As Helena Reckitt details in her curatorial essay for Habits of Care: “Claire Fontaine’s lightbox work Untitled (Rust & Tears) (2012) is based on the image of a ten-dollar US banknote onto which water or tears are doodled. By folding the bill, the words ‘rust’ and ‘tears’ are produced, calling to mind flows of liquidity and drought, including the pain inflicted by neoliberal economics, which came to a head in the 2008 global financial crisis.”

The word “rust” together with “tears” adds to the emotional charge of the work as one associates, even measures, industrial labour with, or against, affective labour. Rather than operating at the service of a cause or call to action, the image reads more like a desperate lament or plea to reflect on the extraction, exhaustion, and exploitation that fuels capitalist economies. Claire Fontaine’s folds and doodles distort and critique the imagery printed on US banknotes, particularly the visualizations of faith in a Christian god and the Treasury system, which further conflate the operations of capitalism—labour, commodity exchange, resource extraction, and so forth—with morality. In extending these ironies by defacing the ten-dollar bill and transforming it into an artwork, Claire Fontaine participates in an anarchist gesture that also engages the status of the artwork as a commodity.