The anarchive: an assembly of mostly photographic and filmic works, "Archive Fever" provides an occasion to consider the institutional uses of visual information

Art in America, May, 2008 by Tom McDonough

The first works one meets at the entry of "Archive Fever," Okwui Enwezor's ambitious survey of the various uses to which the photographic document has been put in contemporary art, are a cool 1960s silkscreen by Andy Warhol and a hulking expressionistic mixed-medium piece by Robert Morris from the 1980s. But more of the presiding spirit of this exhibition, on view [through May 4] at the International Center of Photography in New York, is to be found in two large enigmatic photographic prints in the galleries proper: Machines 1027 and Machines 3440 (both 2003), by German photographer Thomas Ruff, depict products of obsolete industrial technology whose use remains rather a mystery to the viewer. The images can themselves be traced to long-gone equipment--they are based on glass negatives produced by a defunct German machine and tool company in the 1930s and '40s for publicity brochures. Ruff has scanned, cropped, colored and enlarged the negatives to create glossy C-prints in which the machines seem to float like alien presences. It is hard not to see the photos as paying homage to his mentors Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose work also frequently took as its subject the disappearing industrial heritage of central Europe. But whereas the Bechers had, in a project of conceptual documentary, built their own archive of various factory types, Ruff works from within an already established archival source--the company's photo file--to destabilize meaning and recontextualize the iconography. His intentions seem ambivalent: on the one hand, the artist appears to want to make these mute images speak, to have them yield some quotient of truth, perhaps some historical secret of Germany's troubled past; on the other, his manipulations work precisely to remove the images from their historical specificity and to transform them into something like generic ciphers. These are, perhaps, the defining gestures of the exhibition as a whole, in which the archive is simultaneously embraced and refuted. Enwezor's selection reveals this to be a rich terrain to explore.

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"The archive" is hardly a novel lens through which to examine contemporary artistic practice, or contemporary issues of cultural remembrance more broadly. Strategies that we may broadly term "archival" have been in use at least since the advent of conceptual art. But the term itself has been widely circulating among artists, curators, art historians and critics only for something over a decade, with exhibitions like P.S.1's "Deep Storage" of 1998 announcing this turn toward issues of memory and its institutional coordinates. Enwezor's title nods to one source of this fascination: French philosopher Jacques Derrida's 1994 lecture, and later book, Mal d'archive, translated into English as Archive Fever although perhaps more accurately rendered as "archive sickness." For Derrida, the nature of that sickness is ambiguous, being both a malady within the archive, affecting its ability to construct social memory, and an affliction suffered by those who are denied access to its store of information. Indeed, Derrida usefully points to the wider social parameters of our fascination with this domain: it could be seen as a response to what he calls a trouble de l'archive, "the trouble of secrets, of plots, of clandestineness, of half-private, half-public conjurations, always at the unstable limit between public and private, between the family, the society, and the State." Against this widely noted crisis in the mechanism of social memory, artists have deployed what Hal Foster calls "an archival impulse" as a means to construct alternative histories and forms of knowledge. As Derrida reminds us, "there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory," and artists, too, are asserting the fundamentally democratic right of "participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation."

One of the primary roles of the modern governmental archive is to identify and assign a place to each of its citizens, to order a vast, heterogeneous population into identifiable "subjects." The place of the subject within the archival order of state and society constitutes a central theme of Enwezor's exhibition, taking shape as an artistic conversation in a large gallery just beyond the entrance to the show, where works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ilan Lieberman and Fazal Sheikh each address the mass media as a space of memory and forgetting. Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Death by Gun), 1990, a stack of giveaway posters, transforms a Time magazine feature on gun violence and its victims into a dispersible memorial; in the series Nino Perdido (Lost Child), 2006-07, Lieberman painstakingly re-creates in pencil drawings the faces of missing children from photographs in Mexican newspapers; and Sheikh, in a group of works known as "The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan" (1997), allows relatives of mujahideen rebels killed by Soviet occupation forces to tell their stories, personalizing the anonymous accounts of war in far-off places typically provided by photojournalists such as himself.