Continued from “Parallel Acts, Part 1: Lucy Raven”
We should understand the images of globality from space and the verticality of vision that aimed for an increasingly spectacular encompassing of the globe—a God’s-eye view—as an attempt to grapple with the indeterminacy of materiality; to banish an atmospheric optic and still the dynamic of the Earth.
—Kathryn Yusoff, “Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene,” e-flux ArchitecturePresenting a boundary solely as a barrier, solely as a visible and inviolate demarcation (rather than also a site of crossing and exchange), “value as form” secures itself the site (sight) of value. By means of the visible and fetishized boundary, value attains its too apparent form, confers upon itself visibly immanent distinction, and, thereby, re-covers itself.
—Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double
Prologue
At the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River (2016–22) begins in a low-slung, white-walled gallery with cracked grey concrete floors, their lightly pebbled surface rasping at the rubbery tread of footfalls, its four white walls thronged by the tremulous sounds of whippoorwills and finches. This is Al río’s prologue, its angular walls stitched into a single flow by twenty-four modest color prints measuring movement on a muddy river, rendering space in a state of constant change, the Rio Grande becoming an undulating equator coursing around an empty room. This watery horizon runs in whichever direction we choose. The direction of its continental flow is in fact elided by the attenuation with which the photographs render its surface. In this small concentric square space, we are given churned surfaces, spiraling shadows, shallow fields of soft blue-grained focus—the walls unfurling an endlessly iterating visual rhythm of flotsam and jetsam lacking only cargo. Leonard’s prologue pictures water without a body, and shows instead water as a body in motion, water as accumulation’s spillage of capacity to ferry silt, spume, goods, or people through a landscape without horizon.
The prints are paced at steady intervals, roughly a forearm’s width apart, these periodic gaps yoking the photographs’ surface ripples into a wider figuration of sequence, flow, and movement untethered from latitude and longitude. They give us the idiom of landscape as space described without coordinates. Stark shifts in July’s barometric pressure brought on by heavy rainfall have shuttled moisture and heat throughout the gallery, the campus, the town. The gallery’s heavy wooden doors have warped shut due to the humidity, even as the surfaces of the prints have rippled in tautological echo of their watery referent underneath their sheaths of glass. The Rio Grande is, in this sense, multiply in the room. It is in the wood, in the air, between the prints and their enclosures, within the images themselves.
This small set of color frames compresses the river’s depth into pure surface, and it turns diegetic duration—the time passed as the water courses and passes by—into synchronic instantaneity. By imaging a single fixed spot as it changes over time, Leonard’s prologue creates an order of sequential iteration that wraps the room like a horizon. The prints thereby engender stilled motion through a static array, queering measure’s definition of fixity by reproducing a count without a beginning or end. Faced with their oblique and yet emphatic presence, I am moved to ask if measure without end is effectively measure without sense, where sense makes sense if, and only if, it serves instrumental ends. In echo of Fred Moten’s writing on Leonard, we might ask, “Must seriality be aligned with the vulgarity of a timeline, which is held in the sterile fetishization of the singular?”1 How to consider a prologue without a beginning, if not as a pressuring of measurement and ordering itself?2 If Leonard’s Al río is framed by the question of what it means “when a river is made to perform a political task,” then the logic of measurement is itself a politic, perhaps more than a practice, one at play in a deliberately opaque and undisciplined fashion within this recursive scene.3
These photographic views, this uncertain vantage, occlude the watery depths and forces of which the pictures are a surface expression. They flatten the diurnal flows of water and air, of water in air and earth, making stark maps of opacity. Seriality here echoes the constitutive abstractions of cartography, offering an iteration of flattened bodies and of depthless presents, each alienated from their natal rhythms, each unwound from their multiple entanglements in a lifeworld by the exteriority and “remote authority” of a fixed point of view.4 Seriality infuses this latitudinal looking with spectatorial duration, and effectively theatricalizes our movements through Leonard’s gallery, by infusing a conscious experience of time’s relation to movement into the distanced act of looking that the category “landscape” historically proffers to its viewer.
In the specific contexts of art photography, I would argue that Leonard counterposes sequence to the tradition of modernist autonomy that devolves around the individual exposure, the editioned print, the stentorian rhetorical frame of the grand landscape picture. In this, her work echoes (albeit dissonantly) some of the commitments and claims advanced about seriality in the American art of the 1960s, inasmuch as with her “serial imagery the masterpiece concept is abandoned … Each work within a series is of equal value; it is part of a whole; its qualities are significantly more emphatic when seen in context than when seen in isolation.”5 Her photographs share the recalcitrance and ascetism that Robert Adams celebrates in the work of T. H. O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, but it is in the multiplicity of their iterative diction that Leonard’s photographs show, as Adams has it, “space as the antitheatrical puzzle it is—a stage without a center.”6 A stage without a center is a ground without a singular protagonist.
In Leonard’s work, iteration reanimates photography’s contingency and incompleteness, its incapacity to see and know all from a fixed point in space. It resurfaces the copresence of a wider variety of discernible “subjects” than can tend to articulate themselves in a visual economy driven by autonomy’s logic of exception. The recursive nature of iteration materializes the multiplicity of varying connections that exist between places in time, and it materializes the manifold connections that exist between images in space. Iteration in this way makes multivalence available, perceptually, by infusing the vertiginous force of instantaneity into the horizontal plasticity of time. In Al río, iteration presses back against the solipsistic illusions that Adams critiques, just as Leonard’s work responds to multiple entangled histories of imaging, and to the political implications of our hereditary or chosen points of view.7
Barracks Building
The second segment of Al río unfolds within a former barracks building, which, in the Chinati Foundation’s prior existence as Fort D. A. Russell, housed Nazi prisoners of war captured during World War II. This phase of Leonard’s tripartite installation begins with a large print, which frames its view squarely on the center of the Rio Grande, notching a distant bend in the road to the photograph’s vanishing point. The northern bank is peppered with pylons capped by cameras, sensors, and lights delineating a crenellated network of detection, shielding an American interior. The southern bank is marked by sweeping tire treads but is otherwise barren of any ostentatious installations. A similar view of the same stretch of river adjoins this first large print, revealing a north bank scarred by one solitary, methodically parallel set of tire treads. The coupled prints give stereographic dimension to an overarching optic and infrastructure of surveillance that is oriented obsessively, and only in apparent passivity, toward the south.
