Simone Leigh, "Sentinel IV," 2020
I saw this piece on Simone Leigh’s Instagram a few weeks ago and immediately fell in love. The moment I saw it my mind started wandering as I drew connections to different artworks, from Giacometti’s women to West African sculpture.
For Giacometti, the most obvious comparison would be his iconic standing women, whose tall, soldier-like postures are echoed in Leigh’s Sentinel IV. But the piece that reminds me most of her new sculpture is “Spoon Woman,” seen in the fifth slide. For this early surrealist work, Giacometti appropriated ceremonial spoons from the African Dan tribe that symbolize fertility and femininity. Exploring visual metaphors, Giacometti questions whether the “spoon is like a woman” or “the woman is like a spoon.” Rosalind Krauss describes the work as “a prismatic abstraction.” But in his radical transformation of the spoon-woman, Giacometti strips the object of its religious and cultural significance, reinventing it’s meaning to fit his avant-garde theories. Like many other modern artists who appropriated “primitive” African art, Giacometti abstracts and ignores the work’s social context, losing any sense of its original meaning.
Almost 100 years later, Simone Leigh embraces the same object but reimagines it in radically different terms. While the meaning of Giacometti’s sculpture is confined to (western) artistic theory, Leigh reclaims Spoon Woman as a piercing social commentary on both race and gender. And perhaps most importantly, the work embraces its African heritage. Domestic tools like jugs, bowls, and spoons often appear in Leigh’s work to represent the roles of both women in modern society and black Americans during slavery. And how she places the work in an art-historical context adds another layer to the work, questioning the problematic legacy of colonialism in art history and challenging Giacometti head-on. All of these details, against the backdrop of today’s heightened racial tension, make for a truly incredible work of art.