SHARED FREEDOMS.

Such as We: Leone & Macdonald, Ten Years of Collaboration

North Dakota Museum of Art 

Grand Forks, North Dakota 

March 18-May 19,1999

Henry Art Gallery

Seattle, Washington

June 29-October 3,1999

The overriding theme of the 10-year collaboration between Hillary Leone and Jennifer Macdonald is the intersection of legislative actions and civil liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to privacy. The artists play games with stylistic markers of the art world, disrupting simple forms with larger perspectives and explicitly painful realities. Their work is particularly timely in the late 1990s at a time when deceptive language is being used to dismantle civil rights at the ballot box.

Leone & Macdonald work at the intersection of feminism, late modernism and the breakdown of social, legal and political processes. They are clearly products of late twentieth-century conceptual frameworks, yet in their disciplined production and exhaustive research, they have an obsessive and encyclopedic approach that suggests classical Renaissance artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci. The great difference from the traditions of the Renaissance is, of course, that they are working in collaboration, not as individuals.

Collaboration is arguably the basis for much of the best work of the twentieth century. Collaboration has most frequently occurred between male and female partnerships in which one partner, usually the female, is overlooked or underrated. For example, Bernarda Bryson Shahn made a profound, and as yet unexamined, contribution to the ideas published by Ben Shahn in The Shape of Content (1957). In the case of Leone & Macdonald, there has been a deliberate decision to create a new identity that acknowledges the exchange of ideas--each piece is the result of joint concepts, research and execution, along with a shared willingness to embrace serendipity. Their work becomes a new body, a body that is more than the sum of its parts. Such is the strength of collaborative art. Contrary to the privileging of individualism as the goal of art in canonical modernism, working with another person (or group) actually allows for courageous and outrageous acts that would be difficult for an individual working alone to perform. It is hard to imagine an individual artist being motivated to pursue the exhaustive mental and physical labor in Leone & Macdonald's work. Of course, shared energy can also lead to excess, as may be the case with one of the pieces in "Such as We: Leone & Macdonald, Ten Years of Collaboration."

The exhibition, stunningly installed in the elegant galleries of the old wing of the Henry Art Gallery, began with Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down (1989-1991), the result of an invitation to participate in the first AIDS Day Without Art in 1989. The AIDS epidemic upended the atmosphere of extravagance and excess that characterized the art world during the Reagan years. It caused the deaths of many young, extraordinarily talented artists and led to political action and artwork that portrayed struggle in the face of devastating loss. Artists like Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, although immersed in their own impending deaths from AIDS-related illnesses, reached out to a wide community with their last words and actions. For Leone & Macdonald, semiotics and minimalist aesthetics became the means to create a complex statement about death, memorials and the inability to preserve a person through memory. Ashes, Ashes takes its title from "Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down," a nursery rhyme created during the time o f the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages--"ashes" being a distortion of the sound of sneezing (sneezing was one of the ways that the disease was spread). The piece consists of a sandbox in which the artists have written in Braille the names of their friends who have died. The Braille is destroyed if someone attempts to read it by touching the names in the sand (or touches the piece in any way). The piece is evocative of the inaccessibility of life after death as well as the difficulty for the living to remember the dead.

I found Ashes, Ashes deeply moving, both artistically and conceptually although I questioned using the language of the blind in a way that made it inaccessible to them, since if a blind person tries to read the names they are obliterated. This deficiency however is intentional on the part of Leone & Macdonald. They attempt to underscore the elusiveness of language and memorials, even if in doing so they limit their audience.

The video entitled Passing (1996) was commissioned in 1994 by Miami Dade Community College as a temporary public artwork. (It has been on frequent display in sites from Australia to Europe ever since.) The piece is indicative of the late 1990s shift toward emphasis on community and developing a wider audience for art, and is easily understood despite the complex statement it makes. Passing imitates a police line-up: 30 people individually narrate the ways in which they have "passed" sexually, ethnically or in terms of invisible illness. As they speak they face forward, sideways and then look up in response to some invisible authority. Each confession is structured as a sequence within a 9 x 12-foot grid of video images. Signifiers like hair, skin color, clothes, language and social style become a layered communication system, but the viewer gradually realizes that the speakers' lips are not synchronized with their narratives. Passing echoes real police confessions, but it carefully diverges from those abusiv e practices: the participants are all volunteers who responded to a newspaper advertisement and they never give their names. Nonetheless, as their revelations connect to widely held prejudices, the viewer becomes an investigator, voyeur and collaborator. Everyone is implicated, everyone passes.

