Exploring Ideas of Identity through Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat
Earlier this year, from April 19 until October 27, 2019, the Solom R. Guggenheim Museum’s Samuel J. and Ethel Lefrak Gallery hosted Loophole of Retreat, an exhibition by the winner of the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago). Loophole of Retreat consisted of four sculptures that actively challenged hegemonic ideas of the black body through the usage of traditional elements from artifacts and other artistic manifestations of West Africa and the African diaspora. To complement the viewer’s experience, the Guggenheim is also offering a daily viewing of three short films, Untitled (M*A*S*H) (2018–19) that was directed by Leigh and Black Composer Trilogy, Part I: A Quality of Light (2018) and Spit on the Broom (2019), both directed by another female American filmmaker, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich.
Simone Leigh, a daughter of Jamaican immigrants, is an artist known for creating works that portray the black female experience. Through several mediums, from bronze and raffia sculptures to film, Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat invited the audience to consider the ways that dominant cultures have regarded the black woman’s body as an object and the relevance that this might have in contemporary times. Additionally, the exhibition dealt with the obscurity that influential Euromerican culture has assigned to events and cultures from Africa and African diasporas and the effect this has had with contemporary black identities.
The first theme that Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat invoked is that of the female black body and its relationship with ideas of being useful, profitable, and a resource that has been taken advantage of — many times resulting in its exploitation through sexual and manual labor throughout history. Knowing that Leigh describes black women as her intended audience, I considered the body to be the main theme of the exhibition[1]. Leigh managed to get viewers thinking about this theme with help from the wall text at the entrance of the show, as well as with her almost obvious usage of a dark bronze vessel as a body in Jug (2019). Even though this sculpture was situated towards the far end of the room, because of the exhibition’s size, it can easily be the first piece a viewer might notice. Loophole Retreat was a rather small exhibition. With only four sculptures, this exhibition took up only one room of the many gallery spaces of the Guggenheim, which unfortunately left the viewers wanting more at the end of their visits. However, the reduced number of sculptures can also be regarded as a positive element of the exhibition because it did not overwhelm the audience and allowed them to dedicate their full attention to every piece.
With Jug (2019), Leigh thinks of the portrayal of the black female body through one of her best-known elements, the jug. She expresses this idea of the female body acting as a vessel through the bronze handle on the left side of the figure’s vessel-like body as well as through the realistic jug-like body below what Leigh clearly sculpts as a human torso and head. These elements successfully planted the idea of the jug in the viewer’s mind even before they read the title. The jug is not only a customary element in Leigh’s art, but also in West African art as well. This traditional element of the jug, in conjunction with the sculpture’s more contemporary depiction of the face in Jug(2019), conveys Leigh’s relation between the contemporary black experience with the history of West African and diasporic traditions.
In a more abstract way, Panoptica (2019) also depicts this idea of the black body seen as a vessel. However, with this sculpture, Leigh uses a more recent element, the hut-inspired bodies of her sculptures. In this terracotta pipe and chimney, steel, and raffia sculpture, Leigh establishes notions of the utility and a history of labor related to the black body through the shape and the usage of terracotta pipes as the torso as well as, once again, through the usage of this vessel-like body. However, this sculpture’s title and great size might inspire the audience to think of the body in relation to another definition of vessel, a ship. The word “Panoptica” can be connected to the “Panopticon” that Michel Foucault notoriously explored in his work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which brings forward ideas of surveillance and oppression that can be connected to the ways the female black body has been perceived through history.[2]
Both Jug (2019) and Panoptica (2019) successfully connect Leigh’s theme of black feminist with the incorporation of traditional African elements as mediums. Jug (2019), for instance, uses bronze from the Benin region. Benin, one of the West African nations of the Gold Coast most noxiously related to the slave trade, while Panoptica(2019) uses raffia to transform the hut-like body into a structure that can be connected with traditional structures like Taíno bohíos or Mandé clay round houses.
In regards to the supplementary materials, the show’s curators, Katherine Brinson, Susan Thompson, and Amara Antilla, have included three films as well as a pile of broadsheets designed by Nontsikelo Muiti that feature short excerpts of text from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. The curators’ choice of pairing Leigh’s works with Hunt-Ehrlich’s films benefits Leigh’s purpose by offering the perspective of another American filmmaker that, similarly to Leigh, deals with black feminism and questions of the black experience in her art. Additionally, this combination also highlights the many ways that black women collaborate in Leigh’s work and come together to make it a success. Firstly, with Leigh naming the show after Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; and secondly, through the inclusion of Muiti’s designs in the broadsheets that feature Hartam’s text. By presenting several artistic manifestations by different female artists of African descent from different periods, these materials work in favor of Leigh’s desire for black women to relate to her art as well as for her sculptures and film to share themes of black feminism and female subjectivity.
Even though the primary theme of the black female body can be very clearly perceived through the entire exhibition, there is also a secondary theme regarding the black identity that the viewer can pick up from the placement of the sculptures in the gallery, as well as through the only sound sculpture in the show, Loophole of Retreat (2019). The sculptures’ arrangement, strongly invited the viewer to navigate through the entire room in order to see all of them. Not only are some sculptures not fully visible from some angles, but the viewer certainly had to get closer to the pieces in order to directly experience their bodies in relation to the sculptures’ bodies, as Leigh intends one contain. Hartman’s text; and lastly as members of the audience who get to experience Loophole of Retreat. By presenting several artistic manifestations by female artists of African descent from to do. The most isolated one of them, Loophole of Retreat (2019), featured one of Leigh’s well- known vessel-like sculptures, The Village Series #14 (2019), enclosed by a concrete wall with little ornamental patterns that secludes the brown stoneware sculpture.
This wall, similar to that of a prison, can be compared to Panoptica (2019) through this idea of the prison. Over the sculpture plays six minutes and forty-four seconds of a recording of protests and news coverage of an act of police violence, that Leigh claims is a reference to a pregnant member of MOVE, a Philadelphia-based black revolutionary organization, that was imprisoned when she was eight months pregnant. These sounds over a vessel-like sculpture with braids, a sculpture that combines contemporary elements of black identity with traditional idea of ceramics, appeals to how some cultural elements and events from Africa and African diasporas have been obscured by dominant cultures. The audience, unable to identify their origin for a while, go around the wall only to see that there is just a speaker. The viewer never sees the events that the sounds were extracted from; there is just a ceramic artifact.
Leigh’s aim to combine traditional African and contemporary elements in her art in order to overturn hegemonic perspectives associated with black identities and black female bodies is a recurring goal for her art. This has earned her merit and international recognition that has quickly intensified after her first solo show at Luhring Augustine Gallery (September 8-October 20, 2018), the recent installation of her sculpture, Brick House (2019), at New York City’s High Line; and her participation in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.[3] Leigh’s ability to successfully create art that conveys the important message of societal radicalism and rethinks the way the black experience has been portrayed, makes Simone Leigh an exemplar winner of the Hugo Boss prize. The Hugo Boss prize is meant for artists who create long-lasting impact through their art, something that Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat effectively manages to do.
[1] Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa. “Simone Leigh For Her Own Pleasure and Edification.” The Hugo Boss Prize 2018, n.d.
[2] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
[3] “Simone Leigh Included in Whitney Biennial 2019.” Luhring Augustine, n.d. http://origin.www.luhringaugustine.com/news/simone-leigh-included-in-whitney-biennial-2019.
