Review of reviews: Art

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art

International Center of Photography New York

Through May 4

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This exhibition takes on racism, terrorism, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust, said Carly Berwick in Bloomberg.com. “It’s a bummer of a show—and essential viewing.” Works by two dozen artists analyze how visual media affect the way we remember the past. Almost since the invention of photography, artists have realized that photographs aren’t quite a reliable reflection of reality. “People inevitably get in the way of facts, manipulating them, avoiding them, or flat-out denying them.” The earliest work on display, Andy Warhol’s Race Riot (1963), frames a news image from Life magazine of dogs lunging at civil-rights demonstrators. “It’s chilling and somehow impassive, a grainy snapshot of American culture.” Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 Front Page (2001) is a room-size installation of front pages from the world’s major newspapers the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center. “Arranged together, without commentary, the front pages hit the gut, not the mind.”

Feldmann’s work is the exhibition’s “showstopper,” said Jerry Saltz in New York. “As the attacks are multiplied, you’re reminded of how the entire world witnessed not just destruction but something akin to annihilation.” Unfortunately, few other works in Archive Fever match this high standard, and many advance simplistic political agendas rather than challenge the viewer. “Several pieces here, with manipulative or melodramatic content involving images from Bergen-Belsen or video of Eichmann, border on cheap shots.” It takes time to find the quieter, more intimate works. Anri Sala’s video Intervista, for instance, shows the Albanian artist and his mother watching film of her speaking at a Communist rally 30 years earlier. “The empty platitudes” she spouts horrify them both. “This is a portrait of a son and his mother peering into a vacant place in the mother’s soul and a nation’s history.”