In the photographs, rigid concrete and metallic lines of demarcation reflect the fortified skin of an American interior against which the sudden spontaneity and undulating irregularity of this littoral terrain figures a liveness always subject to surveillance or containment. Leonard’s compositional grammar seems uncomplicatedly open, structurally unabridged by obstacle or occlusion. It is straightforwardly “straight” in its proffering of direct views on such rigidly demarcated space. Indeed, Leonard’s beguilingly “straight,” seemingly uninflected compositional voice can be considered as an affected and precise form of artistic diction, a mode of aesthetic citation that enacts a directness freighted with subtle and substantive conceptual distortions.
In a passage of five photographic prints, prefaced in a prior grouping by the serried façade of the Border Fence at its left-hand edge, and by a tessellated weave of mechanically cultivated fields at its right-hand edge, Leonard’s camera sweeps panoramically across a modest homestead and ranch, ringed by distant smudging mountains, a waterlogged valley floor, and a smattering of trees. This passage begins in a pastoral idiom, offering its viewer the classic elements of a romantic landscape: mountains framing recession toward distant space, a textured topography animated by the passing of beautiful light. Yet all the scene’s edges are brittle, the earth muddied by the thick textures of film grain, the far corners of the scene blurred and soft, and the frame heavy with the condensations of atmosphere. Leonard’s aesthetic deployment of the idiom of romantic landscapes starkly contradicts the militant clarity of rendition that the late critic Max Kozloff so incisively located in the American landscape tradition, writing in 1991: “In a grand horizon, one expects both texture and tone, or rather texture within tone. A large-format print allows a panorama to be backed up by what seems to be an endless reserve of data.”8
Depth of field, within a landscape tradition shaped by Ansel Adams’s glacial clarity of view, or by Edward Weston’s zealotry for the precisions of f.64, can be read, inversely, as equivalent to a death of space through the perfection of data. These borderlands are so microscopically mapped, so kaleidoscopically surveilled and measured, that Leonard’s optical irresolution resists the panoptic drive that her sequence’s horizontal pan subtly evokes. Indeed, despite the vast number of photographs in this series, one looks in vain within and across them for much identifying information of any sort, much less for the discernible presence of “endless reserves of data.” Seriality’s idiom of measurement is uncoupled, in Al río, from the cartographer’s attachment to the specificity of location.
We could also consider Leonard’s general withholding of information (of license plates, or of legible faces) as a refusal of landscape photography’s capacity to stake claims, as a refusal of its propensity to enact or empower both processes and politics of capture. In contrast to the hegemony of the state’s infrastructures of optical control, Leonard’s description of space through her photographic sequences does not aim to clearly triangulate its terrain, or to objectify evidence structural to a nativist architecture of repression and disavowal. These are photographs without title, without deed, even as they are also pictures firmly rooted in place. The sizing of Leonard’s prints is crucial here, in that their modest size militates against our capacity, as spectators, to feel ourselves fully and passively subsumed within their illusory three dimensions. This quiet resistance to the aggressive interpellations of the visual also presses against an overidentification between picture and place. Scale, in this sense, resists the spectatorial instinct to reduce the reality of place to the immersive qualities of its image.
Indeed, even in those many instances in which Leonard’s frames run sharp and clear from front to back, offering limpid and granular views of open space, what becomes apparent is precisely how enclosed one’s own pedestrian perspective would be within the undulating, suddenly vertiginous folds of these desert basins, within these valleys thicketed with tall brush, and enclosed by the steep sweeping flanks of mountains. What one can see freely here is only sky, and what one strains to preserve is a capacity to see over, to see across, to see beyond, to see discontinuous distances in any kind of elevated simultaneity. The rolling rhythms of this river, and of its surrounding terrain, refuse to proffer a vantage from which they might fully disclose their own undulating interior.9
If this borderland space is insistently sparse, it is also littered with the installations common to a theater of military action. From the grounds of Marfa, one can easily and continuously see one of the US Customs and Border Protection’s eight TARS blimps, or aerostats, floating pale and resplendent as high as ten thousand feet up in the daytime sky.10 Indeed, as one turns away from the first pair of images of the Rio Grande in this second venue toward the bend in the U shape of the barracks building, that same pallid blimp rises vertically in the distant sky beyond the gallery throughout the day. It certainly lends a savage twist of irony to the apparent neutrality of floating, to the metaphysical registers of flight, to the seemingly inconsequential implications of vacant or vapid space overhead.
At the juncture of that squared-off bend in the barracks’ U shape, Leonard stages a short sequence of prints that orbit around a miniscule church located in the deep midground of a desert basin bisected by the border. The sequence reveals the bridge that spans the basin’s river to be blocked off by a panoply of unremarkable construction materials: bollards, concrete barriers, meshed netting, scaffolded posts, and corrugated iron, which here articulate how a policy of repression choreographs actual “obstruction” as a nativist play. Fittingly, the bridge’s improvised blockade has the shape of a theatrical stage, its wide flared wings retorting an aggressive denial of passage to the undulating plain that it confronts, its disposition in space a public form of expressly political address. Other images in the sequence make plain that no impediment exists between the camera’s vantage and that distant church other than the blockage of the bridge, which obstructs not a square inch of the superwide basin whose river the bridge spans.
