Geoff Park - "Theatre Country" and Zoe Leonard's You see I am here after all

Geoff Park's essay on the way that, he argues, the Western mind has turned nature into scenery, reminded me of work I saw recently - Zoe Leonard's You see I am here after all. The work consists of nearly 4,000 postcards of Niagara Falls, arranged on one giant Dia wall into the few different, standard vantage points.

Leonard's work acknowledges the somewhat vulgar touristic nature of the postcard as the summary for the experience of a site or place, or as curator Lynne Cooke puts it 'function[s] as a form of witness' ('You see I am here after all'). The overly organised grid presentation and sheer quantity of uniformly similar postcards (and thus, uniformly similar experiences?) makes certain the absurdity of this function of the postcard and the way it has changed travel via the transformation of natural wonders into landmarks then tourist attractions. So, Cooke's essay ends on a fairly sinister sounding note:

'images produced by reproductive media provide not only the dominant vehicle through which the contemporary world is experienced but the problematic, and often insidious, means by which we lay claim to it'

Yet, there is still something genuinely charming and straightforwardly pleasant in Leonard's collection. Maybe this has something to do with the realisation, when looking up close, that each postcard really is a memento of a personal experience - details like hand colouring, print quality*, borders and scribbles; or maybe even in light of the inclination towards provoking a common experience, or a 'simple truth'.

In Jan Verwoert's In Search of the Miraculous, on Bas Jan Ader's work of the same title, Verwoert describes the way Ader's work uses conceptual means to explore romantic ideas (the solitary traveller, grand emotion). Verwoert discusses the ambiguous pairing of Ader's images of solitary night time walks with a 50's pop song (4):

'On the one hand the absurdly formulaic character of the lyrics foreground the derivative nature of the images and thereby makes the entire work seem like a practical study on the rhetorics of romantic representation. On the other hand, the genuine experience of a night-time walk, which the images clearly communicate, fills the empty formula of the song-text with new meaning. You feel that the beauty of the idea of the romantic quest might in fact lie in the simple truth that in order to find love you have to travel. Through the ambiguous interplay of text and image the integrity of the romantic idea is thus simultaneously dismantled as pure rhetoric and restored as a true experience.'

The title of Leonard's work, You see I am here after all, could have a similar function to Ader's inclusion of dated pop lyrics. Taken from the back of one of the postcards, it could read like standard postcard fodder, versions of which are almost certainly repeated on each card on view. But a kinder interpretation too is suggested. You see I am here after all hasn't completely shaken the romance of the place and experience it depicts.

* The postcards, spanning from the early 1900s to the post-war era, also show an evolution in printing techniques.

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Works cited:
Cooke, Lynne. "Zoe Leonard - You see I am here after all, 2008". Dia Art Foundation. May 9 2009 http://www.diaart.org/exhibs_b/leonard/essay.html .

Park, Geoff. "Theatre Country". Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113-127.

Verwoert, Jan. In Search of the Miraculous. London: Afterall Books, 2006.