Army Of The Dolls - Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Germany, Anthony Meier, San Francisco

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Judith E. Stein

Zoe Leonard's recent installations and photographs, examining the time-worn objects that people leave behind, manage to evoke both nostalgia and resolve.

In her youth, the Victorian heroine of Peter Carey's 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda appalls her frugal family by mutilating an expensive birthday doll. Despairing of her own frizzy mane, the nine-year-old Lucinda treats her toy as a surrogate self. She yanks out its curly blonde locks and artlessly affixes horsehair snippets that more closely resemble her parents' straight black tresses.

When in 1999 artist Zoe Leonard came upon such real-life playthings in tag sales and flea markets, she was struck by the physical evidence of wear and alterations which together were tantamount to autobiographies. These girlhood souvenirs pointed toward a psychosexual terrain worth surveying. Leonard ultimately amassed nearly 700 dolls in "played-with condition"--as the secondhand dealers described them--for use as raw material in her art. As an unintended by-product of these transactions, she accumulated a quantity of cast-off suitcases used to carry home her purchases.

It was after she remembered the dignified terra-cotta warriors of Xian, China, entombed for millennia in a stop-action march, that she understood how to utilize her growing stockpile of toys. For Mouth open, teeth showing, the principal installation in her recent show at Paula Cooper Galley in New York, Leonard stood 162 dolls at stately intervals, approximately 3 1/2 feet apart in a loose grid. Visitors entering Cooper's airy truss-roofed gallery could wade into a shallow sea of miniature women and girls, along with life-sized newborns, all as individual as the children who once owned them. The dolls with movable limbs has been coaxed into a walking stride, arms gently swinging. The generous distance between the rows allowed viewers to explore. A calm "personal space" encircled each winsome belle and eerily silent infant in the spooky Toyland army.

The phrase "mouth open, teeth showing," is doll collectors' parlance for valued feature of the early models made with smiling faces. Leonard liked the physicality of the words, which implied both passivity and aggression, encompassing the mixture of vulnerability and menace presented by a vast roomful of pint-sized people. Leonard initially titled the work Citizen and thought of it as a sociological reflection of female participation in the world. She found that her 75 Barbies were not suitable for inclusion because they literally couldn't stand on their own two feet. As she lived with her collection in her studio, the layered implications of working with human surrogates opened up to her.

Like Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographic series of closely related structures, Leonard's ranks of dolls invited the eye to discover the differences among them. No two were identical. Even when produced by the same manufacturer, each was subjected to unique alternations. The criteria for comparison expanded as one looked. A few were brandnew; others were bitten, broken or soiled. They were attired, undressed or partially clad. Several wore endearingly personalized getups, such as a tatted cape and matching tam-o'-shanter. Hair was another arena for individuation: their unruly coiffures frequently revealed the intervention of scissors, paint or girl-sized barrettes. Each figure was a richly contradictory repository of inaccessible memories along with socially decodable content.

The assembly spanned nearly a century, the earliest an antique composition doll ca. 1910 (the term refers to a wood pulp material that is cast in molds and then painted), the latest one still available in shops. Leonard offered such formal polarities as garish and subdued or big and little, and hinted at subtle narratives. A circumspect older girl in pajamas held her position next to a jubilant black cherub decked out as an in-line skater. A perky infant, head cocked as if listening, adjoined an armless, sooty-faced child with downcast eyes. Leonard's telling placements hinted at the diverse experiences of girlhood, with its potential for both joy and abuse. One ludicrous doll decked out in a purple flowered dress arrested attention. Holding her ground on chunky, Stakhanovite legs, she defiantly displayed a bald pate rising above a multitude of platinum plaits.

Leonard's grounded congregation staked a claim of kinship with Carl Andre's floor-based grids.(1) Viewers might also perceive consanguinity with Mike Kelley's floor installations of grimy stuffed animals and handmade toys. Closer to the present, Leonard's stripped and partially dressed dollies recall the live, wigged mannequins who constitute Vanessa Beecroft's sculptural modules. Indeed, Mouth open, teeth showing bears a stronger resemblance to Beecroft's staged performances of ambiguously vacuous young women than it does to the work of either Laurie Simmons or Ellen Phelan, for example, who have employed dolls in photographs and paintings. But unlike Beecroft's idlers, Leonard's marchers bespeak the artist's feminist intentions by suggesting group solidarity and a capacity for action.