The choreography of this theatrical division recalls Lindon Barrett’s trenchant analysis of the politics of value, and of value’s constitutive delimitations and disavowals. The reciprocal flows that traverse this “division” of space against itself so perfectly echo Barrett’s lucid assertion that “value masquerades both its violence and the revisionary impulses of its belated self-representation by means of the symbolics of a boundary.”11 As Barrett continues: “Value enters the world in a performance. More accurately: Value enters the world in concomitant performances”—performances that dutifully ratify the ostensible self-evidence, the natural impermeability of value’s arbitrary boundary lines, which Leonard’s nonlinear iteration shows to be a charade.12 The permanent permeability of this US-Mexico border to the traffic of bodies, matter, and goods moving in both directions, continuously, is a settled fact of the lifeworld and agricultural practices that sustain these borderlands. The sheer energetic accretion of objects that constitutes this improvised “blockage” thus articulates the libidinal dimension of this repression, this represa, recalling Barrett’s incisive assertion that “fetishized boundaries … are sites not only of separation but also of influential yet surreptitious traffic and exchange. As inexorable sites of arbitration, these boundaries are … also inexorable sites of violence.”13 The Customs and Border Protection murders of unarmed Mexican children like Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca and José Antonio Elena Rodríguez give visceral dimension to the lethality of the violence of that traffic, which can and does result in the reduction of Mexican children to live instruments in one-sided games of target practice.14 In this sense, Leonard’s articulation of the performative dimensions of a national, racial hierarchy of value shows the theater as a stage for (militarized) action.15
In a grid of thirty-four prints arrayed in six columns and six rows, Leonard reproduces thirty-three clear depictions of a circling Border Protection helicopter as it spirals recursively just above the tree line, tracking her presence from a shallow pocket of aerial space. The helicopter has arrived to litigate the integrity of the border, and to reassert the inviolability of its boundary line.16
The chopper arrives in an aggressively flat trajectory, only to veer away, climb, bend, recede and sweep back in tightening orbits as Leonard’s rapid picturing is matched to the concentric rhythms of its rotor blades. Each exposure distills an infinitesimal fraction of a second, and each print is transposed into a proxy for duration in time, rendered here as an antagonistic interaction of two views unfolding in common space, because the helicopter is armed with its own protuberant lens, or sensor, suspended in a pod beneath the pilot’s seat. Through this grid of prints, we can imagine two diverging reels of images unfolding from one intersecting pass—an unremarkable encounter, but also a stark description of visibility’s militarized role in the management of unmonitored movement.
So much of the substance and character of this encounter, so much of who is at stake in this unremarkable what of two views intersecting, eludes the technologies deployed to capture it. The binary clarity of black and white, the diametric measures of live or dead, the thermal spectrum of hot to cold, the relative qualities of moving versus still, of friend or foe, all thoroughly fail to clarify or stabilize the vicissitudes of the encounter. Instead, across the span of the grid, seeing and knowing—in any human sense of relation—diverge at the interface of newly created data.
It’s in this sense that Leonard’s project enters into a dynamic and multivariant dialogue with wide histories of imaging, which, in the fullest sense of the implications of that term, must include not merely, or even principally, histories of photography, or, more narrowly, art histories of photography, but also interdisciplinary conceptions of optics in relation to forms of power.17
Nevertheless, across the varying passages in Al río, there are salient art-photographic echoes. Toward the close of the work’s second site, Leonard restages one cherished passage of five photographs of an irrigated field, its silvery rain-filled furrows sweeping back toward a low-slung horizon’s vanishing point. To my eye, the images offer a subtle but legible echo of Dorothea Lange’s classic photograph from Childress County, Texas, entitled Tractored Out and made during the Great Depression. In that epoch, American governments shuttered the borders of state and county lines against the entry of citizens fleeing drought and starvation in neighboring states. These echoes resurface a prehistory of American anti-migrant tradition, one both connected to, and seemingly distant from, the contemporary paroxysms of communal life brought on by the ICE raids of 2025 and 2026. The convergence of Tractored Out with this sequence registers a century of sustained governmental antipathy towards migration occasioned by crisis, capital, foreign policy, and their corollary ecological and political calamities.18
In Leonard’s sequence, the shadowy densities of a nesting flock of blackbirds litter the midground of her first frame with a flurry of staccato stains of no discernible dimension, occupying no plausibly spatial position within the print’s ordered frame. The depth of their blackness extrudes their bodies from the illusory space of the landscape, as their voided volumetric forms are made over, by exposure, shutter speed, and Leonard’s modulation of light, into splotches of black ink that could almost as plausibly sit atop the surface of the print as rest within its recessional form.
The flock is already rustling into a sweeping murmuration in the first image, but the serried rows of the field stabilize the frame. As the flock takes iterative flight, Leonard’s camera snaps right, then left, then further left, as her frame is filled by a gelatinous black smattering of voids gradually wheeling up into the air. The sheer, stark mechanical contrast in tones between the light-grey textures of this stubbled, watery field, and the unalleviated darknesses of black bodies in flight is so improbable as to make the flock alien—the voluminousness of black figuring a superimposition of stochastic disorder upon an orderly agricultural space.
