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Framing the Falls

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It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.
—Clarice Lispector 1

In Zoe Leonard: Survey, the personal and historical archive are laid over one another, moved around, pulled apart, and stitched back together, showing the inseparability between the two, “everything in play, or in battle with everything else.”2 The title of the exhibition not only indicates that the show is a large-scale overview of Leonard’s work, the artist’s first in the United States, but also reflects something embedded in the work itself: an examination of individual parts in order to understand them as a whole.3 Leonard undertakes this process in a minimal and vestigial fashion, small moves for life’s biggest questions.

Zoe Leonard, Untitled, 1989. Gelatin silver print, 9 3/4 x 7 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

Leonard’s photographs hit all the textures and terrains that make up the world: land, sea, and sky—capital, commerce, and culture. Her signature 35mm gelatin silver prints are hung bare and frameless, sandwiched under a piece of glass screwed straight to the wall. Despite the absence of physical frames, framing—i.e., both visual perspective and the parameters by which we read the world around us and make sense of our experiences—is prevalent throughout.

Frames of all kinds also appear in the images and their presentation, not least in the fact that the edge of the photographic negative is always visible in the final print. Leonard does this to call attention to her position as photographer, the thick lines demarcating the captured space of the image from the space around it. Her photographs are never printed full bleed, so the black edge of the image is also framed by the white edge of the print—a frame within a frame. And then more frames within the images too! In one untitled series of small photographs, the black vignette of an airplane window frames big things: cloud formations. Photographs of ornate mirrors hang alongside pictures of two female anatomical models (the female frame) that wait paralyzed, their entrails showing. In the last room, eight found photographs of immigrant families posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, circa 1930, have been rephotographed, printed, and are hung opposite a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that frame our view of the Hudson River. On the floor, directly in front of the windows, stand columns of stacked copies of How to Make Good Pictures and the later edition, How to Take Good Pictures, mimicking the New Jersey skyline behind them.

Zoe Leonard, Water no. 1 + no. 2, 1988. Two gelatin silver prints, 17 5/16 × 23 7/8 in. each. Collection of the artist; courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

In the larger diptych Water no. 1 + no. 2 (1988), the angle of the camera is pointed down at the black gelatinous surface of moving water. The dark swell alludes to an expansiveness both below and beyond the image edge, but we can’t know for sure; the title only gives us the substance—not its frame of reference. Photography is doing what it does here: freezing a moment, removing it from its context, and representing it anew. Separated from its source, the meaning of the image is malleable. Its narrative changes as well as its shape, size, and scale. Elsewhere in the show, aerial views of the city are interchangeable with models, coats and shoes lose their owners, trees break out of their urban cages, a dirty note on a toilet wall is a postcard from a lover, and a pool is an ocean. Through their re-presentation, the insignificant or unmemorable become important. Leonard’s photographs are better understood not as indices but rather as open questions, the answers to which will differ from person to person. Our perception of the work is tied not only to what we see but also to what we have seen before—a trip switch for our own personal mental archive.

Leonard’s sculpture 1961 (2002–ongoing), titled after the year that Leonard was born, consists of 57 old blue and gray suitcases lined up on the floor, one suitcase for each year of the artist’s life so far. In an otherwise minimal installation, the sculpture dominates, protruding out from the wall and directing the movement of visitors by splitting the space in half. Like her photographic works, this sculpture could be read in multiple ways. Depending on how you look at it, the idea of unloading all of your experiences from the year into a suitcase and clipping it shut could be seen as therapeutic (shedding weight) or burdensome (carrying it around): emotional baggage becoming physical baggage that either heals or hinders. This imagines the suitcases are full. What happens if we imagine they are empty? This is more likely their reality but, again, we can’t be sure. It is their perceived weight that will determine if they are understood as empty or full.

Zoe Leonard: Survey, installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 2–June 10, 2018. © Zoe Leonard. Photograph: Ron Amstutz.

Someone once told me that when you first experience trauma your brain doesn’t know what do with it because it has never experienced it before. It doesn’t have a place for it, so it can’t understand it. Without the ability to categorize and pack it away, trauma is vast and unending. Its amorphous form manifests itself in anger, panic, confusion, numbness, speechlessness. Over time, it’s as if the brain builds a box for the trauma, in order for it to be contained, stored, and accessed—or hidden. In this way, the brain’s process of understanding is similar to creating an archive, cataloging experiences in order to understand them and their place in our personal history. Without a structure by which to understand it, trauma has no edges, can’t be seen as a whole, can’t be contained. It’s an abyss.

