Instructions for Twilight, Dressing for Success, and Getting Your Art Funded: Reflections on Sylvie Fleury
Originally written for the Performa Biennial, written November 2025. This is a review of Sylvie Fleury's commission for the Biennial: "Instructions for Twilight."
Yesterday I attended an open rehearsal of my friend Nile Harris’s show from 2024, This House is Not a Home. Nile is restaging the work for the Walker Art Center this Winter, and he had invited some friends to rehearsal to serve as a mock audience. Part of the set contained a T-shirt that read, “Proudly Funded By Peter Thiel.” This referred to the bouncy house on the stage, which had been purchased in 2022 by his close friend Trevor Bazile using redirected funds from shadowy right-wing venture capitalist Thiel. This reference in Nile’s show was an “if you know you know” kind of inside joke that expanded over the course of an hour and a half, raising questions about blood money, dirty money…American money. By the point at which Nile’s show came out in 2024, it had already become common knowledge that Thiel was throwing money at various downtown art projects. In theory, these funds were intended for works that advanced Thiel’s rightwing mission to shift the culture away from wokeness. But in the mess of funding structures and distributions, some of that money did not go the way he intended. Nile therefore had the opportunity to use this money to create art that was Black, brilliant, gay, weird, and certainly not furthering the right-wing mission. However, Thiel-money is still being thrown around downtown NYC today, and more than one friend of mine has been offered a slice of this pie in exchange for shifting their public views to the right. Neither of my friends accepted the offer, but we all know people who have.
It was Peter Thiel and his redirected funds who came to mind on Saturday afternoon, when I arrived at the mysteriously-financed WSA building at 161 Water Street in the Financial District of Manhattan. I was there to see a show by the artist Sylvie Fleury as part of Performa’s biennial festival. The building is a skyscraper with a revolving door that opens onto the corner of Maiden Lane, and a lobby that feels cold and imposing despite the hundreds of real plants that fill every corner of the space. We waited on the second floor in a hallway that glowed gold through white curtains. A couple minutes before 5pm, they started letting us up. The work was called Instructions for Twilight, and as the elevator doors opened onto the 39th floor with sweeping panoramic views, the light of the dying sun was our first welcome into the large, open space. The majority of the floor was blocked off by a hot-pink tape stretched across pillars, and the audience was left to fit itself into an L-shape, spanning two sides of the square building. In the off-limits area, there were several large objects: a few old cars which had been sawed in half and placed at various intervals; glass ornaments lying across a blanket (some already shattered); mic stands; a glowing neon sign that said “exfoliate;” and a long, thin, reflective metallic panel which laid across the concrete floor, resembling a runway. Audience members milled around our cordoned-off area, all of us wondering where in the room the show would begin. The crowd was rather chic and art-world-y, and skewed a bit older than most of the scrappier shows that I usually attend.
Crash! We looked over to the far left side of the space, where a freestanding white wall divided the edge of the room from one of the windows. A pair of high heels had been thrown over the wall. Crash, crash! Another two sets of heels came flying, then another, then another. I counted eight pairs of shoes. The audience pressed inwards to crane their necks towards the sound. Since there was no seating, my best bet was to move to the very front and then squat down so as not to block those that I’d edged through. It was packed, and most people probably could not see the shoe-pile. After a few seconds of waiting with baited breath, a model came walking towards us. She made one pass through the space and then, as she disappeared, four more models appeared: two men and two women. The men looked like hypebeast fashion boys and the women were all (including the first model who had disappeared) wearing pencil skirts, high heeled pumps, and blazers belted at the waist. They were all very beautiful, tall, and thin. I recognized one of the women from a nightclub that I’d once worked at. The group made their way over to the metallic runway, and one of the men started to walk across. Click, clock, click, clock. One of his shoes was mic’ed. Each model walked back and forth twice, all of them with mic’ed shoes that added to the mesmerizing live electronic sound score by JG Thirwell.