As the flock clears the horizon in the fourth frame, the sharp delineation of ploughed rows of crops dissolves into an expanding blur. Across this sequence, the regimented order of measurement is sublated into a miasma of movement and mess, of miscegenated simultaneity and improbable flight. Measure’s rigidity collides, here, with a figurative immoderation: It meets a many of ones, a flurry of indistinctions, and a multitude of contiguous units. In the shift from sharpness to blur, from the clean logics of subdivision to the disparate harmonics of the chorus, I am reminded of photographer, novelist, and critic Wright Morris’s claim that “to form a meaningful unit, one begins with a measurable multitude.”19 I am reminded by this murmuration that one—itself an uncertain integer—is intelligible only as an abstracted expression of a many that precedes its delimitation. I am reminded that the photographic negative is already a duplicate in the very moment of its inauguration of what we name its single instant. That instant’s visibility as a positive print depends upon a triangulation between world, camera, and picture, the last of which itself distills a multiplicity of forms of seeing as they converge in a single frame: the world, seeing a figure stood behind the camera, the negative, seeing the earth stilled even as the world spins. Leonard’s sequence here rearticulates the structural realities of parallax at the site of converging and discontinuous perspectives.
Lange’s Tractored Out is shaped by a convergence of moving surfaces that sweep in, fold over, and at the same time curve, or perhaps fall away from the frame. The composition is pitched to the oblique, elliptical shape of planetary rhythms of movement. Her photograph draws the eye into a concentric rotation that bends through and over, ultimately stretching down past the desiccated shell of the abandoned home that anchors the metaphor at the root of her photograph. In the year prior to her photograph’s production, the Scottish poet Edwin Muir wrote a poem entitled “The Sufficient Place,” whose opening lines perhaps figure the lapsed dream of which Lange’s picture is both ruin and obituary:
See, all the silver roads wind in, lead in
To this still place like evening. See, they come
Like messengers bearing gifts to this little house,
And this great hill worn down to a patient mound20
If Lange’s modest domestic structure is, or was, to be a sufficient place, the rhythms of its emergence out of a barren emptiness suggest, with a pitiless poetry and lunar strangeness, that its demise might be part of the cyclical rhythm of life and death. This “little house’s” diminutive position in the frame, its canted angles, its solidity set against the featureless brightness of the sky, might suggest that definition is itself temporary, that centrality is contingent, that absolutes are also relative. The better part of a century later, Leonard’s furrowed rows of waterlogged earth might echo this same claim, adding to it a figuration of possession’s terror of invasion, as her blackbirds sweep in from an apparent elsewhere, taking up, settling down, and moving on, namelessly.21 Histories of settlement and displacement might be seen to converge, through metaphor, between these sodden rows, within the lineaments of this brief sequence, figuring the irrepressible drift of life traversing and exceeding a rigidly demarcated American interior.
Notably, it is in the wake of these particular images, both within the structure of Leonard’s two-volume book and within the tripartite form of her Marfa installation, that we are then presented with a long sequence of pictures of people in motion, re-photographed dissonantly by Leonard’s iPhone, which cuts across and reiterates the supra-human vantage of a security camera, as the people traverse the covered walkways of an open bridge connecting Mexico to the United States. In the book, Leonard precedes the flurry of flocking birds with a suite of images of the Border Fence, seen architecturally first in section, then in its lengthwise plan. Its latticed face is, in a figural sense, first erect and vertiginous, then prone and longitudinal, as its serried rictus echoes the linear shapes of that soggy field.
In these subtle elisions of discrete scenes, in these sequential conjunctions and compositional repetitions, Leonard figures the symbolic and material entanglement of the many within the homogenizing strictures of the one. She pits the quadrilateral rigidity of property, and of property’s delimitation of its borders, against the irrepressible fluidity of water, of bodies, of life’s liveness, its bursting of every seam that might seek to contain the gravitational force of movement, which, in a paradoxical relation to the photograph’s stillness, we can understand in this work as the inevitable measure of time. I would argue that Al río issues from, and is rooted in, the interstitial, the queered and indeterminate space of conjuncture, that stopped gap in which time nevertheless moves.
Mess Hall
An array of complex threads converge at the former mess hall, which houses the third and final element of this iteration of Al río, sited opposite the barracks building. The structures themselves were named for Major General David Allen Rusell (1820–64), a career soldier in the US Army who made war upon Mexican natives in his twenties, and against Native American peoples in his thirties, before fighting and ultimately dying in the American Civil War in his forties. Sixty years after Russell’s death in battle, the US government passed the 1924 Immigration Act, catalyzed by faux nativist antipathy toward Asian migration and designed to intensify race-based restrictions against “biologically inferior” foreigners. In that same year, the US Bureau of Immigration created the US Border Patrol, tasked with deterring persons from crossing not only the Rio Grande in Texas, but the entire southern “frontier.” The US Border Patrol established its Marfa Station at 717 South Highland, immediately alongside what was then dubbed Camp Albert in 1924, a site which became Fort D. A. Russell in 1930, and the Chinati Foundation in its present, public iteration in 1989.22
The mess hall’s interior is permanently open to the elements. Its twenty-two square window frames are empty, its doorframes bereft of doors. Its walls and ceiling struts bare the varying records of the structure’s repairs—cracked and grouted, split and seamed, braced and bolstered with an unvarnished expedience lacking not merely ostentation but pretensions to permanence or perfection. Running lengthwise through the extensive space of the mess hall’s interior Leonard has installed four architecturally shaped vitrines made of wood and designed in the idiom of post and beam construction, an architectural vernacular brought to North America by European settlers. The vitrine bases are capped by triangular roof-like structures that resemble the barracks buildings beyond, enabling their long, angled flanks to serve as flatbeds for unmounted prints secured—like the murals of the Nazi prisoners of war once fed here—under sheets of glass. The empty undersides of Leonard’s vitrines redouble the windowlessness of the larger structure, even as their shape in frontal elevation echoes the latent figure of the Parthenon, itself an ennobling referent and guarantor of Manifest Destiny’s historical inheritance.