Opposite the line of suitcases is a photograph called Niagara Falls no. 4 (1986/1991), an aerial view of a boat approaching the colossal falls. In contrast to the placidity of Water no. 1 + no. 2, Niagara Falls no. 4 is an abyss with the threat of action. The tiny boat is a black dot in a sea of white foam, surrounded by the impending force of the falls and headed toward a billowing wall of mist. The falls frame the boat’s vulnerable position; the image’s steep perspective pulls you in. Not included in the show but found in the Survey exhibition catalog is Niagara Falls no. 1 + Niagara Falls no. 2 (1986/1990), a diptych from the same series that shows the falls from the side. Water gushes towards the edges and tumbles down. The diagonal angle of the shot and the spray from the water hitting the surface below obscures the end of the falls and the fate of the little boat.

Zoe Leonard, Niagara Falls no. 4, 1986/1991. Gelatin silver print, 41 7/8 x 29 1/4 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy of Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

The end of 1961 is known, a product of the work’s making. When looking at the line of suitcases, one is aware that one day the production of the work will cease, and no more suitcases will be added. By marking the passing of her years, Leonard is able to take an active part in her own mortality, even if she is unable to change it. This cataloging of her history is done with the knowledge not only that it makes up part of her personal archive now but also that it will become a memorial to her when she is gone. In another room, a tower of ten brown, beige, and black suitcases stands against the wall. This piece, called Robert, was made in 2001, the year before Leonard started 1961. At over six feet tall, its anthropomorphic presence evokes a memorial.

The residues of grief coat much of Leonard’s exhibition. In the 1980s and 1990s, Leonard was one of many artists involved in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), a group founded in 1987 “to undertake direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”4 In Strange Fruit (1992–97), the skins of dried-up pieces of fruit are stitched, zipped, and buttoned back together, then scattered across the floor in a room of their own. Leonard started making the piece after her friend and fellow artist David Wojnarowicz died from AIDS-related complications. The title refers in part to the eponymous song, made famous by Billie Holiday, in 1939, about the lynching of African Americans. But strange fruit is also an archaic slang word used to describe homosexuals.5  The shriveled pieces of fruit have been broken apart and hollowed out, the “stitched peels attesting more to holes than to healing.”6 Although held together, they are not whole.

Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit, 1992–97. Orange, banana, grapefruit, lemon, and avocado peels with thread, zippers, buttons, sinew, needles, plastic, wire, stickers, fabric, and trim wax, dimensions variable. Installation view, Zoe Leonard: Survey, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 2–June 10, 2018. Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art; purchased with funds contributed by the Dietrich Foundation and with the partial gift of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery. © Zoe Leonard. Photograph: Ron Amstutz.

When I visited Survey, the exhibition An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017 was concurrently on view. With Leonard’s work present in my mind, I wandered into a section titled Mourning and Militancy, featuring work made during the AIDS crisis.7 In it, I found AA Bronson’s photograph, Felix Partz, June 5, 1994 (1994/1999). The wall-sized color print on vinyl depicts Felix Partz, Bronson’s fellow collaborator in the Toronto-based art and activism collective General Idea, a few hours after his death. His body is pale and emaciated, his eyes dark and hollow. Wearing a shirt that is several sizes too big, he lies surrounded by brightly colored pillows and blankets and other objects he used: a pack of cigarettes, a remote control, a tape recorder. His mind is gone, but his body and the fabric of his life remain. Of the piece, Bronson said, “We need to remember…that the diseased, the disabled, and, yes, even the dead walk among us. They are part of our community, our history, our continuity.”8

