Mathieu Beauséjour

ROYALTIES
05.13–06.20.1999

Temporarily departing from his usual practice of stamping banknotes and conceptual work on money, Mathieu Beauséjour engages not with the physical realm of the dollar, but rather with the gallery’s fixed, geometric space. There, he installs artifacts that, much like Survie’s *Survival Virus*, undermine the concepts of value, symbolism, and institution, while adhering to—in order to better explore it from within—a distinctly museum-like aesthetic protocol. Rigorously framed drawings present, as a leitmotif, the obstinate and excessively repetitive spelling of a phrase of insubordination that Guy Debord might once have turned into graffiti. On the wall’s surface, patterns made from identical black logos serve as an indistinct backdrop for an anthropomorphic figure carrying an equally black banner. These components, standardized by color, undergo an alteration of their properties or—to borrow an image with monetary connotations—a devaluation, an erosion of their emblematic qualities and identities, even as their serial arrangement reaffirms them. The artist intervenes in this very identity and draws inspiration from a generally overlooked tradition of social activism and symbolic appropriation. This tradition may also call for the affirmation of the artistic gesture’s sovereign unproductivity as labor, from the perspective of the scale of monetizable values.