Back in 1990, Sylvie Fleury caused some irritation when she grouped assorted shopping bags filled with luxury goods on the floor of Galerie Rivolta in Lausanne, Switzerland. The legend claims that she had purchased these items shortly before arriving at her very first group exhibition, where she then neatly placed them in front of artworks by fellow Swiss artists John M. Armleder and Olivier Mosset. Over the years since, she has produced a loose series of similar works and, as with these groups of bags that really contained high-quality goods acquired during shopping tours, they’ve occasionally prompted thievery.
Fleury’s recent exhibition “Shoplifters from Venus” featured new paintings and installations along with older work, highlighting her recurrent themes of consumerism and fashion as well as her propensity for appropriation: Catwalk, 2008, for example, is an actual catwalk occupying an entire room. It is surrounded by black paintings—with colors splashed onto them à la Jackson Pollock—that come with a chain affixed to their top edge, so that they can actually be carried like handbags, adding a twist to the notion of appropriation itself: Just go ahead, take it, and turn it into something else, as long as it’s fashionable! Eternal Wow on Shelves, 2008, resembles one of Donald Judd’s wall-mounted stacks, but with some slightly gross, amorphous heaps of polyurethane foam populating each level’s surface. And “Flawless Finish,” 2017–, is a series of acrylic paintings (Perfect Cherry Blossom, Perfect Lavender, etc.) that look like giant makeup palettes waiting to be used.
Gender stereotypes are among Fleury’s prime targets, and she is at her best when she attacks them most literally. For her 2008 video Cristal Custom Commando, she hired three women from a Geneva motorcycle club to shoot guns at Chanel handbags (a satiric take on the 1968 exploitation movie She-Devils on Wheels), filming both the female protagonists and the destroyed items in assertive close-ups. This attack was not aimed at luxury, as such, but at its predominant meaning, which ideologizes wealth for women in a way that takes the shape of an accessory. One room gathered the notorious rockets that Fleury has manufactured since the mid-1990s. Their oversize dimensions make fun of the notion of technology being a male toy and of the masculinist desire to conquer, whether that urge pertains to war or to space. Some of them—for instance, First Spaceship on Venus (16 ABC), 1998—are covered in fake fur, creating giant toys to cuddle with or cherish like a precious doll. Others shimmer in garish colors, such as First Spaceship on Venus (Icy Purple), 2023, which was specially made for the show—close to a hundred pounds of car paint were applied to it.
However, the wit behind Fleury’s positive or amusing exaggeration of abundance does not always come through in times like the present, when one economic uncertainty rapidly follows the next and large parts of formerly flourishing societies are slipping into poverty. The conditions of consumption have dramatically changed since 1990. With online shopping taking over from physical stores, today’s hot new shopping bag is the mail parcel. Will Fleury eventually comment on the current flood of cardboard as well?