Beneath Leonard’s glass “roofing,” she lays out a series of thirty-two color printed screengrabs from a live El Paso video feed broadcasting to a web browser on a laptop screen, which she has photographed seemingly in the dark—in camera obscura so to speak. This final suite of images is striking for the suddenness with which it returns color to the palette of the series. Color first emerged in Al río as the silted and undulating surface of the Rio Grande. It returned, briefly and luminously, in the installation’s second section, in a short set of color prints describing the spiny efflorescence of desert cacti in sudden bloom. If, in this sense, color has been associated in Al río with natural life’s renewals and periodic transformations, then color here lends these thin prints a vibrant air of immediacy. In this use of color’s contrast to the grey tones of black and white, Leonard counterposes to the cyclical vitality of this ecology the evergreen constancy of state surveillance’s own vivid, live view.
In the simple invitation to pace along the vitrine’s flanks, Leonard frames our spectatorial passage in an echo of two distinct but synchronized conditions of movement: our own, at leisure, and the pictured pedestrians’, under constant surveillance. This conjuncture of exposure and occultation, this dialectic figuration of revelation and secretion—a dynamic redoubled by the darkness of the room that these surveillance images illuminate—materializes an insight structural to Leonard’s project, one articulated in writing by Judith Butler on the ethics of photography: “It is essential to the continuing operation of … power not to be seen. Rather, it is precisely a nonfigurable operation of power that works to delimit the domain of representability itself.”23
The vitrine’s horizontality demands that we move laterally across its vibrant views, effectively making us scanners of the state’s supervening surveillant gaze, inflecting our perspective on this elapsed liveness with the political differential of freedom. This intensification of the inherent, estranged abstraction of photographic looking freights our freedom of motion with the overtones of a supervening freeness to image. To be safely ensconced within the darkness of a camera obscura, to be a purveyor of the look from within a blind spot, is to be relatively free, and the corollary freedom that issues from our invisibility is, therefore, the unfettered right—and the unrestricted power—to screen, to filter, to leer, to stare, to see from secrecy. In other words, to be, or to understand oneself as being, unmarked, exterior, sovereign, in a thoroughgoing reiteration of the propertied exteriority that Denis Cosgrove locates at the core of the Euro-American “landscape idea.”24
Leonard’s dissonant choreography of this view identifies us with, and sites us in an adjacency to, the position of the disembodied figure of the state. However, in our reciprocal exposure as viewers of this vitrine to the world outside the mess hall, Leonard’s installation identifies these photographs within a visual field, within what Butler calls “the field of representability,” which Leonard’s installation here shows to be “structured by state permission,” in such a way that we can neither know the identity of the pilot whose helicopter assaults our viewing, nor the authors and users of these surveillant images. “As a result,” Butler writes, “we cannot understand this field of representability simply by examining its explicit contents, since it is constituted fundamentally by what is cast out and maintained outside the frame within which representations appear.”25 In this concluding element of Al río’s installation, the veiled and disembodied figure of the state is elided with the viewer of art, but it is thereby also exposed, a condition we can now continuously see under violent contestation by masked (ICE) agents of the state.26
Leonard’s installation counterposes its structurally open and entangled imbrication into its site of occurrence not only to a nativist politics of resentment and a repressive architecture of surveillance, but also to an arts institution indelibly linked to the aggressive hermeticism and utopic masculinism of a strand of minimal art emblematized by Donald Judd. Leonard’s work is fundamentally porous, in its contrapuntal interplay not only with Camp Albert/Fort D. A. Russell, but with Judd’s mnemonic sculptures, or Carl Andre’s modular floor works. Into these spaces and works, it interjects a seriality of open aggregation, posing a sinuous variation and constant adaptation to a minimal aesthetics of stoic resistance that wholly refuses to incorporate or respond to the historical dimensions of its elaboration in this particular place. Al río offers address quite literally toward not just the river but to its regional space, which is to say it is grounded in the structure of relation, not with an abstracted vacuum or a utopic system, but with the historical particularity of location.
In Marfa, Al río shows seeing as a relational praxis unfolding contingently and never in a utopic space of abstraction or a void seemingly outside of history. Rather, it unfolds in the same shared air, the same sediment and humidity, and the same uncertainty and political urgency that marks the wider space of its exhibition in Texas and in the larger moment of the work’s decade-long unfolding. Al río sites the activity of seeing in the reciprocal position of these opened enclosures, and it thinks the intertwined and intersecting encounters of a variety of lifeways and a spectrum of ecologies and economies from within the textured space of their historical inheritance. In this, the installation solicits a measure of work from us as viewers—not merely the work of feeling in the moment of seeing an image, but the connective, iterative work of thinking seeing in situ, of seeing space and its image(s) in relation, of moving recursively through thought over time.
