TY - JOUR

T1 - Against abstraction: Zoe Leonard's "Analogue"

AU - Troeller, Jordan

PY - 2010/12/1

Y1 - 2010/12/1

N2 - In the late 1990s, Zoe Leonard began photographing the storefronts and sidewalks of her Lower East Side neighborhood. For the next ten years, she assembled an archive of quirky and forlorn scenes. In one image, two tattered chairs stand awkwardly outside a grimy laundromat, while in another image, pink and white foam pillows press up against a glass facade, and in a third, threadbare suits and dresses hang in a dimly lit window display. Comprising over four hundred chromogenic and gelatin silver photographs, Analogue offers vignettes of marginalized discards as well as mass-produced kitsch. In one of the first sustained responses to the work, Mark Godfrey remarks that such objects seem above all to belong to the category of the outmoded, to “a passing era of material and retail culture.”1 Echoing Godfrey's observation, Helen Molesworth describes Analogue as staging the “tension between disappearance and tenacity” of an older mode of exchange—the mom-and-pop store, the corner bodega, the artisan tailor—as it keeps at bay, if only temporarily, the multinational corporation lurking somewhere off-camera.2 This sentiment of loss is the primary tone in which critics have received—and consistently praised—Analogue.

AB - In the late 1990s, Zoe Leonard began photographing the storefronts and sidewalks of her Lower East Side neighborhood. For the next ten years, she assembled an archive of quirky and forlorn scenes. In one image, two tattered chairs stand awkwardly outside a grimy laundromat, while in another image, pink and white foam pillows press up against a glass facade, and in a third, threadbare suits and dresses hang in a dimly lit window display. Comprising over four hundred chromogenic and gelatin silver photographs, Analogue offers vignettes of marginalized discards as well as mass-produced kitsch. In one of the first sustained responses to the work, Mark Godfrey remarks that such objects seem above all to belong to the category of the outmoded, to “a passing era of material and retail culture.”1 Echoing Godfrey's observation, Helen Molesworth describes Analogue as staging the “tension between disappearance and tenacity” of an older mode of exchange—the mom-and-pop store, the corner bodega, the artisan tailor—as it keeps at bay, if only temporarily, the multinational corporation lurking somewhere off-camera.2 This sentiment of loss is the primary tone in which critics have received—and consistently praised—Analogue.

KW - Science of art

UR - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2010.10791403

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79952660233&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/246f18a4-450d-3c92-b476-f43157c5ee72/

U2 - 10.1080/00043249.2010.10791403

DO - 10.1080/00043249.2010.10791403

M3 - Scientific review articles

VL - 69

SP - 108

EP - 123

JO - Art Journal

JF - Art Journal

SN - 0004-3249

IS - 4

ER -