| Archive Fever: The Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art was a compelling tour-de-force organized by Okwui Enwezor, a curatorial triumph of what critic Jerry Saltz has termed “1 + 1 = 3.” Enwezor’s installation prompted parallels and interconnections that significantly broadened each individual work. Eyal Sivan’s chilling film The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem of 1999 intercut the vigorous testimonies of survivors with Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s hollow defense at his 1960 trial, which served to reinforce the damning reality of crime and the virility of speech in overcoming victimization by state-sanctioned violence. The close proximity of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s familiar poster-size sheets of 464 dead, killed by gunshots during one week in 1989 prompted more questions. Who are these victims of crime? What is the responsibility of the state in gun crime? |
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Anne Swartz
Archive Fever was on view at the ICP in New York in May.
Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993-1996. 78 gelatin silver prints and four chromogenic color prints, Dimensions variable. é Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Archive Fever: The Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art was a compelling tour-de-force organized by Okwui Enwezor, a curatorial triumph of what critic Jerry Saltz has termed “1 + 1 = 3.” Enwezor’s installation prompted parallels and interconnections that significantly broadened each individual work. Eyal Sivan’s chilling film The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem of 1999 intercut the vigorous testimonies of survivors with Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s hollow defense at his 1960 trial, which served to reinforce the damning reality of crime and the virility of speech in overcoming victimization by state-sanctioned violence. The close proximity of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s familiar poster-size sheets of 464 dead, killed by gunshots during one week in 1989 prompted more questions. Who are these victims of crime? What is the responsibility of the state in gun crime? The curator enlivened the artistic imaginings through such juxtapositions.
But that was only the beginning of profound encounters in this exhibition. Glenn Ligon’s Notes on the Margin of the Black Book from 1991–93 was shown on three walls in a gallery, in which the artist deconstructed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s much-reproduced images of nude black men and then added two quotations by a wide-range of speakers (including Ken Moody, one of Mapplethorpe’s models; scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and poet, Audre Lord) in between two of Mapplethorpe’s images. Ligon’s treatment of Mapplethorpe’s sensationalizing and retrograde images was radically divergent and uplifting in its celebration of queerness over its exploitation. And Enwezor’s adjacent installation of Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans from 1981 emphasized appropriation in the service of her radically intellectualized brand of feminism—making the male master’s work her own art. The language of photographic appropriation was writ powerful here in these oft-exhibited and reproduced works seen with fresh and new eyes.
More juxtapositions teased out the myth of objectivity in archiving. Tacita Dean’s found American and European snapshots (many in candy-colors, with some black and white) alongside Zoe Leonard’s fantasy photo and text narrative of an imaginary black actress and adjacent prompted me to consider if text validates images. Nearby, Walid Raar’s images of Beirut, reduced to a small horizontal strip atop a large sheet of mostly white paper, animates the urban scenes by drawing the viewer into the present image. They made me think about what’s missing and what’s real, compounded by the fiction of Leonard’s multi-part work and Dean’s spontaneous glamour. The pairings connected how the past informs the present alongside the ways images support the truths and myths we embrace. Each turn in the exhibition brought forward the conception of truth as conveyed through photographic images or the deceit of photographic transparency.
The art in this exhibition was moving and chilling, enrapturing and disquieting, and I am only recounting only a few of my discoveries. The liquidity of time, the simultaneous sensuality and terror of anonymity, the fragmentation of forgetting, the fervor to reconstruct, and the trauma of hostility were all layered in these images. The show title, appropriated from Jacques Derrida’s 1994 Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, reminded me of the politics of archiving and the burden of memory and amnesia. Enwezor makes Derrida’s ideas fresh and shows off the artworks in this lustrous show to considerable advantage.