The walking dead are pertinent figures in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Susan Sontag describes misconceptions of the disease in her 1989 essay AIDS and Its Metaphors. She notes that those who tested HIV-positive were considered, regardless of their current health, “doomed” to suffer “a hard death.”9 This reinforced the perception of HIV/AIDS as being a single thing, which mischaracterizes its pathology. HIV/AIDS is not one illness but a syndrome constituted by many. It is a disease with no “natural borders.”10 Public understanding, especially during the initial crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, was not of something vast and complex but rather of a disease specific to marginalized communities—particularly, in the US, intravenous drug users and gay men. The creation of that border, which was based largely on the fear and bias promulgated by the US government and media, led to isolation, alienation, and neglect: framing that altered perception.11 Artists such as Leonard and Bronson have used the empty frame of the body, left behind in death, as a structure to focus the act of remembering. The empty body is particularly poignant in the context of AIDS, because its often emaciating effects reduced people to shells of their former selves. That emptiness also speaks to the huge chasm left by the disease’s devastation on an entire generation, and its continuing destructive impact today.

In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014), author Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, recounts the treatment of a Vietnam war veteran who, despite being plagued by nightmares, outbursts of rage, and panic attacks, refused to take the medication prescribed to him. The patient said, “I realized that if I take the pills and the nightmares go away…I will have abandoned my friends, and their deaths will have been in vain. I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam.”12 His fear of forgetting, or letting go of the past, was compounded by the fact that his memories were so easily triggered by everyday life. A sight, sound or smell could send him back to Vietnam. This confirmed for van der Kolk something he already suspected, that PTSD “isn’t ‘all in one’s head,’ as some people supposed, but has a physiological basis.”13 In recent years, the term post-traumatic stress disorder has evolved into post-traumatic stress injury, “because it’s actually a physical and physiological injury to our brain.” 14 Trauma is as rooted in the body as in the mind. It is both psychological and material, like history.

Zoe Leonard, Tipping Point, 2016. Books (James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, first edition, Dial Press, New York, 1963), 53 Parts; 39 ½ x 5 ¾ x 8 in. (overall). © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo: Simon Vogel.

In James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), the author discusses race-relations and religion in the United States through personal experience. The book, comprised of two essays, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down At The Cross—Letter from a Region of My Mind,” earned Baldwin national recognition as a writer and voice of the Civil Rights Movement. In “My Dungeon Shook,” Baldwin recounts the trauma inflicted by white people on black people, through the experiences of his mother, father, and brother. He warns his nephew, also James, of a United States that is still a ready perpetrator. He urges young James not to internalize the subjugation forced upon him: “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”15 Leonard’s sculpture Tipping Point (2016) is comprised of a stack of 53 first-edition copies of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. The sculpture was made 53 years after Baldwin wrote to his nephew, and 153 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. As with the suitcases in 1961, time accrues materially. But here, the reiteration of the book’s title gives the impression not of time moving forward but of it being stuck in a repetitive loop. The stack of books reminds us of the lack of change, as if the United States described by Baldwin in 1963 has remained the same every year since. The title Tipping Point is indicative of how many Americans felt at the end of 2016, a year that epitomized a divided country torn apart by the same kind of hate, fear, and ignorance that Baldwin describes.

Baldwin attributes the power of history to its presence within our bodies. He writes, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways…[History] is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”16 He describes seeing history in the face of his brother, his nephew’s father: “Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his.”17 We carry our personal history and, like an heirloom, we pass it down, along with the histories that we have inherited—often as “an unknowable weight.”18 To borrow a term from Hal Foster, the “archival impulse” is perhaps, in fact, an instinctual one.19 Suitcases, books, photographs, all of these things help us to catalog our experiences. They ensure that there is no forgetting the past; it is there, physically taking up space.

Zoe Leonard, Survey (detail), 2009–12. Postcards and table, 6,273 parts: 60 x 80 x approx. 39 in. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy of Collection Enea Righi, Bologna, and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan. Photo: Andy Keate, courtesy of Camden Arts Center, London.

Leonard’s work on Niagara Falls culminates in two pieces, the exhibition’s titular Survey (2009–12) and You see I am here after all (2008). Survey consists of 6,299 vintage postcards of Niagara Falls dating from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The cards have been sorted into stacks based on the original photographer’s position and laid out on a tabletop, to create a map of the falls. Some stacks are taller than others, indicating the popularity of certain perspectives, perhaps an indication of which ones “make good pictures.” Survey maps time as well as space by showing the development of photography and printing over the twentieth century. But, as with Tipping Point, it does not move forward—it is scattered and it stutters, as the same shots repeat again and again. Next door, in a long thin room that runs alongside the larger spaces, more old postcards of Niagara Falls make up You see I am here after all. This time 3,883 of them are laid out in grids and spread across the full length of the wall. The difference in the space taken up by the two works is notable. Although Survey has nearly double the quantity of postcards, it fits neatly on a table. The table itself looks functional, a place to put the postcards. The old saw horses, makeshift tabletop, layer of foam core held in place with blue tape, and the roughly torn archival paper that covers it do not appear in the materials list. How the table was made is not important. Its presence as a containing structure is what matters.

