Simone Leigh

Photo by Kristine Larsen

Simone Leigh in her studio, Brooklyn, 2008

   November 2008 Introducing

Petra Trenkel

Constantin Brancusi Louise Bourgeois Lee Bontecou Ana Mendieta Marcel Broodthaers Eva Hesse The Second Sex (at Auction, Anyway) Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Around the corner from the imposing, white-columned Beaux-Arts building that is the Brooklyn Museum—the centerpiece in an elegant complex including a 19th-century-era park and botanical garden—is the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Check-cashing stores, crammed bodegas, and abandoned lots share space with narrow, vividly painted Jamaican restaurants, indicative of the area’s predominantly Caribbean population. On one of its quiet side streets, situated between the dappled green luxury of Prospect Park and Crown Heights’ sunburned boulevards, is the studio of artist Simone Leigh. The sculptures that fill the airy room actively embrace the jarring disparities of the world outside. Enormous terra-cotta vessels with pendulous appendages brushed in bulletlike glazes sit on the floor; above them stretches a glass-fronted vitrine filled with hundreds of delicate porcelain casts of plantains, which beckon the viewer like outstretched fingers. A restful clay sculpture calls to mind Brancusi’s Head outfitted with a spiky white afro and the tread of a Timberland boot; next to it, a series of mica-encrusted toilet plungers allude to the infamous police brutality visited on local resident Abner Louima in the late ’90s, an event that sparked marches and riots. Such works synthesize “primitivist” African pottery techniques, the modernist artmaking strategies that took so much from them, and the pan-Africanist politics that critique that very lineage. As Leigh, who turned 40 this year, explains, “My work is often about this idea of a corrupt education. I learned how to make an ‘African pot’ using 19th-century colonial texts. Which is kind of cool. What am I making anyway?”

It’s a good question. Coming across Leigh’s commanding ceramic sculptures in two Chelsea group shows this past summer, I was struck by their effortless embodiment of opposing narratives. Their curvaceous forms and glittery glazes were both fertile and militaristic, organic and industrial, utterly contemporary and mysteriously artifactlike. Queen Bee (2007), a chandelier of voluptuous, grenade-shaped forms sprouting TV antennae, conjured the bulbous, feminine contours favored by Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois as well as Lee Bontecou’s futuristic, sinister sculptures. A wall piece of cast plantains in a zippered plastic vitrine (a dry-cleaning bag fancifully reimagined) recalled Marcel Broodthaers’s ineffable pairing of institutional critique and poetic vernacular products in works like Panneau de moules. Leigh, Chicago-born and of Jamaican parentage, has been making these ceramic works for the past 10 years. They evoke both the black female body and the multifarious cultural and political histories that have laid claim to it. They also variously call on African pottery, performance art, feminism, modernist abstraction, and postminimalist sculpture. But it is the artist’s cribbing from colonial-era anthropology and contemporary pan-Africanism that is her most notable conflation. “I feel as inspired by the attempt to be scientific, that anthropological approach to objects,” she concedes, “as I am by the materials, the surfaces, and the gestures of the objects themselves.”

It was during an internship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, that Leigh became entranced by African ceramics, the 19th-century texts that attempted to explain them, and museological strategies. “These objects have this long narrative, and then they arrive with a complete lack of authorship. Yet they’re supposed to have this incredible importance for modernism,” she explains, nodding to the fact that she learned about “primitive” objects via their relation to the Western canon. “It was so impossible to figure out what my inheritance was.” Smiling, she adds, “It’s just a great narrative for me to think about.” Behind this cultural transposition, however, are the objects themselves. “African pots are often explained as primitive objects made by primitive people who don’t have the ability to think conceptually,” she says, “but it took me a long time to acquire the skills to create what I wanted to make.” While in school, Leigh taught herself to make African pots by reading books like Nigerian Pottery. She began to see a performative aspect to the making of her round-bottomed terra-cotta vessels, which are each built up—as pinch pots—laboriously by hand.

In addition to her pots, Leigh makes ceramic wall, floor, and hanging pieces cast from organic objects like watermelons and plantains. Yet her references are not the expected ones. The watermelon’s form attracted her because of its femininity: the stretch marks, the fullness. She is less interested in the racist depictions of African-Americans with which it can be associated. Likewise, the plantain, often viewed as phallic, conjures for Leigh place rather than body. For her, it’s an iconography that brings up the Caribbean and its products: “it’s my postcolonial reference.” She reflects: “They’re specifically about Jamaica for me because, since I grew up in Chicago, they’re this strange fruit.” Regardless of their geographical basis, the cast plantains’ lithe forms can recall so many bodies, and the lyrics about lynching that Billie Holiday made famous—“Strange trees bear strange fruit // Blood on the leaves and blood at the root”—are eerily called up by Leigh’s language.

In fact it is the body, often the black female body, and its many manipulations and subversions—whether beautifying or scarring or cleansing—that is the root of Leigh’s practice. Her very materials enforce this theme, as with the porcelain she uses to cast her plantains, a type used primarily for making dolls. “The porcelain is precolored for making different skin tones,” Leigh explains, “so they have these great names like Oriental and Natural. They’re fun materials that deal with ideas of empire and chinoiserie.” She enjoys the hyperreal appearance they take on in the kilns, toeing the line between the natural and the artificial. Such ideas converge in French Manicure, a cluster of brown forms that Leigh tipped with pink and white glazes. “I love the idea that you could make your body pure again by painting it white and pink. So that it becomes better than natural.” Whether it’s a boot mark, manicures, or tribal scarification, the act of marking the body captures the artist’s attention. She cites as inspiration both Hannah Wilke’s ’70s-era scarification series and Ana Mendieta’s blood-strewn performances about sexual violence. She also looks to Nkisi power objects, which gain strength as nails are driven into them. “There’s a tension in such gestures between whether they’re decorative or they’re abject,” she remarks. “It’s as if there’s some innate need to adorn with scars. But I like to remind viewers what a scar really is—to take the romanticization out of the idea.”

Leigh’s exploration of the trials to which we submit our bodies can perhaps be traced back to the severity of her upbringing. Her father, a fundamentalist Nazarene minister, and the strict Christian environment in which she grew up, has left a lasting effect. As a child, she felt “scarred” by the idea that the body must be purified. “It’s influenced my work in that it’s created my awareness of the possibility of transgression in almost any thought or act.” This interest in transgression might also be applied to Leigh’s embrace of ceramics, which has long been viewed by the contemporary artworld as craft or, worse, women’s work. Although it has lately seen a resurgence, it remains an eccentric track to pursue. “I got a lot of resistance,” as Leigh puts it.

Nevertheless, the medium of ceramics—with its formal tactility and conceptual heft—continues to inspire Leigh. She recounts a scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the hero finds work at a paint factory renowned for its “pure” white paint, created by mixing in 10 drops of black paint. Her white teeth (for Ota Benga) (2004) was inspired by that scene. It made her think about how many different colors of glazes she could get into the white porcelain piece. As she relates this story, I flip through a bound book of photocopied texts and images that she uses as references. I stop at a soft-focus snapshot of a female pit bull, sitting on its haunches on the asphalt. Around its neck is a dangerous looking silver-spiked collar; along its stomach are two rows of swollen teats tipped with pink and white nipples. It’s immediately obvious why Leigh took the photo— the dog eerily resembles her work. Her themes are all there: the fertility, the menace, the ur-urban street aesthetic. Leigh says the image is blurred because her hand was shaking: “It was like one of my sculptures was walking down the street towards me.”

"Introducing Simone Leigh" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.