translation (les ready-made appartiennent à tout le monde®), the agency carried out countless international projects during the course of its existence, with over sixty collectors and institutions as its signatories. Since the agency’s closure in 1995, its legacy has been conserved in the collection of MAMCO (Geneva), and is now displayed at MACRO in its entirety.

The agency formulated its own graphic identity and communication, including a logo and advertising campaigns, often made in collaboration with other communication agencies like Dolci Dire & Associés or BDDP/Paris. “As storage area and a presentation area, The Agency is at once a work and a retrospective. It is a deposit and an event, both singular and plural. It is an archive and an image of the agency readymades belong to everyone®. It is what remains and what has happened, just as it is at once open and closed, available and unavailable, absent and present, active and passive." (Élisabeth Lebovici)

With the purpose of perpetuating a position like that of readymades belong to everyone®, the exhibition project works within three different temporalities incorporating the contributions of figures who lived in the same period, or were influenced by the agency, such as self-styled readymade artist Claire Fontaine. The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters (1979) reflect the same urge to respond to the structures taking an increasing hold on the art system during those years. Christopher D’Arcangelo, on the other hand, foreshadows the spirit of the agency and of Philippe Thomas, with an approach to the dematerialization of art through a forceful political stance: his body in chains, or the complete absence of any trace of his physical being.

Christopher D’Arcangelo was an American artist known for a series of unauthorized actions inside the leading museums of New York. Driven by a deeply anarchic spirit, he was active until 1979, the year of his premature death. Every intervention he carried out was accompanied by an anarchist statement. In spite of the subversive attitude towards the art system, D’Arcangelo was deeply involved in it, since he was the son of the famous painter Allan D’Arcangelo. In January 1977, Christopher D'Arcangelo was invited by Claire Copley to contribute to the LAICA magazine for which she was the editor. The theme of the issue focused on the methods of economic survival of artists and their power in relation to the institutional context. The artist responded with a project titled LAICA as an Alternative to Museums, a four-page booklet inserted at the centre of the magazine, with a blank white double-page spread. The text on the first page, protesting against the "curatorial control" over exhibitions, urged readers to remove the white pages, do what they pleased on them, and hang the results in the exhibition space of LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art).

The research of Claire Fontaine, a collective artist founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in 2004, is articulated around the various implications of the concept of readymade. By criticising the values and hierarchies that structure our society, the artist through her theoretical and aesthetic approach shows lines of flight out of the crisis of the individuals in the contemporary world. The artist uses existing forms and techniques to restore hope and power for the viewer by insisting on the existential use value of the references that she uses. The work Untitled (pubblicità pubblicità) presents, in fact, a détournement of the advertising poster of readymades belong to everyone®. Two lightboxes give shape to a dialogue between the original version of the agency and the feminist version of Claire Fontaine. The intervention of the artist reconstructs a pantheon of imaginary monographs of the most decisive women artists accompanied by a text that questions the dominance of male art in the system and in the history of art and invites us to change the status quo.

The Offices of Fend, Fitzgibbon, Holzer, Nadin, Prince & Winters was a group formed in 1979 and composed of the artists Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Robin Winters. Working in New York, the group operated from an office that set out to offer “practical esthetic services adaptable to client situation”, as the postcard shown in the exhibition explained. The objective was to offer their art as “socially helpful work for hire”. The founders believed that as artists they could sell aesthetic intuitions on a par with any consulting that could be provided by advertising agencies or law firms. The aim was to invite artists to imagine a new relationship with the society and its organization. In spite of the lack of clients (like the artist-run space White Columns, for which they conducted the rebranding) and short history, The Offices attempted to formulate a new identification of the artist as an entrepreneur of ideas.