Zoe Leonard, Untitled 1999-2000

Zoe Leonard, born in New York in 1961, is a painter and photographer who’s work often incorporate subjects of poetry, landscapes, urban scenes, human anatomy, death, sexuality, beauty and femininity. In 1995, Leonard began a continual series of installations called Strange Fruit, where she used various fruits such as oranges, bananas, grapefruit, lemon, and avocado as the subjects haphazardly covering the floor of the space. She and others would eat the meat of the fruit and allowed the skin to dry out, and then she proceeded to “repair” the bare remains by sewing the skins back together with thread, buttons, and shiny wires.

At first, Leonard admitted that she didn’t even realize that what she was doing was making art, (however, that eventually changed as she continued working on it.) She claimed that her work was originally a “way to sew [herself] back up” after the death of a friend. Her visit in India also contributed to the production and methodology of her work. She was impressed by the maximum usage of each scrap of paper, each bit of wire; everything was consumed and none left to waste. In fact, the first fruit she sewed up was done so absentmindedly, after feeling one morning that she didn’t want to throw the orange peels away.

In the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), Leonard exhibits a much smaller version of her work Strange Fruit, (Untitled) which only includes the skins of three bananas, three oranges, and one grapefruit. The seven fruits, or rather what remains of them, sit quietly in a row, spaced out evenly on a three-foot white shelf jutting out from the wall (four feet from the ground). From far away, they are indiscernible dark organic objects, upon closer inspection, however, one can spot seams and threads sewing back together the rotting, almost unrecognizable flesh. As with her larger installation, all the fruits are lacking the vivid colors they once discharged. The absence of color is alarming because we normally visualize fruits with the bold colors that allow them to be the symbols of life. (Then it is appropriate that these bare skins should represent death.) Also, the fruits have shrunken and wrinkled up in a melancholic manner; the bananas resemble fingers and the grapefruit and oranges look like stressballs that could easily fit in one’s fist. It is hard --- therefore I refrain from --- giving any exact and precise measurements because the objects transform at every tick on the clock. Their flawed, but purposeful design, doesn’t allow them to outlast their maker, unlike the paintings from the European Art section that were produced centuries ago and are still well intact. The fact that no preservatives have been added, ensures that the fruit-remains will continuously shrink and vanish completely over time. Just the “pretense” of deterioration was not enough for Leonard, who refused to accept German conservator Christian Scheidemann’s customized preservation technique of “shock-freezing the pieces and then penetrating them with Paraloid B72 under vacuum.”

She rejected the preserved pieces and chose to retain the aspect of honesty in her work. And from her choice of keeping the true nature of the decaying fruits, comes a peculiar appeal with the piece’s element of mortality. Like for the viewer, time is an enemy for the fruits. This provides a distinct connection among the viewer and the objects, drawing out empathy from the former towards the latter. It is also important to point out that the lack of effort to preserve them is not only an uncommon practice, but the reverse of how most curators or any art collector would treat a piece of art. It is a reflection on societies’ obsession with immortality.

Strange Fruit, as well as Untitled at the BMA, probes our notions of what can be considered beautiful. What is beauty? Both the installation and the smaller sample glorify decaying objects that would normally be frowned upon and thrown away. Instead of the usual display of perfection, we receive imperfection and the remains of time-battered fruits. (Ironically, the viewer can associate better with these ephemeral fruits than the heroic and celestial figures of the Renaissance.) There is a poetic charm in finding beauty in cracks and broken pieces, in the flaws that we’ve tried so hard to conceal.

The fact that the piece in the BMA is untitled, accentuates the temporality of Leonard’s work. Titles imply certainty or absoluteness, which is not the case with her fruits that will eventually dematerialize and cease to exist over time. It raises the question why we give anyone names at all if we’re perishable.

The very act of providing the dead with tombstones or some sort of symbol confirming their identity is a common ritual that again reflects upon our obsession with immortality. (A plaque that immortalizes the being by engraving their identity in stone.) Having visited the cemetery a couple times in my youth, I remember being aware of what was under my feet, (or perhaps what wasn’t under.) Have they rotten away over the years? Have the maggots and worms reached their putrid prize inside the box yet? Of course, it gave me an eerie feeling, but it fascinated me that something so dead could be so alive at the same time.

This great interplay between two of the most common motifs in art and literature is another aspect of the piece that makes it even more appealing. It speaks strongly of death, even more than a magnificent illustration of death that only implies or symbolizes it. At the same time, it also holds more vigor than a lively and animated drawing/painting because it has the freedom to change over time; it has a life of its own, free from a man-dictated destiny. It embraces time, an admirable and heroic trait considering that Time is man’s greatest enemy. As the ubiquitous cliché goes: nothing lasts forever.

Leonard’s work is representative of 20th century art that has sought to eliminate the border between life and art. She pushed the metaphor of death to its maximum with her piece, after deciding earlier that the appearance of decay was not sufficient. As Ann Temkin, the Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art who exhibited Leonard’s Strange Fruit states: “The provocation offered by Leonard's work sends a message that reverberates throughout our building. Maybe it is not the only thing in the museum that is not forever. Maybe this is not a universe without wounds, reconstructions, scars, or death.”