In most of their work Leone & Macdonald begin with a minimalist structure but they inject into its sterile, aesthetic vocabulary references to highly charged political issues. Private Parts (1992), Obscenity Series (1993) and Sex Studies (1993) all address the ironies of legal language and legal actions with respect to sex. In these works actual sexual terms have been coded in Gregg shorthand (used for decades by typically female court reporters) and branded onto paper and muslin. For example, Anus, Clitoris, Hymen and Labia are the titles of individual pieces. They confront the viewer with the sudden reality of the meaning behind the abstracted decorative flourish of the image they see. The branding of canvas with shorthand sexual terms forbids a lapse into admiration of the beauty of the work as it is a physical parallel to the branding of sex in our society, particularly acts, words and people that are seen as deviant.

An additional layer is added in Sex Studies. Titles like Kissing, Licking and Rubbing are taken from two government-sponsored studies of sexual habits intended to help in the fight against AIDS and teen pregnancy. Although the program was canceled under pressure from the political right, the artists were able to obtain the existing texts under the Freedom of Information Act. Reducing such rich source material to single words is a minimalist act. It underscores the attempted suffocation of the art world through the obscenity accusations that the far right manufactured against Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Sprinkle, among others, in order to eliminate government funding for the arts. The use of words branded in shorthand also points to the art world phobia about direct political statements: the artists "pass" their work as decorative modernist flourishes. However, the irony could have been even richer with a less generic selection of words from these unpublished texts. The words resonate becaus e of their source, but information about the source is only provided in wall labels.

In the gallery the physical presence of the brands themselves, hanging from the ceiling by their 26-foot handles, makes the entire endeavor as much a physical act as it is a psychological one. The use of these huge brands to burn onto the canvas and paper becomes a symbol of strength and punishment. Most forceful, though, is the long line of steel brands unofficially entitled Gate (1992-1993) that physically creates a divider in the gallery and invokes the sense of incarceration that branding suggests.

Similar issues arise in Speaking Secrets (1991) in which the artists successfully use blackboard chalk scribbles to undermine a modernist gesture in oil on canvas and return it to its place in the classroom. Speaking Secrets consists of transcriptions of children speaking about sexual abuse written in chalk on blackboard-sized gray paper. The piece is unreadable, though, as the texts overlap and obliterate one another. Without an explanation the viewer would not know to what they even referred. The difficulty of documenting children is the reason the artists give for the illegibility of the texts. Leaning against the chalkboard is an oversized bronze "wishbone" or divining rod that looks like an instrument of torture, and in front of the board is a child-sized bronze chair with a sharp protrusion on the seat that could easily pierce a child. As in Gate, these sculptures translate the obscurity of the texts into something physical.

Leone & Macdonald approach the making of each piece as a massive research project, as well as a physically demanding endeavor. An outstanding example of their exhaustive efforts is the monumental Double Foolscap (1994). The artists shredded, boiled and pulped almost all of their clothes to make 1000 sheets of 27 x 17" pastel-hued paper (the size is double "foolscap," a British measurement of paper size). Inserted within the exhibited rows of paper are two photographs of bald women, one cutting her dress to shreds, the other dressed as a clown and looking sadly in the mirror at the face of the other woman. The suggested distance in their relationship is echoed by the huge, knitted double straightjacket unraveling on the facing wall. Double Foolscap also includes a catalog with a photograph of each piece of clothing before it was shredded, an actual sample of its material and its label. Double Foolscap is a powerful refutation of materialism, capitalism and the identities that they place on consumers. One is l eft wondering if the labor was a catastrophic miscalculation. Unlike other works in the show, this critique is turned inward on the artists themselves as they remove one of the public signifiers of their identities and transform it into art material.

From 1995 to 1997, Leone & Macdonald worked on smaller pieces with less obscure references, yet their ironic wit persisted. Shooters (1995) is a welcome mat made of red and green marbles. As in Ashes, Ashes, the obvious joke is that if you use it you will destroy it, although in this case you could also harm yourself. It also comments on the hazards of domesticity, as does Nest (1995), an oversized scale bearing only a fragile bird's nest.

The main subject of Leone & Macdonald's work is the unreliability and instability of language or any type of code as a protective framework for society, as well as the dangerous and sometimes life-threatening results of remaining oblivious to that fact. Works from the minimalist sculptural installation Ashes, Ashes to the high-tech video Passing also mark their own growth from the insulated, self-referential art world of the 1980s to the highly porous, community-based concerns of the late 1990s. During 10 years of collaboration the artists have gradually liberated themselves from arcane references in order to reflect upon meaning and communication. They now allow a clear relationship to emerge between their political concerns, their work and their audience.

SUSAN PLATT, based in Seattle, is a Contributing Editor of Art Papers. She is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Istanbul, Turkey. Her most recent book is Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism, A History of Cultural Activism During the Depression Years (1999).