Refiguring Systems
If, as Andrew Sungtaek recently wrote, “selective memory serves the construction of new identities by obscuring the historical conditions and material realities that made them possible,” then the contingent, reflexive, and mnemonic dynamics that have proven so central to Leonard’s exhibition, and to Raven’s works, press back against such erasure and resist the perils of historical disavowal.27 Raven titles her film installation Murderers Bar despite the fact of that place name’s change, in the late nineteenth century, to “Happy Camp.” This posthumous revision, by the state, refigures the river’s history, and overwrites the constitutive role of Indigenous massacres in the settlement of that section of the Western “frontier.”28 Indeed, both Leonard’s and Raven’s works probe the limits of signification as an expressly political, sensuous, and contingent act. Their grammars of practice, enacted through the intricate and reciprocal forms of installation, sound out the populous histories of both names, and the geographic and historical places from which they emerge.29 Each artist indulges in a complex relay of elisions, linkages, and revelations that resist the foreclosure of history, and that reconnect ostensibly generic structures, forms, and terms—panels, post and beam architectures, depositions, mile markers, sepia-toned “scenes,” and “straight” photographs—to the specific contexts through which they developed their normative status. Their installations are fundamentally grounded in a comparative grammar, whether in the material links that traverse distinct works in the case of Raven, or in the sequential and situated historical relays that Leonard creates between picture and site on the Chinati Foundation’s grounds.
It is inarguable that both Raven and Leonard work in modes that draw “parallels between their aesthetic systems and those of the real world,” to return to a conception of the openness of artistic practices that engage with systematic modes of production advanced by Donna De Salvo.30 Moreover, both artists solicit the active participation of their viewers in the navigation of “a scenario in order to experience something that could be perceived as an aesthetic system,” the linkages between which traverse various sites, works, and artistic and political histories.31 The porosity of their approaches enables what De Salvo describes as “a physical opening up of the object to the world,” as a function not only of the indexical bonds that moving image and photographic works bear to a world beyond their frames, but also as an intellectual and aesthetic position in their practices that conceives of seeing in situated and relational frameworks.32 Such an approach embraces the fact of contingency. It works through the contiguities that contingency affords, and results in artistic works whose “propositions” necessarily “open themselves to the vulnerability of the world and its events.”33 Thus the absence of hermeticism in Raven’s and Leonard’s approaches to the iterative, structural, and serial—thus the absence of mysticism in their work.34
The work of both Raven and Leonard effects a comparable “subversion of measure.” The artists resist logics of homogeneity, and reflexively deconstruct the normative prerogatives of perspective. This subversion in their work is an effect not of a game of chance operations, but of an embrace of visuality understood as the site in which a multiplicity of forms of seeing discontinuously converge in a single frame.35 Their embrace of contingency refuses the indifferent universality and ostensible neutrality of measurement, recalling to me an observation by the late Mel Bochner, who wrote that “measurement is one of our means of believing that the world can be reduced to a function of human understanding. Yet, when forced to surrender its transparency, measurement reveals an essential nothing-ness.” 36
Bochner’s Measurement Room works (1969) illuminate the arbitrary dimension of art’s delimitation of origin and interiority.37 By tautologically re-marking the existing, contingent relations that define the volume of art’s interior gallery, he reveals the createdness of its ostensibly neutral and natural parameters, exposing, in Lindon Barrett’s terms, “the boundary as ‘the uncreated source of creation,’” and demonstrating how art, like property, proceeding “from an arguably uncreated position,” uses its capacity to delimit in arbitrary ways to demonstrate that “boundaries [themselves] create.”38 If Leonard’s prologue refused to assert a differential scale, and Raven’s Dam Breach LIC tests similarly refused to disclose an objective measure, we might think of that resistance to the imposition of arbitrary order in deep, structural relation to the arbitrary delimitations of “landscape.” Each artist resists the metrical will to order that animates measurement’s homogeneous, hermetic indifference to site, to space, and to specificity and its differences, and they do so precisely through a dissident commitment to the “representation of distance, and by implication the imposition of form on the amorphous, undefined expanse of open-ended space.”39
The generative work of bordering, such as the energy of the represa that gave life to the fictive stoppering of that bridge in Leonard’s work, or to the hydroelectric force of the CopCo Number 1 Dam, is itself the product of a complex constellation of scientific, commercial, and governmental power, which operates through the naturalization of such arbitrary logics of measure as those Bochner theatricalizes and that Barrett so incisively critiques. As Sungtaek asserts: “Neutrality is never actually neutral when economies of power are involved.”40 Moreover, these logics of measure and assertions of settler property are premised on the vitality and durability of acts of designation and assertion: on claims made pursuant to depositions in the idiom of a law that disavows the Indigenous thefts on which the legality of its order depends.41
As Kathryn Yusoff has shown, acts of designation, and the politics of measurement structural to the settler project, diffuse the violence of geology, and maintain the colonial prerogative of value and its progressive scripting of extraction as a genealogical achievement of whiteness.42 Colonial maps and scales of measure mark the continuation of an aesthetic and political project which (re)produces a natural teleology in which land theft, and the successive asphyxiation of Indigenous lifeworlds, evaporate in the crucible through which “value” and “progress” are achieved as possessable ends. The prerogative to mark and to efface, the capacity to record, to measure, to name, and thus to assign things and people relative positions on a scale of life pitched on the division of the human from the inhuman, is a primary activity of those possessed of textuality’s capacity to “narrativize earth as a site of improvement and settler scripting,” as Yusoff writes.43
Barrett reminds us that “textuality—the sign of privilege and value over which the discipline of literary studies presides,” is in fact powerfully “reconceived along unorthodox and formerly unimaginable lines, antinomian lines” when a “landscape mediated in terms of [racialized] inclusion by exclusion” becomes an object of our sustained attention. Difference enters suddenly into “a carefully restricted economy of signs,” as does the black tape against the pristine white walls in Bochner’s Measurement Room, as does the viscous liquid evaporating in Raven’s indeterminate Depositions, as do the blackbirds in Leonard’s serried agricultural field.44 In doing so, it reconceives the limits of order along “antinomian lines.”
