Exhibit Review
Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
International Center of Photography
New York, New York
January 18 - May 4, 2008
Okwui Enwezor, ICP/Steidl, 2008, 224 pages, 185 color and black & white images, ISBN978-3-86521-622-9, Softcover, $45.00
Enwezor: "…I want to make a distinction between curating within the canon and curating within culture." (1)
Curated by Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever is at its best and most exciting when exploring the wide range of strategies with which contemporary artists have shaped the memory of historical traumas. In this complex exhibit—named after a book by Jacques Derrida—of the work of twenty-five artists, Enwezor defines the archive as an organizing structure that shapes the understanding of history. It is not a neutral shell or container that merely holds and protects records. The fever, the passion, and the activity of the artists is wildly varied, from outright invention to appropriation. Some strategies re-contextualize documents, changing their meaning, while others de-contextualize documents, calling meaning into question. Yet the strategies represented here include few forms of digital media. In fact, two thirds of the work in the show was created in the 1980s and 90s. The strength of this exhibit is in the juxtapositions between iconic, established works, not in the exploration of “new forms of knowledge.” (2) Archive Fever finds Enwezor’s pendulum swinging towards curating within the canon.
Andy Warhol’s Race Riot (1963) and Robert Morris’s Untitled (1987) from the Holocaust and Firestorm paintings guard the entrance to the exhibit. Unpainted plywood panels mix with dark gray walls to meld overtones of the temporal with the elegiac. The exhibit oscillates between emotional engagement and critical distance. Work that undertakes to give voice to the silent is juxtaposed with work that questions the premises of representation. While respectful commemoration can be the most appropriate response to trauma, the archive is most engaging as a dialogue between the living and the dead. Fazal Sheikh’s poignant photographs of photographs of dead Afghani men held in the hands of their living relatives grab our attention with their emotional immediacy. Accompanied by short statements, these visually seductive carbon prints articulate the longing of the living for contact with the dead.
Occupying an adjacent wall is Christian Boltanski’s Detective (1987). A wall of floor to ceilingstacks of taped boxes deny access to the promise of documents within. Along the top, there is a row of clip-on desk lamps from which dangle Boltanski’s characteristic light cords. A single image has been unceremoniously taped to the outside of each box. These images have been taken from two crime magazines. Without further context, however, there is no way to know anything about the people in the photographs. In Sheikh’s work, a clear formula communicates the voices of the underrepresented. In Boltanski’s work, the images are jumbled and lose their meaning without the support of text. He puts into question photography’s ability to convey information.
Zoe Leonard’s knockout The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–96) creates the life story of a fictional African-American lesbian. Utterly convincing yet totally staged, with humor and grace this piece amplifies a typically silenced voice while laughing about the ease with which a photographic document can lie. We, the audience, are brought into the joke as the casting credits are displayed as part of the piece.
Shifting from the staged archive to the collection, Hans-Peter Feldman’s 9/12 Front Page (2001), featuring more than one hundred international newspaper front pages from that date, wraps around the four walls of their own room. The immediate impression is of a globalized world where one lens filters and distributes information. Then, the pleasure of creating fine distinctions unfolds: Frankfurter Allgemeine selected a restrained photo of a kneeling man with his head in his hand while Barcelona’s Avui used a sensational close-up of an explosion. The installation places the emphasis not on the event itself but rather on how this tragic event was represented in print news media.
Artists Lamei Joreige and Walid Raad grapple with the wars in Lebanon in some of Archive Fever’s most recent work. Joreige creates an archive of stories of the survivors of the war in Lebanon. Taped without cuts, each of her subject’s was asked to pick an object that he or she considered representative of his or her life during the war and discuss its significance. This archive seeks to catalog how individuals survived violence, imminent death, and fear by capturing their stories. Raad started with a question: how could the stories of Beirut’s car bombs be changed from routine news fare to the center of attention? Raad answers with fiction, and when photography cannot contain “the speed of war,” (3) he uses digital manipulation and fragmentation to create long thin strips of imagery to capture the deep sense of rupture and disorientation caused by the incessant violence. More successful than the inkjet prints in the show, however, is a work by Raad that is surprisingly absent: the comprehensive Atlas Group Archive, an Internet project that uses the archive structure to explore the recent history of Lebanon. The show would have been stronger with its inclusion.
An entire room is devoted to two classics of appropriation art by Sherrie Levine and Glenn Ligon. While it would be interesting to propose that appropriation was the forerunner to this age of mash-ups and remixes and ubiquitious ccutting and pasting, appropriation isolated as an artistic strategy is no longer provocative: note that one of these works is leant to the exhibit by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the other by the Guggenheim. And while these works speak beautifully to each other and art history, it is the radical changes in technology that have changed cultural ideas about intellectual property—the archive itself has been the site of radical technological change. These changes in technology and the culture are not tackled or even broached in Archive Fever. Enwezor has written about the difference between curating within art history, re-contextualizing works within the canon, and curating from the culture—a riskier, more vital proposition. Here he has chosen to work primarily within the canon. Archive Fever is rich and complex, but not edgy, daring, or exploratory of new forms of knowledge.
1. Carol Becker, A conversation with Okwui Enwezor – curator. Art Journal. Summer 2002. March 25, 2008. <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_2_61/ai_88990674/pg_10>2. Ibid.
3. Walid Raad. We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask. New York: International Center of Photography (2008)
published in Exposure, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education, Spring 2008
