Sylvie Fleury: Auto Erotica

The crushed body of the sports car had turned her into a being of free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex - J.G. Ballard, Crash, 1973

Cue the car radio, the sun is up, the top is down...smell the Coppertone...Sylvie Fleury's body of work seems to come with its own Girl Power summer soundtrack: "We Got the Beat," "Crash and Burn," "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." By shrouding her objects in unusual skins and colors recalling make up and fashion, she reveals deeply rooted issues of male dominance and gender hierarchies in culture and contemporary art while celebrating traditionally female preoccupations. Automobiles have always played a big part in Fleury’s art and life. Despite having been raised in Switzerland, her first car was a 1968 Chevy Camero and she was the founder of a Swiss motoring club for women called She-Devils on Wheels. Fleury freely merges the realms of the garage and dressing room. She has presented hubcaps as a wall of trophies, enlarged car insignias and spoiler decals to mural-like scale, and created installations with titles such as IS YOUR MAKE UP CRASHPROOF?

Skin Crime 3 (Givenchy 318), 1997 is a crushed car, flattened in what can only have been a loud and violent crunch. The "car-daver" conjures images of fast curves, road trips, and late nights at the drive-in, and makes you wonder how this machine of speed and motion met its inert and definitive end. Fleury encased the car in a monochromatic pink which visually evens out the crushed sections with those bits of unscathed metal, thereby equalizing destruction and design.

Much of Fleury’s work has deliberately softened the hard male edge of recent art history. In the instance of Skin Crime 3 (Givenchy 318) the comparisons to John Chamberlain and Cesar are the most apparent; however, the blanketing of color also references the work of Yves Klein and his penchant for claiming ownership of objects by coating them in his signature International Klein Blue. While Klein’s color considerations were deeply rooted in the artist’s spiritual studies and his love of the hues he found while deep sea diving, Fleury’s color choice has a far less lofty base; as she determined her palette simply by considering the latest color trend from Givenchy’s line of nail polish. Like Klein, she co-opted the object through color, but by choosing nail enamel over an industrial varnish, Fleury is firmly feminizing the object through coloration and texture. Truly a custom car, the artist is also absolving herself of aesthetic choice by choosing a pre-conceived directive based upon current fashion.

Fleury has tackled the work of many of the big male guns of modern and contemporary art, most reverentially Warhol. In one of her earliest works, the artist made a stack of silkscreen facsimiles of Slim Fast diet drink boxes in counterpoint to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. Fleury shares Warhol’s interest in subjects like shoes, celebrities, designer labels, and perfume bottles. They also share a fascination with car crashes and disasters. Like Warhol, Fleury uses consumer culture as her inspiration and tool box. Her materials are popular products: shopping bags, scarves, shoes, feather boas, and make up. It should not be surprising therefore that Fleury also shares with Warhol a dedication to high fashion and consumer culture.

Artist and curator Peter Weibel observed that Fleury "uses soft feminine materials to change the hard aesthetic of men. She has thus not just deconstructed Pop Art, but by introducing soft materials into the world of hard signs she also deconstructs Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, Abstract Painting, etc, and reveals them as male codes.” 1 In her video, Walking on Carl Andre, 1996, stiletto-heeled, Mondrianinspired boots, walk over one of the artist’s floor pieces; a work of torn denim, simultaneously conjures high style and Lucio Fontana, and gilded Hermes bags, footwear, and shopping carts recall the finish fetish obsessions of Jeff Koons’ Rabbit and Balloon Dog.

The notion of exploring the "softer side of art" is found in Fleury’s Mondrian series, in which the artist has filled the colored squares of a Mondrian grid with red, yellow and/or blue fake fur fabric. Eric Troncy, in his essay, "The Better You Look" 2 noted that these works owe as much to Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic Mondrian dress, as they do to the painter’s original work. In Fleury’s FIRST SPACE SHIPS ON VENUS, 1996, rocket ships are clad in various make-up inspired colors. Alongside these lipstick-like projectiles are a series of missiles which have no interior structure but are simply sewn together out of quilted leather, inspired by Chanel bags. These objects, with their soft leather quilting, completely feminize these phallic objects, presenting them as flaccid shells, while simultaneously conjuring Oldenburg soft sculptures of the 60’s. These impotent trajectories completely subvert the notion of "dressed to kill."

For Chanel’s Mobile Art Museum in 2008, Fleury created Crystal Custom Commando, a coming together of many of the artists’ interests and influences. The main feature is an automobile-scaled Chanel handbag, replete with Chanel’s signature chain strap, which in this oversized context, evokes far more machine part than fashion statement. Inside the bag, which is splayed open to reveal a pink interior, not dissimilar to her Skin Game palette, is a video, projected in an over sized compact case, featuring a trio of women, clad in car racing gear. Inspired by Russ Meyer’s B-movie classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! these uber confident, automatic weapon wielding "broads" are shown at a firing range where they practice their perfect aim using Chanel bags as targets.

It seems apt that an artist who was born and raised in Switzerland, the land of banks and currencies, would produce work which examines consumer culture and invites a discourse on the relationship between, fashion trends, consumer markets, and the fine arts. Beneath their seductive surfaces and art historical double entendres, Fleury’s work continues to provoke and challenge. Testing the balance between high art and fashion trend, this girl’s clearly in the driver’s seat.

Sylvie Fleury was born in Geneva, Switzerland in 1961. In 1981 she received a degree from Germain School of Photography in New York. She has had exhibitions at Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin, La Monnair, Paris, Grieder Contemporary, Zurich and Musee d’ Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Sylvie Fleury currently lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.

Nora Halpern is based in Washington DC, Ms. Halpern splits her time between her writing and exhibition work and her role as a Vice President at Americans for the Arts, the nation’s preeminent organization for advancing the arts. Ms. Halpern settled in the Washington area following four years in Oxford, England, where she served as thesis advisor to graduate students of art history at the University of Oxford while continuing her work as an independent curator and advisor to collections and foundations. Prior to living in England, Ms. Halpern, a native of New York City, spent much of her career in Los Angeles, where she was curator of the Frederick R. Weisman Collections; founding director of the museum at Pepperdine University; and vice president and director of fine arts for Sotheby’s, Los Angeles. Ms. Halpern received both her B.A. and M.A. (with honors) from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written and lectured extensively on modern and contemporary art issues as well as served as an art critic for a number of national and international publications. She is a recipient of the Helena Rubinstein Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was a Rhodes Scholar finalist from the University of California. She has served on the board of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Advisory Board of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. She is co-founder of Street Scenes: Projects for DC, an independent public art program which organizes public presentations of work by artists in all disciplines including poetry, performance and the visual arts. Projects include works by Jenny Holzer, Cal Lane, The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, E. Ethelbert Mille, and Yoko Ono, among others. Most recently, Ms. Halpern was the curator of ANTON’S MEMORY, an exhibition of the work of Yoko Ono which was on view at Palazzetto Tito, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice, Italy, May through September 2009.