Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art

The recent article “Picturing Auschwitz” (The New Yorker, March 17, 2008), came to mind during a visit to the International Center of Photography’s current show Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, an exhibition dedicated to the forms and interpretations of archives. The article described the chance discovery of two important photo albums containing pictures of Auschwitz. Each album is a time capsule of potent images that has hurtled through the ether of history: one was recently unearthed from a suburban basement in Virginia, over sixty years after the end of World War II; the other was discovered at Dora-Mittelbau by a prisoner named Lili Jacob on the day her camp was liberated. While each album brings to light a wealth of historical information about Auschwitz, their fortuitous emergence also tells an incredibly romantic tale worthy of any fiction.

Archive Fever inhabits those same two spheres—the hard world of information and the ephemeral realm of remembrance. In fact, archives themselves are a paradox—memories and transitory occurrences arranged into formal systems. Their quixotic nature is echoed in the physical layout of Archive Fever, which unfolds mysteriously while remaining unabashedly academic. The overall experience of the show is akin to exploring a dimly lit vault; every turn of a corner is a slow reveal. One of the strongest aspects of the show is how the curator, Okwui Enwezor, has utilized the relatively small space. He has arranged intelligent groupings that, with lesser pieces, or a different sequence, would swallow the individual works. That doesn’t happen here; each work fully envelops the viewer while maintaining its elegant alliances.

The beginning of the show is the most demanding, challenging the viewer to dedicate time to the exhibition right from the start with a myriad of videos and films dealing with socio-political themes (Communism, Soviet ideology, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Romanian Revolution all make an appearance). All of the works turn the preconception of the archive as a static form on its head, but Anria Sala’s Intervista (1998), does so the most gracefully. The film jumps back and forth between found 16mm footage of Sala’s mother from 1970s Communist Albania to a present-day videotaped conversation between him and his mother about the footage. This deceptively simple setup thus becomes “an archive existing alongside a running commentary on its status as an historical object” (very meta).

Nearby are dreamier works, like Vivan Sundaram’s Four black boxes for the family (1995-97), in which portraits recalling the aesthetic of Julia Margaret Cameron flicker to the surface of dark vitrines, and Floh (2000), Tacita Dean’s impressionistic collection of vernacular photographs. But it is in the final room that the head surrenders to the gut. One reason is the countless eyes that follow the viewer around this room, peering out from works that emphasize how people themselves can be reduced to archival data.

In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990), stacked lithographs act as a de facto “monument” to the gun-violence victims they depict. Gonzales-Torres has emphasized the dead as statistics by positioning their faces in rows. Their grainy visages echo those of the missing children in Ilan Lieberman’s Nino Perdido (2006-7), which hangs on a nearby wall. Lieberman meticulously reproduced newspaper portraits of each child, “enlist[ing] the archive as a form of commemoration”, while also “alert[ing] us to the wide-ranging deployment of the photographic portrait as an index of memory”. More identification-type pictures can be seen in The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (1997), by Fazal Sheikh. But this time, the photographs are not arranged in rows; instead they appear carefully cupped in the hands of relatives. The portraits, while just as artless, have become talismans in this context. All of these pieces make the viewer zoom in and out; they can stand back and observe the archive as a whole, all the faces (data) bleeding together, or they can hone in on a specific person. This room further underlines how an archive is a collection of individual stories.

The piece in Archive Fever that most effectively illustrates the archive’s dual nature, however, is Hans-Peter Feldman’s 9/12 Front Page (2001), an installation that makes its debut here. It inhabits one of the first rooms of the show, but it’s best-viewed last, after circling around the space. In a brilliant display of less-is-more, Feldman has covered four walls with a collection of front pages from international newspapers dated September 12, 2001. At first, an anthropological impulse prevails—it’s endlessly fascinating to note which images of 9/11 editors from Chile, London, Berlin, China, Egypt, and so on chose to print, how the layouts were designed (some are very spare and graphic, others juxtapose images of the smoking towers with mundane advertisements or celebrity snaps), and the headlines penned by wildly different cultures all covering the same event. But the safety net of intellectual curiosity gives way to the cumulative effect of these repetitive images, evoking visceral memories of the attack. Newspapers are the most common, daily form an archive can take, and Feldman cleverly doubles that once over by taking a part of these self-contained systems and combining them into a whole new one, one which emphasizes the deceptive banality of information. 9/12 Front Page is therefore the quintessential piece in a show where every archive is a dam holding back an abyss.