Documents of Utopia by Paolo Magagnoli

Author:Paolo Magagnoli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 26. Zoe Leonard, Analogue, 1998–2009 (detail), 412 C-prints + gelatin silver prints, 28 × 28 cm. (Courtesy Zoe Leonard and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne)

Three similar interpretations informed the reception of Leonard’s work. The series was discussed as a lament about the vanishing of the LES working-class community, as a poignant critique of globalisation as a homogenising force erasing local identities, and as a self-reflexive project interrogating the losses produced by the rapid obsolescence of analogue photography.12 All three readings framed Analogue as a critique of capitalism, viewed, in turn, as an inherently destructive force. My purpose here is not to dismiss the interpretations proposed by the reception of Analogue: indeed, I believe that they are valid. However, one wonders whether critics, in the hope of finding elements of ‘criticality’ in the artist’s work, have ‘imagined everything and projected it’ into Leonard’s images, reducing the work to a rather straightforward critique of capitalism.13 These critics’ emphasis on loss and mourning downplays the pleasurable affective and aesthetic investments that can be extrapolated from Leonard’s representational strategies and downplays the work’s ambiguous mimicry of consumer culture. Mimesis occurs in the archive: Analogue not only portrays a highly commodified culture in the process of been displaced, it also mirrors it by adopting some of the conventions of advertisement.

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