Zoe Leonard, You see I am here after all, 2008. 3,883 vintage postcards, 11 x 10 1/2 x 147 ft. Installation view, Zoe Leonard: Survey, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 2–June 10, 2018. Collection of the Artist, courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. © Zoe Leonard. Photograph: Ron Amstutz.

To see something really big you either have to look at it from a distance or piece it together in parts. Either way you have to find a way to make it smaller, to find its edge; if you don’t, it takes up too much space and time. Survey, made after You see I am here after all, does this. It makes something really big—Niagara Falls—smaller, more manageable. The table’s edge frames it like a photograph, creating space for thousands of postcards, with many different views, condensed and organized in one place. Implicit within this system is a withholding: you can no longer see the cards individually, something revealed only by expansion. Maybe, then, to see something really big you first have to expand it—to see all the parts—and then compress it, to see it as a whole. The abyss is as important as the box you build for it. Leonard’s neat piles of postcards, like the expansive grid, seem to be an attempt to reckon with what cannot be represented: death, loss, and the immeasurable “Falls.” Yet each piece also represents a presence; it is a witness, a memento: You see I am here after all.

Poppy Coles is an interdisciplinary artist and the Managing Editor of X-TRA.

Footnotes
  1. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1964]), 139.
  2. This quotation is from an unpublished text by the artist Michael Kidner RA, from Kidner’s archive. The title and date are unknown. For more information on Kidner, see http://www.michaelkidner.com/.
  3. As this issue went to print, Zoe Leonard: Survey opened at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I was unable to address the Los Angeles iteration in this review, but it is very different in feel and content.
  4. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “1980–1989: Activist Art,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, vol. II, 1945 to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 651.
  5. Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh, “1980–1989: Activist Art,” 655.
  6. Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh, “1980–1989: Activist Art,” 655.
  7. “Mourning and Militancy” is the title of an article written by Douglas Crimp and published in October 51 (Winter 1989).
  8. AA Bronson, quoted in “Felix Partz, June 5, 1994 (1994/1999),” Whitney Museum of American Art website, http://collection.whitney.org/object/16348.
  9. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001), 121, 126. Of course, many have died hard deaths from AIDS-related complications.
  10. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 116.
  11. On July 27, 2018, ACT UP NY protested An Incomplete History of Protest and the concurrent David Wojnarowicz retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, at the Whitney because the exhibitions failed to connect to the present-day AIDS crisis and ongoing activism: “Historicization reinforces distance… Just as the AIDS crisis of the ’80s was exacerbated by governmental neglect and public ignorance, neglect and ignorance are arguably the biggest obstacles to ending AIDS now that we have the tools to do so.” See https://actupny.com/drawing-attention-to-the-modern-hiv-epidemic-for-act-upartist-david-wojnarowicz/. In response, the Whitney released a statement expressing their intention to frame AIDS as a current and ongoing crisis. They updated the exhibition wall text and invited ACT UP NY to hold another convening on August 4, to inform visitors about the pandemic.
  12. Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, “Lessons from Vietnam Veterans,” The Body Keeps the Score (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 10.
  13. Van der Kolk, MD, “Lessons from Vietnam Veterans,” 11.
  14. Mike Ming, deputy chief of employee support services for CalFire, interviewed by A. Martínez, “Firefighters Could Benefit from Counseling, the History of Arson in the State, There’s a New Puma in Town,” Take Two, 89.3 KPCC, July 31, 2018, https://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2018/07/31/18731/.
  15. James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 8.
  16. James Baldwin, quoted in Michelle Elam, ed., “Introduction: Baldwin’s Art,” The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 10.
  17. Baldwin, quoted in Elam, “Introduction: Baldwin’s Art,” 4–5.
  18. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 24.
  19. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Autumn 2004).

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