(more) strange fruit

[note #25]

Last week I wrote here about Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit, an elegy for friends who had died of AIDS. It consists of some three hundred skins of various fruits that she ate and then stitched back together.

Zoe has said this about the work:

This mending cannot possibly mend any real wounds, but it provided something for me. Maybe just time, or the rhythm of sewing [. . .] Once the fruit is eaten, I sew it closed, restore its form. They are empty now, just skin. The fruit is gone. They are like memory; these skins are no longer the fruit itself, but a form reminiscent of the original. You pay homage to what remains.*

The summer I met Zoe, she was interested in taking over the boat, but by that point I didn’t have it in me to get it seaworthy one more time. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would never float again. She ended up moving to Alaska, and I didn’t see her again until three years later, when she had an opening in her studio in the Lower East Side. There I saw an early version of Strange Fruit, hanging from threads in her windows.

Strange Fruit had not been displayed for seventeen years when I saw it again at the Whitney (2018). Like all time-based art, it is difficult to handled. Fleeting and ephemeral—decay, on one level, is what it is about. One day, it will, like all of us, be dust. It echoes a Dutch still-life, a memento mori, but in those paintings the ripe fruit is frozen in time. Here, time keeps pressing forward. Maybe it more closely echoes Cezanne, when he places a skull alongside his apples.

Or when he paints his apples rotting.

(note: I reached out to Zoe last week and we’re going to talk once she finishes her travels)

*O.Laing: The Lonely City, London, 2016.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

25-26 july / SOMOS / Taos Writers Conference / Taos, NM

10-15 aug / Memoir as Bewilderment / Fine Arts Work Center / Provincetown MA

14-19 oct / Memoir as Bewilderment / Omega Institute / Rhinebeck NY