Sylvie Fleury

Untitled (Car Magazine Covers), 1999

Central to Sylvie Fleury’s analytical interest is the way in which consumer article, luxury items and their codes are fetishized as well as the changing perspective between typically male and female consumer worlds. By using found design and art objects, or objects she has bought herself, Fleury adopts the artistic practice of the ready-made and deconstructs male-dominated art history by replacing it with a typically feminine object world. Here she leaves the feminist discourses of the 1970s and 1980s well behind her and acts from the affirmative position of an accomplice of both fashion and art. The photographic blow-up’s of magazine covers is to be seen in this context. Like her earlier photographic works in the Playgirl series, Fleury’s Car Magazine Covers can be seen as a constellation of signs representing a society geared solely to production of goods. Seen from tis perspective, the female bodies, like the depicted cars, are part of the consumer society, just like the pictures of them that are presented to us.