Claire Fontaine’s The Dialectics of Sex brickbat is one of several iterations in the artist collective’s brickbat series, which consists of bricks wrapped in book covers customized to fit their dimensions. Since all the brickbats have the same thickness, all the “books” are now equivalent. While the covers generally represent a certain type of book—history, philosophy, literature, theory—the interiors of these “books” offer a brick displaced from its typical utilitarian function. The term “brickbat,” which is used to refer to a brick being thrown as a weapon, already suggests an alternate potentiality for resistance and rebellion. Yet knowledge and theory, indexed by the book covers, are also real (and at times abstract) tools of resistance. The merging of these two anarchist objects invokes a slippage between abstraction and reality, and potentiality and actuality, allowing us to reconcile two different forms of resistance that may otherwise be in tension with one another.

Curator Helena Reckitt outlines the political potential of this particular work in her essay: “The ambiguous presence of the cover of Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 book The Dialectics of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution in the brickbat missile of 2014, points to the explosive power of this radical, proto-cyberfeminist’s ideas about surrogate childbirth and non-conformist parenting. In the context of Habits of Care, Firestone’s book evokes the difficulties that women continue to face in negotiating their own care and flourishing in relation to the many other care taking obligations placed on them.”

Moreover, the brickbat series challenges terms of legibility and accessibility by questioning the relationship between the book’s cover and its contents—from the marketing of intellectual and literary work to the branding of protest and dissent. In this way, Claire Fontaine’s series is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the hyper commercialization and commodification of objects, to the point that their contents no longer correspond to their purpose or promise.