he Woman Who Stole Christmas
Jovana Stokic
Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury is often perceived as a key proto-post- feminist artist. In her works of the early 1990s, she displayed luxurious shopping bags or fashionable shoes and shoeboxes, usually scattered on the floor. At first sight, her work looked like a confirmation of the values of a consumer society–she appropriated logos from fashion houses, perfume stores and glossy magazines. Instead, it was her attempt to come to terms with the fetishistic attachment to material goods that is the defining feature of the world of fashion. The artist defined her critical stance: "For me, fashion is a creative weapon. I use it like a brush or a video camera." She thematized shopping as the ultimate feminine activity through her frivolous reduction ad absurdum of feminine acquisitiveness. She brought it to the fore of so-called post-feminist discourse as an empowering strategy. Thus her tactic of ultimate passivity (she displayed shopping bags as they are)–devoid from the slightest critique, analysis or satire–becomes the ultimate site of resistance. Or, is the empress naked here?
At first, Fleury did not deal with the issue of body–the shopper was tellingly absent. But then, in the 1995 piece Walking on Carl Andre that she showed at the museum in Esslingen, Germany, she took high heeled shoes with a Mondrian design on them and scattered them on the surface of a copper Carl Andre floor piece. Curiously enough, Carl Andre did not let his piece be used in this way, and he had it removed, not only from the ground, but also from the exhibition catalogue.
Fleury has recently turned to magic light phenomena, colorful rooms, glossy surfaces, magic auras and crystals. Her new exhibition at Patrick Painter Inc. consists of two elements: a video, and a red neon light reading "Strange Fire." The video is projected on a large slab mounted at an angle in the corner of the gallery, with the letters positioned behind the projection. The red neon glows from behind the screen giving the projection a pulp, trashy halo. Absent from her previous works, Sylvie Fleury, offering herself as a protagonist, is represented in the video in an active gesture. The artist stomps through the field of silver Christmas tree ornaments. The mirrored balls shatter and explode under her feet. The camera fragments her body so that she is visible only from below the knees. The Swiss artist also is settling an account with American symbology: she wears red, white and blue stripes-and-stars sequined stilettos. She puts her foot down on the silver balls destroying their mirrored surfaces, revealing that the shiny surface is a thin membrane encasing a void.
Fleury’s act of breaking, directed here at Christmas ornaments, marks an openly active role towards her environment. This brings to mind Pipilotti Rist’s seminal, larger-than-life video projection Ever is Overall (1997). In it, a woman is represented walking down the street with a metal flower. As she walks along in slow motion, in a blue dress and her red shoes, she swings the flower into a parked car’s window breaking it. Both women do not get punished for their transgressions, showing that theirs is not a random violence but the acts of rebellion against "the order of things."
Fleury’s earlier works lent themselves to Lacanian interpretation of fetishistic desire for objects. Now her actions, steeped in glamorous decadence and luxuriously represented, plunge into the abyss of murky polarization between creation and destruction that is at the core of artistic activity.
