The book La Fatigue culturelle reports on the Quebec visual arts milieu through various projects carried out by artist Nicolas Rivard. The major part of the book is devoted to a project that looks at the reality of artist-run centres in Quebec. Rivard uses the principles of engaged art within a vast performative and conceptual project that appropriates the milestones of the economic and political systems in place. Under the guise of his fictitious company La Fatigue culturelle, he infiltrates working structures through interventions or with the help of artistic promotional objects diverted from their primary function and demonstrating the flaws in the system of funding for arts and culture. The artist seeks to create mediation tools between the public, the politicians and the cultural workers, ironically showing the imbalance between creativity and the constant demand for performativity.
The publication brings together three authors who focus on different aspects of Rivard's artistic practice and the discourse he supports. Anithe de Carvalho paints a generic portrait of the large-scale project entitled La Fatigue culturelle in Quebec artist-run centres, through a formal and sociological analysis of the different modes of mediation used by the artist. Sonia Pelletier attempts to reconcile the socio-political context surrounding Hubert Aquin's text entitled La Fatigue culturelle du Canada français with that of Rivard's project. At the beginning of the book, Nicolas RIVARD reviews the premises of his fictitious enterprise before listing the multitude of information gathered during the project in the artist-run centres.