Ours is a profoundly antinomian moment in which irreducibly opposed realities nevertheless perpetually, and often violently, converge. Such realities demand a capacity to see difference in its simultaneities, to see the interpenetration of things by their outsides, to see evaporation and inscription as processes irreducible to the seductive shape of a sepia-toned and silhouetted landscape “scene.” Across these exhibitions, Raven and Leonard demonstrate a commitment to standing astride an array of symbolic registers as they converge in the identification and allocation of meaning to a landscape irreducible to such significations. They proffer a conception of visuality grounded in an “anti-theatrical” conception of space, to recall Robert Adams, and thus they figure landscape as itself “a stage without a center” through their sustained engagement with what Yusoff dubs “the indeterminacy of materiality,” and through their resistance to what she elsewhere describes as “the affective work of purity.”45 The land, in the material and symbolic space of Raven’s and Leonard’s work, is perpetually a site of “surreptitious traffic and exchange,” as Barrett asserts as definitive of any border. They situate us in entangled proximity to its movements, working from a variety of vantages, elucidating the profound partiality of unilateral claims through an optic geared toward the continuous unfolding of parallel acts.
Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River, was on view at the Chinati Foundation from October 2024 until July 6, 2025.
Fred Moten, “Photopos: Film, Book, Archive, Music, Sculpture,” in Zoe Leonard: Survey (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2007), 144.
I’m reminded of Annette Michelson’s appreciation of the significance of measure in the work of Robert Morris: “The subversion of measure is a matter of considerable importance and complexity … All societies are careful to control measures and preserve fixed standards. Production in the modem world depends on the accuracy of measure for the identical dimension of bolts, wrenches, and parts which make mass production possible. The subversion of measure … is linked to the notion of process (the measure creating itself through chance, falling) and more particularly to the creation of a socially-critical dimension of irony.” Annette Michelson, “Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression,” in Robert Morris (Corcoran Art Gallery, 1969), 51. Relatedly, Leonard’s repeated black and white photographs of tire treads in the Texas sand may naturally recall Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test (1967). What seems significant in the fact of these artistic echoes is the expressly material, viscerally real political consequence attaching to the interplay of chance, error, detection, and location, in the context of the state’s continuous activity of measurement at the US’s southern border.
See →.
Robin Kelsey, “Arthur Schott: Marking the Mexican Boundary,” Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for US Surveys, 1850–90 (University of California Press, 2007), 34.
John Coplans, “Serial Imagery,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (October 1968) →.
Robert Adams, “In the Nineteenth-Century West,” in Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (Aperture Foundation, 1994), 146.
“In front of such landscapes it is easy to sympathize with those who lived out the early acts of our national misunderstanding of space. Little wonder that Americans said so confidently and unqualifiedly that they were free. How could it be otherwise—they were alone, or so it seemed. And they had gotten there as a result of their own effort.” Adams, “In the Nineteenth Century West,” 141.
Max Kozloff, “Ghastly News from Epic Landscapes,” American Art 5, No. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 1991): 109.
Notably, the Rio Grande is described by some of its earliest surveyors as “one of the most intractable river systems in the western hemisphere,” a motif C. J. Alvarez describes as relying on the widespread implicit premise that “the natural world of the border region was out of control, but … could in fact be dominated.” C. J. Alvarez, Border Land, Border Water: A History of the Construction of the US-Mexico Divide (University of Texas Press, 2019), 7. One thinks here of the nineteenth-century language of Manifest Destiny, as it is invoked by Sandra S. Phillips in her study of photography’s imbrication in the “development” of the American West: “Attitudes toward the West were expressed in the language of control: We were to ‘conquer’ nature, or as Gilpin put it, ‘subdue’ its geography. Nature was in need of ‘taming’; she was ‘wild,’ ‘virgin,’ and often ‘dark’; she needed to be ‘penetrated’ and ‘controlled.’” Sandra S. Phillips, “To Subdue the Continent: Photographs of the Developing West,” in Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present, ed. Gail Larrick (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 14.
Per the United States Customs and Border Protection, these “aerostats are unmanned, unarmed, and spend their service lives hovering over a fixed location on the southern edge of the border … Each sweep of the radar in the belly of a TARS detects all flying aircraft within the balloon’s 200-mile range. Wireless transmitters send TARS radar data from each balloon into the Internet cloud, where it is combined with other TARS radar data … TARS is the only persistent wide-area air, maritime and land surveillance system specifically designed for CBP’s border security mission.” Dave Long, “CBP’s Eyes in the Sky,” US Customs and Border Protection →.
Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29.
Barrett, Blackness and Value, 26.
Barrett, Blackness and Value, 17.
See also The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by Tommy Lee Jones (EuropaCorp / The Javelina Company, 2005).
As the scholar and organizer Harsha Walia writes, “Borders are not fixed lines demarcating territory. They are elastic; bordering regimes can be enforced anywhere. Subjected to surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms within the nation-state, undocumented migrants endure the omnipresent threat of immigration enforcement, dangerous and low-wage work, and barriers to accessing public services … Borders can thus follow people indefinitely … Bordering regimes are also increasingly layered with controls far beyond nation-states’ territorial limits. The United States, Australia, and Europe subordinate Central America, Oceania, Africa, and the Middle East by compelling countries in these regions to accept border checkpoints, drone surveillance, offshore detention, and migration prevention and interception campaigns as conditions of trade and aid agreements.” Harsha Walia, “There Is No Migrant Crisis,” Boston Review, November 16, 2022 →.
