[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: February 22, 2008]
I spent an uncomfortable hour at the misleadingly, almost jauntily named "Archive Fever" exhibition at the ICP on 6th Avenue this week. The title of the exhibition is borrowed, as much artworld discourse now is, from Derrida
As it happens, Archive Fever is only the melodramatic English title of Derrida's Mal d'Archive, a dense and generally unenlightening lecture he originally called "The Concept of the Archive". Derrida's concern, unlike the ICPs, is Freudian psychoanalysis and memory.
What's more, the ICP's subtitle - "Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art" - seems to imply a broad overview of the deployment of archival resources in art, how they function and how they contribute to the aesthetic experience. Instead, by and large, the show is an atrocity exhibition, illustrating the narrower point that artists have recourse to archives to document the major and minor holocausts of the modern age.
I don't suggest for a moment that it is not one of the artist's functions to bear witness to cruelty and murder, and the archive plays a familiar role in this. As the ICP correctly observes, the archive has long been a repository of more than paper documents: photographs - obviously - film and audio-recordings, even personal objects, embody the past.
One might think of the film Shoah as a pre-eminent example of art in the service of memory. Indeed, one of the few eye-catching items in this show is a film of the Eichmann trial. Although the material is edited - an artist's hand is at work - the documentary footage has the immediacy of a real event.
In too many cases here, however, the artist's hand is overworked. Not only is it often unclear what purpose is served by making an artwork out of moments of suffering and loss - what contribution to memory is made by papering a room with newspapers from the morning of 9/12? - but the act of bringing these works together, in a "show" at a "gallery" raises questions about the aestheticization of cruelty.
An expensive exhibition of other people's misery.
A word of respect for Fazal Sheikh's photographs from Afghan refugee camps. The imaginative device of photographing hands holding photographs of the dead and missing lends some dignity to loss. Praise too for Zoe Leonard's terrific "Fae Richards Photo Archive". I've seen this work elsewhere in the past: at first sight utterly authentic, it's actually a fictional photo narrative which describes the arc of a black stage and film performer's life. It's warm, moving, thoughtful, and completely out of place here.
The show's nadir is a silkscreen by Robert Morris which embellishes and even renders decorative a photograph of a victim of Belsen. I am not sure what that tells us about the use of archive. Additionally insulting is its location facing the downstairs cafe.
Adorno questioned the possibility of lyric poetry after Auschwitz. It didn't occur to him, I am sure, to question the possibility of capuccino.
One to miss. More here, if you must.
