Ever since the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble, Matthieu Laurette has been exploring the notions of public and private spaces - recording a capsule-hotel experience in Japan (Simple Life, 1993), as well as the privacy of a hotel room in New York during a 24-hour visit (New York City Guest, 1993). That same year, on television (Tournez Manège, TF1), he declared his intention of becoming a multimedia artist. Since 1993, Matthieu Laurette has "appeared" in the media background. The artist has haunted television programmes in the backdrop, where the ordinary studio audience is pasted like wallpaper. Using a process of recovering and editing these video images, Matthieu Laurette emerges from his anonymous position. At the same time as his Apparitions, after his participation on the TV show Je passe à la télé (France 3, 1996), he was invited to appear on a number of television programmes to answer questions on "how to get a refund on your shopping". He explained how to spot the products, pay for them and obtain a full refund. Matthieu Laurette understands and accepts television's codes. In order to adapt to the requirements of audience ratings, he doesn't emphasise the fact that he is an artist; he concentrates on aspects of ordinary life. Television uses him in the same way as he uses television. Matthieu Laurette uses the space and marketing models of the commercial system to broadcast his works, from television to Internet, from the press to leaflets, from radio to the showroom. Far from seeking the failure of an economic system, he uses the same weapons as companies to develop a kind of social attitude between playfulness and realism that plays with the consumerist entity by adopting its rules. In Paris, he organised a showroom, Mangez remboursé (1998), which was as much an exhibition as it was an information point with guided visits of supermarkets. In the Ghislain Mollet-Viéville gallery, he presented Nourrissez un artiste à partir de 100 francs et faîtes-vous rembourser par les plus grandes marques! (Paris, 1998). In Nantes (1997), a publicity van circulated through the streets with his Vivons remboursés! This operation gave rise to an autonomous association, "refunded consumers" – a real recycling of his work. On Internet, the "produits remboursés" site [1] presents "free" menus and all the practical information for finding these products.

In 1995, Matthieu Laurette became involved with a library in Grenoble, where he deposited his own books until the year 2000 – the works were mixed with the public works (La Bibliothèque dispersée). This project, somewhere between a gift and a loan, gives a precise yearly listing of the number of consultations. This gives the artist "exact ratings that literally give precise statistics concerning his appearances at distance" [2]. this aspect of distance crops up again in Artist's Studio Spycam (1997), at the FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon, where exhibition visitors could watch him via Internet as he worked in his Paris studio. The process of the artist's work becomes a work itself: spectators watch live as he manages his electronic file and the consumption of refunded products. The distance is prospective at the CCC of Tours, where astrologer Eliane Soleil predicted his professional future (Projection, Eliane Soleil, Paris 10.06.98), a work in progress of a subjective vision.

With its own manner of commemorating May 1968, the entertainment cable channel offered Matthieu Laurette a slot. He carried out street interviews with a team from the cable channel on the Champs-Elysées, the showcase of multinationals. He stopped passers-by and asked them to read lines by Guy Debord: the critic of La Société du spectacle becoming part of the spectacle.

In November 1998, he exhibited Free Sample at the Jousse Seguin gallery – a space that was transformed into a warehouse as much as it was a production house or, to use the terms of the exhibition brochure, "an installation mixing heterogeneous situations and objects in the space of the gallery. Everything must disappear, from an extra passport… to a series of t-shirts… Free Sample mix, remix, demix bring together in the long version profits and losses, free products, investments, sampling and cataloguing." For the catalogue, Hugues Royer, biographer of stars and screenwriter for AB productions, collated and formed the words of the people who were instrumental in the emergence of Matthieu Laurette.

Since 1998, a developing Internet site proposes the Citizenship Project [3], where reflects on the methods of acquiring other nationalities. The site aims to bring together all the legal texts of various countries and find the flaws. "The fact of acquiring a new nationality interests me as a form. A form that materialises legally, which has implications in everyday life and the economy." [4]

This interest in the economy occurs again in The Big Swap-Le Grand Troc (El Gran Trueque, Bilbao, January 2000), a proposition of swaps in cascade, accessible on a television channel and on Internet [5], supported by the Press and the distribution of leaflets to 150,000 households in Bilbao. Matthieu Laurette devoted part of the production's budget to purchasing a car. The public is invited to make counter offers. The highest offer is selected. In this way, the newly acquired object becomes the swap for the next week. El Gran Trueque calls into question the relationships between the media and the market and perturbs the logic of profit: the values of exchanges lose their usual coherence.

Dominique Garrigues

[1] www.labart.univ-paris8.fr/~laurette/
[2] Alexis Vaillant, "On ne s'est pas déjà vu quelque part ?", catalogue Free Sample Demix, Paris, galerie Jousse Seguin, 1998, p. 73.
[3] www.culture.fr/culture/dap/entréelibre
[4] "Economies parallèles", Blocnotes, Paris (France), numéro 15, July1998.
[5] www.consonni.org/elgrantrueque