Every Photo an Archive

The title of the International Center of Photography's "Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art" is, pace Derrida, somewhat of a cheat and bespeaks a certain anxiety about the premise of the show itself. An archive is, my Webster's tells me, a "place in which public records or historic documents are kept." As the show's introductory wall text admits, the term "evokes a dim, musty" locale. In contrast, a fever (Webster's, again) is an "excessive excitement of the passions in consequence of strong emotion." It's as if the curator, Okwui Enwezor, felt the need, from the start, to sex up what he feared might be a less-than-enticing project.

He needn't have worried. "Archive Fever" (on view through May 4) is a rambling, sometimes irritating, essentially incoherent show, and one in which the sum is decidedly less than its parts. It does not come to any sustained conclusions--or even introduce a sustained set of questions--about photography's relationship to archival documents. But the exhibit's individual elements are, often enough, moving, thought-provoking, unsettling--and even sometimes fascinating. "Archive Fever" is vastly imperfect yet well worth seeing.

The show encompasses an array of forms including installations, films, videos, silk-screens and photographs that range from high-art to documentary. (Surprisingly, though, there is nothing from the Internet, which is really one huge archive.) But what struck me, and surprised me, most about the show is its prevailing obsession: which is, quite simply, violence. Missing children, the Holocaust, gunshot victims, terrorism, jihadism, civil war: these are not the show's only themes, but they constitute, at least to this viewer, its critical mass. One can't come away from this show without concluding that we are, indeed, cursed to be living in interesting times.

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