ZOE LEONARD, PHOTOGRAPHS
Leonard’s photographic investigations concern the role of certain objects, among them animals and women, in the formation of scientific knowledge and aesthetics, two areas of intellectual endeavor that have long been the exclusive domain of men. The most compelling aspect of her photography is the tension she sustains between photography’s objectivity and subjectivity: the views Leonard captures are always both documentary records and studies of form. The interaction between the work as evidence of wrongdoing and as art-for-its-own-sake is the constant beneath what appears to be a wide surface divergence.
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As trivial as they might seem at first, the objects Leonard treats are tools of intellectual history that have left deep marks on current beliefs. While it can be said that the art world has recently progressed to the point where women like Zoe Leonard are less and less outsiders, a long history of exclusion and manipulation remains: thus the qualities of distance, unfamiliarity, and transience that characterize many of Leonard’s photographs. Leonard is also a lesbian artist, and the art world has only recently acknowledged the very possibility of a lesbian gaze or the lesbian subject. Her photographs can be seen as bits of evidence gathered at such off-limits and arcane sites as the scientific archive or the machismo spectacle of the bullfight. “Photography,” Leonard said in a discussion at the opening, “is a most central metaphor for perspective, in terms of identity–the sharing of a certain view.” This show presents a selection of her recent work, which also seems linked to traditional photographic genres such as landscape and the grotesque.
Another piece in the show, Preserved Head of a Bearded Woman (1991), presents a series of views of a surreal knickknack uncovered in a medical college at the University of Paris. It’s hard to imagine what function this specimen–an actual decapitated head of a bearded woman, carefully labeled and cataloged–may have had in the medical community. But freaks, especially cross-gender freaks, have always been a source of fascination: a bearded lady showed up in the recent Jose de Ribera exhibition at the Met in New York, proving that the old masters liked a good sideshow, too. Leonard’s photographs of the anonymous bearded woman are part artistic study of visual forms and part expose of the sensationalistic, cruel Barnum & Bailey element that figures in fields of knowledge like medicine. Preserved Head also points to the viciousness with which nonconformity to the norms of appearance has been treated. As Leonard says, we live in a scary world.
