SYLVIE FLEURY
Exhibition October 21 2001 – January 6 2002
Curator: Yves Aupetitallot

MAGASIN is presenting an exhibition that can be considered an important step in this artist’s career. It is offering her the totality of its exhibition spaces (some 2,000 square metres) and bringing together pieces of which most are very recent, and a significant number made specially for the occasion.
This customary institutional argument aside, the main interest of this exhibition is that it makes an addition to the set of objects and collections of extra-artistic signs used by Fleury. The “Rue” area is entirely given over to She Devils on Wheels (1998), which combines a monumental wall painting of stylised flames, the hulks of old cars, oil drums, tyres and the accessories offices of a women’s club that advises visitors on the technical or decorative customising of their vehicles. In the same way, the world of fashion is present in the new piece Trees Show the Bodily Form of the Wind (made with the support of Prada), which recreates one of the eponymous brand’s stores, complete with its seasonal collection.

For the most part, though, the pieces are articulated around a huge territory evoked by the caption to the image on the invitation: “Identity/Pain/Astral Projection”. This embraces various fields of knowledge and representation, referencing both spirituality and “scientific” apparatus for interpreting the world on the basis of “natural elements”.
Pierre Van Obberghen, a chromotherapist, has collaborated throughout the exhibition. He designed the Matrix Cube room at the back of the exhibition. In this space visitors can consult his chromotherapy software and study the graphs on the wall. Those who put on the necessary white overalls can discover the room called Two Views of the Rock and Sand Garden at Ryoanji, coloured using a special technological technique and filled with Piero Gilardi’s sound-making rocks/seats. AVS 5, comprising the eponymous apparatus along with hospital equipment and a computer, enables visitors to visualise their aura. The Waves Give Vital Energy to the Moon consists of 8,000 volumes which have been acquired and then classified with the help of a nature therapist.
Objects symbolising these “beliefs” are made on a monumental scale (The Mouth that Cracked a Flea Said “Namu Amida Butsu” and pendulums as Seven).
As with the other ones, this new theme disqualifies the analytic schemes inherited from the 1980s, skimpily founded on the idea of the appropriation of signs, fields of activity and objects within a specific artistic context, where they purportedly reformulate its particular problematics, arising from the status of the art object, its display in the physical space of its presentation and the ways in which it contaminates institutional discourse. Her most recent exegetes, notably Markus Brüderlin, Eric Troncy and Lionel Bovier, have gradually established a telling reading of her work as “post-appropriationist”. The operational modes of Fleury’s use of extra-artistic fields, such as fashion, girls’ groups, customising, spirituality, etc., induce “contextual leaps” and the “coupling of systems” related above all to “the cultural techniques and lifestyles” of their users and their destination, or “pervert the enunciative paradigm (of the 1980s) by means of cultural stereotypes (and) imaginary constructs”. The logic and procedures of “customising” (ways of singularising and individualising an anonymous manufactured product) would thus constitute both the tools and the particularity of this post-appropriationism that sets out to reveal the tensions within the fields explored. Fashion draws on this tension in an exemplary way by playing on contradictory terms – the desire to be part of a clan and yet a singularised individual; the dictatorship of collective taste and the desire for personalisation. Fashion is the medium for an articulation of the question of women’s collective and individual identity. This tension also articulates the stereotypes attaching to the distinction between the feminine-masculine gender distinction, destabilising its equilibrium by the barely veiled feminisation of objects evoking masculine symbols (for example, the “phallic” rockets in lipstick colours or covered in fake fur).

SYLVIE FLEURY
Sylvie Fleury was born in 1961 in Geneva where she works and lives.

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
Pleasures, 2001
Neon, 45 x 120 x 5 cm
Edition Art & Public, Geneva

Be amazing, 1999
Neon, 65 x 300 x 5,5 cm
Courtesy De Pury & Luxembourg, Geneva ; Art & Public, Geneva

Razor Blade, 2001
Metal, aluminium
8 elements, each 290 x 145 x 1 cm
Courtesy Galerie Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers, Cologne/Munich ; Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber, Zürich

Waves Give Vital Energy to the Moon, 2001
Approximately 8000 books and bookshelves
Courtesy Bibliothèque Soleil

Trees Show the Bodily Form of the Wind, 2001
Made with the support of Prada

Keep Your Right Hand Turned Upward, And Your Left Hand Downward 1, 2001
Keep Your Right Hand Turned Upward, And Your Left Hand Downward 2, 2001
Courtesy Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber, Zürich

Crop Too, 2001
Pasted offset posters
Courtesy Le Magasin, Grenoble

The Mouth that Cracked a Flea Said, « Namu Amida Butsu », 2001
Giand Chromo Quartz and Smaller Chromo Quartz
Plexigalss, neon, metal

Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing, Spring Comes, and the Grass Grows by Itself, 2001
Matress with jade pastilles, salt lamps
Sylvie Fleury & John Armleder
Rotorua Perpetual Glow Machine, 1999/2001
Video
Courtesy BDV, Paris

Aura-Soma, 2001
Glass shelf, 102 bottles, 1 spotlight
Variable dimensions
Courtesy Collection Fer

AVS 5, 2001 (NB : abbreviation of Aura Video Station 5)
Computer, used hospital furnishings, video projector
Variable dimensions

Seven, 2001
Metal
Pendulum: height 180 cm
Chain: lenght 1600 cm
Sylvie Fleury, Geneva

Twenty-One, 2001
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

Six, 2001
Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

8, 2000
Fibreglass, metal, strass, fabric, plastic, lighting, sound
Diametre approximately 255 cm
Courtesy Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber, Zürich

Pierre van Obberghen, styled by Sylvie Fleury
Matrix Installation, 2001

Matrix cube, Chromopro software, suits
Courtesy Art & Public, Geneva

Sylvie Fleury with Piere van Obberghen
Two views of the Rock and Sand Garden at Ryoanji, 2001
Rochers Interactifs by Piero Gilardi, 1994
Courtesy Soft, Paris ; Art & Public, Geneva
Sajem Lighting Technology, Geneva
Courtesy Art & Public, Geneva

SPACE « RUE »

She-Devils on Wheels Headquarters II, 2000
Hulks of old cars, tyres, oil drums, freight containers
Courtesy Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber, Zürich

Flames 12, 2001
Wall painting

283 Chevy, 1999
400 Dodge, 1999
400 Pontiac, 1999
Chrome-plated bronze
70 x 58 x 76 cm
The Pisces Trust, courtesy De Pury & Luxembourg, Geneva

Zen & Speed, 2001
Video installation
Son Sidney Stucki
Courtesy BDV, Paris; Glamour Engineering, Zürich

Viva Las Vegas, 2001
with Diego Sanchez
Editing and music by Sidney Stucki
Video installation
Variable dimensions
Courtesy BDV, Paris; Glamour Engineering, Zürich

Expert Make-Up, 2001
Video
Courtesy Sonje art Center, Seoul