JULIEN PRÉVIEUX
Julien Prévieux was born in 1974, Grenoble, lives and works in Paris. He studied Fine Arts in Grenoble and terminated a research program in Paris in 2004. Julien Prévieux has conducted his “Lettres de Non-motivation” project since 2000. He responds in the negative to job offers gathered from the press and the lack of “motivation”, reasserted on a daily basis, becomes a full-time job. The author plays a host of roles in order to vehemently increase the number of arguments for his refusal. The answers sent by companies are all evidence of an impossible communication whereby the entire system is seen to be faulty. In his recent works, he is extending his questioning of value production and the notion of labor in this new period of capitalism. He recently had a solo show in Jousse Entreprise, Paris and exhibited in art centres and museums in Europe and North America.
Non-motivation Letters / Uncovering Letters
Julien Prévieux is a French artist whose current activity is to expose the growing standardization at work in our civilized society: while most companies are publishing brochures explaining their intent to ‘give meaning and to connect people’, politically correct attitudes, corporate language and representations are overtaking simple good sense and transforming people into timorous robots unable to address one another without resorting to the established formula.
Following this spirit, job ads are obviously a good terrain to explore the tacit rules of corporate language. Julien Prévieux goes beyond observation and… replies to authentic job ads. Pretending they are addressed to him personally, he explains why he has to decline the job: low wages, too distant offices, the bad reputation of the company or simply the appalling layout of the job ad. Assuming various characters -from the incompetent anaesthetist to the paranoid who won’t work on data bases-, he takes corporate rhetoric literally, compelling Human Resources executives to send obtusely polite answers.
The brilliance of the project is that, in the context of general underemployment in France, the “Uncovering Letters” state the refusal to be a victim: an eye for an eye, do not hesitate to voice your rejection of such supervised nonsense, use it, divert it and have fun! (Cécile Maury)