As the show unfolded, we watched the cast of mostly women moving through a series of postmodern performance scores, which were made up in the 60s by the group called Fluxus. As written in the show description, Fleury was repeating these scores, “with a feminist, gendered twist.” What I saw was more of a flip than a twist, and if the goal was to be gender-transgressive in some way, I wasn’t picking up on it. The sign that said “Exfoliate” suggested some commentary on capitalism, consumerism, and women’s beauty – but these women were exfoliated, beautiful, and decked out in outfits that made me want to go shopping for a similar look. The scores were presented across the large space as vignettes that accumulated: a woman repeatedly slamming shut the broken trunk of a half car (this was done sexily, suggesting that she was fucking the car in some way - reminiscent of the film Titane), a different woman at a hair-dryer halo reading a magazine, another shattering glass ornaments with her heels, and most dramatically: a dominatrix spreading jam across the hood of one of the half-cars, and watching as one of the male models licked it off. The jam-licking car score had been one that was originally performed by a group of women, and Fleury had done a gender-swap. But as I watched the man licking jam off of the car under the eye of the dominatrix, I thought to myself,
“Don’t men often pay money to be dominated by hot women? Isn’t this, quite literally, male fantasy? What part of this is feminist?”
Like Nile’s use of Thiel-money, Sylvie Fleury was making an attempt to re-appropriate something that had been originally intended for someone else. But Nile was re-appropriating funds, and Fleury was re-appropriating art from the 60s. Today in 2025, however, Sylvie Fleury is an artist operating at a very high level. She is sponsored by blue-chip galleries and therefore makes a very good living as an artist. The artists of Fluxus did not get paid for their performances; seeing as they happened outdoors, in public, and without sponsorship. Many of these artists were expressly anti-capitalist and anti-commercial. Fleury’s show, on the other hand, occurred in a building owned by billionaires who sponsor art shows in order to cut a break on their taxes. I saw this work as an evolution rather than a response – moving from Fluxus’s original goal of experimentation into the hyper-capitalist artworld that we see today. Instructions for Twilight read as female, not feminist, in the sense that it represented the way that women dominate the realm of consumer capitalism. “Women be shopping,” as people like to say. Fleury’s work reminds me of Andy Warhol’s (he is cited among her influences), and I struggle to find any critique of capitalism in Warhol’s work. Product is product, and when the product is blown up, large, and glowing? We want it more. Billboards and glowing screens exist for a reason – they sell product. I ultimately found Fleury’s show to be entrancing, but only in the way that a fashion magazine is absorbing: it’s nice to look at beautiful women in beautiful clothes in beautiful environments, laden with products available to purchase. But it doesn’t upset the status quo – it is the status quo.
The structures that fund the arts in this country usually lead back to some wealthy conglomerate, and WSA (Water Street Associates) where Fleury’s show took place, is owned by one of those conglomerates. WSA was purchased from AIG in 2022 by a mysterious LLC with ties to Ken Dart, a billionaire who owns (among other things) Solo Cup Company and most of the real estate on the Cayman Islands. In 2024, WSA received a 41.3 million dollar tax break from the city through a program designed for owners of office buildings with high vacancy rates, which theoretically frees up funds for renovations. The space has since been filled by boutique artist studios, fashion design firms, and swanky parties hosted by various influencers-du-jour. Fleury’s show wasn’t the first I’d seen in that space – an acquaintance of mine has a sound installation on the first floor, and I’ve heard him humorously refer to Water Street Associates as “his favorite real estate developer.” Any taxpayer in America can get a break on their annual taxes by donating to non-profits (which include the arts), and owning a building that’s partly devoted to showcasing art is a great way for a billionaire to save a ton of money. This is a mutually beneficial exchange (I myself wouldn’t mind at all if a billionaire wanted to fund my dance work for a tax break), but rarely do billionaires fund any art that attempts to dismantle the capitalist structures that keep them wealthy. This is why I found Nile’s Thiel-reference to be brilliant and transgressive, and why I found Fleury’s use of capital to simply…reinforce capital.
Are artists doomed? Are we torn between two hellish options: sell out, get rich, and make art that is sexy and capitalist; or maintain integrity and stay in DIY spaces that cannot offer much more than a cut of the door tickets? For the record, I don’t think Fleury had a “selling out” moment. It seems that her work has always been in this vein, neatly stepping into the path laid by her predecessor Warhol. Fleury’s gallerists’ website describes her work as “dealing with our sentimental and aesthetic attachments to consumerist culture.” I’m not sure what “dealing with” means in this context. We deal with our attachments to consumerist culture every time a tailored advertisement pops up on Instagram. “Dealing with” is a grant-writing term almost as vague as “exploring,” and personally, I’d rather hear what Fleury really has to say.
By Vita Taurke