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“Rather, Fleury represents her desire precisely as it is a far more interesting strategy of ultimate passivity, not unlike Lacan’s slave/master relationship whereby the slave’s freedom depends precisely upon a position of submission and resignation to the order of power. It must be understood that there is not the slightest critique, analysis or satire involved in Fleury’s presentation of her shopping bags or display of show and their boxes; this is her shopping presented as it is, and the radicality of this act is precisely in its divorce from any intention or argument, political, social, or cultural. This strategy may be as disturbing as Donald Judd’s vision of a new art based on absolute anti-emotion. In fact Judd’s visibility seems, in some weird, insane and impossible manner, akin to Fleury’s, both of them attracted to artificial shiny and fetishistic materials, both utterly opposed to Romantic formulas of nature and naturalism, to the ideal of “authenticity.” “Things that exist, exist, and everything is on their side.” Judd’s formula perfectly desires Fleury’s own project in which “thingness” is allowed to resonate by itself without further intervention.
“Fleury suggests art can be liberated from its reliance on constant innovation and complex physical formulation and relax instead into a sort of ne plus ultra of laissez faire “whateverism” which ups the ante on American “Slacker” culture’s aesthetics of resignation.”
-Adrian Dannatt
