At heart we are all fetishists. We’re obsessed with objects, whether spiritual, magical, sexual or merely material. It is what defines us and what we create. Sylvie Fleury’s work is a manifestation of the human need to worship, just as sexual fetishes convey the necessity of fulfilment. She works with objects that embody sexuality, idolatry and obsession to underline our fixations. The shopping sprees, the out-of-this-world cars, the goldness of everything: it’s a glimpse of fantastic excess that crosses the boundaries of illusion and reality.
For someone who made her name with
installations of Chanel shopping bags, Gucci heels and crushed American
classic cars, Fleury is decidedly disinterested in pointing out the evils of
commodity and consumption. She has much more to say about art than mere
exposure of the banality of fashion and shopping: ‘I don’t really care,
since I believe that the issue has been tiresomely investigated since the
eighties. One can consume art or experience it in thousands of ways; it’s
all a matter of bowels, bladder and sometimes brains.’ In pieces like her
bronze Alaia Shoes (2003) there’s more love than hate of the object. She
plays with fashion’s fetishisation of touch, shapes and labels, aware of its
cryptic meanings and nuances. She‘s amused by the rules and absorbed in
them. ‘Any fetish relies on codes, on a system of codes; these will be
shared by speciality groups. Art has always relied on similar patterns.
Fashion draughts the same structure in an even more obvious way. It’s clear
that I happen to use one for another.’ Shopping and fashion are equally the
language, medium and subject of the work.
The removal between the viewer and Fleury’s art object is more acute than
the distance between shopper and commodity in the shopping environment. We
are not supposed to touch the installations, making the moment of ‘buying’
even more distant, the labels even less attainable. It’s a tension that
Fleury exaggerates and exploits. ‘[It’s] the paradox in the commodity
factor… Even when you get it, you don’t get much.’ She often plays on this
emptiness, this lack. Pieces like CHANCE (2003), a gold plated empty
shopping basket, and ELA 75/K, Easy, Breezy, Beautiful (2000), an empty gold
shopping trolley on a spinning mirrored pedestal, idolise the moment of
purchase while highlighting its barrenness.
Fleury’s use of the pedestal flirts with western society’s structures of power, value and beauty, transforming the objects into something of worship yet creating an undercurrent of superficiality. Her modes of display are camp, superficial, venerated and exalted all at the same time; she seems to be mocking the viewer and the very act of encountering art. In her latest show at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Fleury is showing what she describes as weird fountains in ceramic in the shape of tyres. ‘I might add to the sound of the water and little smoke, some coloured lights inside the pedestals and some soft relaxing music,’ she muses before installation. The gold-plated tyres are to be exhibited on transparent Plexiglas pedestals in a room painted deep blue. It’s a pop nudge against modernism: Duchamp’s Fountain (1917/64) as a kitsch dimestore amalgam surrounded by Yves Klein blue. Similarly her giant gold cages bring to mind Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy? (1921) from which all the sugar cubes have flown. Rather than a surreal bird cage, Fleury’s giant pens resemble the enclosures of a high-class human zoo. They question objectification and containment, again highlighting the emptiness at the heart of ownership, purchase and even viewing.
Fleury’s chroming technique superficially
fetishises the object in a Liberace-plays-Las Vegas vision of beauty and
prestige. Using superficially ‘female’ gold sheen and pink gloss she is
reappropriating the power of glamour, high heels and hot pink. In a way she
reappropriates fetish itself: ‘Because the tools of power are largely
actioned in our society by males rather than females, it just happens that,
for instance, any fetish is first seen through the realm of men, and that’s
commonly taken as granted.’
Fleury’s fetish-filled world is transformed through a female gaze. In a
recent conversation with artist Peter Halley, she explained: ‘Just
recontextualising something that’s very superficial will give it a new
depth. And sometimes, just being a woman and showing something like a pair
of shoes, a car, or a Carl Andre gives it another dimension.’ Her
‘feminisation’ of typically ‘masculine’ objects has a tongue in cheek
political edge. Pieces like Skincrime2 (Givenchy 601) (1997), a crushed car
painted in pink nail varnish, and the painted slogan Miniskirts are back
(2003) seem to giggle at tired presumptions, with knowing humour.
Rather than condemning the rigid genderisation and ideological constructs within the imagery and language of fashion magazines, Fleury reclaims it. The pink neon italics of Perpetual Bliss (2003) or ‘C’est La Vie!’ written on a pink wall exaggerate and enlarge the superficial vision of gender-specific language to iconic levels.
There is a petulant, dominant edge to
Fleury’s work that reeks of flirtation. She teases the viewer with colour
and easy and immediate objects and imagery, which comes to the fore in her
video work. Her latest video piece is in two parts; the first, Here Comes
Santa (2003), shows the legs and high heels of a woman destroying the
Christmas baubles laying around on a red carpet; the second, Bells (2003),
shows the same process on a green carpet. ‘The person walks the carpets
until no ball is left in one piece, some parts are quite violent and the
soundtrack mixes Christmas music with very loud sounds of the balls being
smashed.’ The work is visually and aurally piercing and violent, while the
extremely high stiletto mules smashing and crunching the mirrored balls
present a cliché of female sexual power, as if the woman is stamping her
feet for recognition.
Fleury’s recent multiples play with similar ideas. Deep & Dark is a series
of feather boas inside long, narrow Plexiglas boxes in what she calls ‘an
erect hanging position’. They explore powers of seduction and delicacy while
illustrating the containment of femininity and the clash of male and female
sensibilities. Whereas Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered tea cups Breakfast in
Fur (1936) unnerve because of the accessibility of the tactile material,
here Fleury’s boas are frustrating because they cannot be touched.
For Fleury fetish and seduction are more
about power and control than something solely sexual. ‘Strategies of
seduction are infinite. It’s debatable that inert objects actively produce
seduction,’ she observes. ‘One could argue that seduction is a reverse power
game where the seducer aims at controlling the realm that will over-power
him in return.’ You get the feeling that Fleury is always in control of her
seduction methods; she knows what she wants and how to get it, but isn’t
immune from temptation herself. She adds wryly, ‘Many artists are basically
seduced by their own work, whatever that implies...’
Francesca gavin is a freelance critic and writer.