Museum Trip

Zoe Leonard: Survery

Unfortunately, due to my shitty schedule, I couldn't attend the class trip to MoMI. While that in and of itself was a bit of a disappointment, going to the Whitney as a trade off wasn't all that bad. I didn't really get a huge sense of film-production-y media from this retrospective, but I could see how Leonard's attention to detail - both in the images themselves and the placement of the images within the space - could contribute to the aesthetic principles of film and media production.

SO, the Whitney has this exhibition on Zoe Leonard, a pretty famous media artist who works in photography and sculpture. She's been around for a while and has certainly earned her place in the consciousness of the art community - it seemed to me that a lot of her work was more concerned with how an image or object is given meaning, and what that meaning translates to in the socio-political climate of the art itself. Her photography especially struck me as aspiring to this kind of narrative - in a completely white room... this super organized structure of photos ranging from some kind of waterfall (I think it was Niagara?) that were postcards, even going around corners and things??? Sort of a tongue-in-cheek comment on social media posts? "GEO-TAG YOURSELF WITH A POSTCARD." And then, of course, the photos themselves reminiscent of Instagram travel pics (I see you peepin' up out that airplane window, Zoe), to just really dark images of a city really seemed to condense the view of the world as we literally see it (both through use of photography being realistic here and the fact that, you know, the elements of everyday life are all shown - air/travel/"head in the clouds", the city/stomping ground/reality we travel day to day, etc.). Her suitcases all lined up made me snicker a little - nothing could be as pretentiously appropriate as that - a suitcase for every year of her stemming back from 2002. I mean, true and same, and I totally get the sense of travel and movement she was going for here, even as everything in this installation/photo room was still and very much attached to the space... but come on. It felt very Old Antique Store Down the Corner... and I hated how much I loved that. I guess if you were to ask yourself, "How can an image and stillness immediately translate to the idea of movement, to history?", Zoe would shout back, "YOU DO IT LIKE THIS..." and then she'd throw your hand-me-down luggage set from your Nana around your couch, print out some bad travel photos you'd taken from the early 2000s and then paste them all over your walls. So, you know, basically just what a home looks like anyway.

The fruit room... is another thing we totally have to talk about. I mean... WOW. I really didn't expect a room full of old banana skins (Strange Fruit (1992-7)) and things to be so... unnervingly powerful? And very surprisingly brown? I know that this installation was the artist's comment on the AIDS epidemic, but if I had gone in not knowing that, I think I still would have felt strangely... sad about the whole thing? I don't know - it was very odd.


P.s. I'm going to print out "I Want a President," (1992), laminate it, somehow tack it up in my bathroom, and sing it to the tune of "So Happy I Could Die" by Lady Gaga for the rest of my LIIIIIIFFEE.