Sylvie Fleury, John Armleder, Antonv Gormley
ACE Gallery
Los Angeles
The installations of Swiss artists Sylvie Fleury and John Armleder, filling an entire wing of this massive gallery in L.A.s Miracle Mile district, have a hard-edged, impersonal toughness about them. Their work, recycling the visual codes of fashion and entertainment, demonstrates the difficulties of constructing the self in a consumer age.
Sylvie Fleurys approach reflects the art world s ambivalence toward fashion and its powerful image industry. There is a hint of envy in this art, that the never-ending line of seductive images cranked out by the couture and makeup industries is more effective in shaping an audience than artists can ever hope to be. Maybe this is why Fleury crams a small room with half-a-dozen video monitors running tapes of celebrity exercise cheesecake, impossibly perfect bodies caught in relentless motion.
Fleury’s art displays a degree of cunning, turning the materials of fashion back on themselves. ln another room, she lines a chartreuse wall with slick red words like those gracing the covers of women’s magazines, all to frame a bifurcated Chevy Camaro painted a glossy purple. Just as the text describes women’s personal care in the language of a car wash (“cleaning, scrubbing, waxing,” etc.), the empty shell of the car
suggests the self hollowed out by the narcissism of fashion.
What distinguishes Fleury’s work from other fashion critiques is her attention to the human touch. We might say her impersonal touch mimics the hard edged autonomy of fashion as a commercial reality. But underneath that veneer is the suggestion of violence against body and self. The act of applying makeup,
after all, transforms a primitive contact with the body into an alienation from the self. Hence, smashed mascara kits litter one room like the evidence of a crime scene. But if this all sounds vaguely predictable or familiar (the wall text recalls Barbara Kruger, for example), Fleury also has a poetic-comedic side that is startling. ln Fur Spaceships on Venus, #18, ABC, Fleury covers two rockets with white fake fur, turning them into phallic satyrs. Standing next to large, similarly covered balls mimicking the cotton balls used to supply makeup, the rockets hint broadly at the sexual charade of fashion.
Just as Fleury taps into the self-negating gesture of touch, John Armleder uses vision, the most privileged of the senses, to create a perceptual baffle. On a huge scaffold, Armleder hangs TV monitors playing bad’50s scifi flicks, and tape decks droning a melange of Hawaiian slack guitar and outer space noise. Flashing caution lights and rows of wall-crawling pink neon circles, reflected in large silvery half domes, add to the visual chaos. ln effect, Armleder performs a paradoxical reading of Michel Foucault. lnstead
of putting the viewer in a commanding position where vision becomes an agent of control, as in Foucault’s metaphor of the surveillance tower overlooking the prison yard, Armleder makes it
impossible for the viewer to organize this visual chaos, lf anything, the viewer is just another element
caught in the shiny mirrors. ln another stunning and economical installation, the party mood cast by six disco balls, spinning in a long passageway, gives way to uneasiness as the viewer’s reflection is shatlered and then disappears into the mirrored balls.
Fleury and Armleder’s art, seemingly all surface and impersonal, refuses to give in to the superficial appeal of fashion and enter tainment. lf their work implies a hollow inner being, it is because fashion and entertainment constantly attack the autonomy of the individual will as an operative, self-actualizing force.
ln that light, it is interesting to note how their work resonates with another installation also running at ACE, Antony Gormley’s Field, wilh its 1,200 terra-cotta figures, dark and furtive as an army of pigeons. While Gormleys handcrafted aesthetic, particularizing individuals amidst an overwhelming mass, is in direct contrast with the cool, commodified approach of Fleury and Armleder, all three picture the self as unanchored, disoriented by the absence of higher transcendent values.
-George Howell
