Since the early 1990s, Sylvie Fleury has referenced luxury items and objects of consumer culture in her work. Often defamiliarized in terms of size and materiality – such as an enlarged make-up palette or a designer handbag cast in bronze – her works shift attention to the underlying symbolic order as well as to the various mechanisms of value generation in the lifestyle industry and the art economy. Surfaces are oftentimes shiny, serving as reflections on the way desire is structured and how gender roles are invoked.For her second edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Fleury continues her examination of the space rocket – equally an object of fetishization, but of a very different provenance. She first questioned dominant narratives of conquest and their underlying phallic logic with “First Spaceship on Venus” in 1996. The title and the use of colors and materials associated with femininity such as glittery pink car lacquer or soft fur in this ongoing sculpture series allude to a different utopia to be sought in outer space and science ­fiction. The concurrent “Soft Rocket” series echoed in this edition confronts the allure of the erect rocket, about to take off with pointed futurity, with its own vulnerability and the reality that this spaceship has run out of steam. Earth’s gravitational pull was introduced as a sculptural principle by the anti-form movement and artists working on soft sculpture, and Fleury applying it here is an example of her ironic engagement with art history. Tales of progress as they manifest in modernism, spacecraft, and contemporary ­consumer culture alike are humbled, with their masculinist force serving as the punchline. It’s a joke that landed, and it offers comfort in times where a desire to leave this earth behind is rising.