I am thinking here of interdisciplinary projects that articulate the entanglements of institutions, policies, and technologies in the elaboration of optics (both in the material and the epistemic or conceptual sense) that enable greater stratifications of governmental or corporate power, and that serve to renew and reproduce hegemonic forms of control: Capitalism and the Camera: Essays on Photography and Extraction, ed. Kevin Coleman and Daniel James (Verso Books, 2021); Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket Books, 2021); W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Jonathan Beller, The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (Pluto Press, 2018); Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013); Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University, 2015); Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press, 2011); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Verso Books, 2009); Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guilford Press, 2010).
Tractored Out was photographed four hundred miles north of the Chinati Foundation. The infamous ICE facility in Dilley, Texas to which so many kidnapped children destined for deportation (like Liam Ramos) were dispatched sits three hundred and fifty miles east of the location for the show.
Wright Morris, “The Camera Eye,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 1 (October 1981): 10.
Edwin Muir, “The Sufficient Place,” in Collected Poems, 1921–1958 (Faber & Faber, 1960), 86–87.
It is instructive to think of Leonard’s murmuration in affinity with Fred Moten’s thinking on the indisciplined multiplicities of the murmur: “The murmur is a sound, a grumble or rumble, given on the outskirts of normal, as opposed to the center of (speech) pathological, articulation. It’s tied to acting and performance where mummery coincides with murmuring, where the dumb show would seem to indicate an otherness if not an absence of articulacy … For Du Bois the murmur is laden with history, is the dubbed and overdubbed recording of a history of complaint, where the phonic materiality of maternal song operates, again, over the edge of speech, over the edge of meaning … The murmur is an interminable doubling in and of what is supposed to be most properly one’s own, namely one’s speech.” Fred Moten, “Uplift and Criminality,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Susan Gilman and Alys Even Weinbaum (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 334–35.
The historical and architectural framework for the concluding element in Leonard’s tripartite installation is sited at this entangled nexus, in a structure that at one point offered nourishment to Nazi prisoners, antagonists of US national interests who themselves fought for a comparably belligerent and imperial German state, seeking lebensraum in a genocidal campaign whose politics were materially informed by Adolf Hitler’s admiration for American racecraft. See Alex Ross, “How American Racism Influenced Hitler,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2018; and James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Judith Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 6 (2007): 953.
Cosgrove writes: “Perspective, in structuring and directing universal reality at a single spectator, acknowledges only one, external subject for the object it represents … In an important, if not always literal, sense the spectator owns the view because all of its components are structured and directed towards his eyes only. The claim of realism is in fact ideological. It offers a view of the world directed at the experience of one individual … The experience of the insider, the landscape as subject, and the collective life within it are all implicitly denied. Subjectivity is rendered the property of the artist and the viewer.” Denis E. Cosgrove, Symbolic Landscape and Social Formation (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 26.
Butler, “Torture and the Ethics of Photography,” 953.
The stark nature of this resistance to exposure is perhaps crystallized in the interaction published on January 29, 2026 between a citizen and an ICE agent seated in his vehicle, in which he declares flatly, “You raise your voice, I erase your voice,” as the ultimatum governing the citizen’s interaction with the state →.
Andrew Sungtaek, “Architectures of Amnesia: Donald Judd and America’s ‘Forgotten War’ in Korea,” e-flux journal, no. 164 (June 2026).
There are parallels here between the constitutive violence of settlement necessary to a place like Murderers Bar becoming a “Happy Camp,” and the specific amnesia Andrew Sungtaek identifies through “mnemonic shrapnel,” those “fragments of historical violence” that “remain embedded within aesthetic forms, occasionally piercing the surface of strategic forgetting,” as in the comparable importance of American imperial violence and its propagation of Indigenous Korean massacres to Donald Judd’s exposure to Korean religious architectures. Sungtaek, “Architectures of Amnesia.”
Mark Ruwedel’s Pictures of Hell (RAM Publications, 2014) seems especially relevant to this dimension of Raven’s and Leonard’s projects. See also Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, “Into the Abyss: Mark Ruwedel Pictures of Hell,” in Dark Mirrors (MACK Books, 2021).
Donna De Salvo, “Where We Begin: Opening the System, c. 1970,” in Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970, ed. Donna De Salvo (Tate Publishing, 2005), 11.
De Salvo, “Where We Begin,” 14.
De Salvo, “Where We Begin,” 16.
De Salvo, “Where We Begin,” 22.
See Johanna Burton, “Mystics Rather than Rationalists,” in Open Systems.
Michelson, “Robert Morris: An Aesthetics of Transgression,” 51.
Quoted in Ann Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (Thames & Hudson, 2001), 184. Bochner’s quotation originates in Mel Bochner, “Three Statements for Data Magazine,” Data, no. 5–6 (Summer 1972).
See →.
Barrett, Blackness and Value, 29.
Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s, 182.
Sungtaek, “Architectures of Amnesia.”
For instance, Vine Deloria Jr. and Clyfford M. Little write of US Supreme Court case Johnson v. Mclntosh (1823): “Marshall used his opinion in this decision to develop an American interpretation of the doctrine of discovery, and this version stressed a theory of Indian subservience to the federal government. While paying lip service to the European notion of discovery and continued Indian autonomy, Marshall reasoned that conquest gave the white settlers ownership and title to Indian lands. This title … was subject, however, to the continued right of Indian occupancy and use. Thus, while the Indians’ interest in their lands was not completely extinguished, it was altered so significantly that it became, for practical purposes, a benign fiction that often gave way to the political realities of the times.” Vine Deloria Jr. and Clyfford M. Little, American Indians, American Justice (University of Texas Press, 1983), 26.
Kathryn Yusoff, Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024), 2.
Yusoff, Geologic Life, 9.
Barrett, Blackness and Value, 52, 54.
Kathryn Yusoff, “Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene,” e-flux Architecture, March 2017; Kathryn Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm,” e-flux Architecture, June 2021.