Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia

Sanja Ivekovic, "Double Life (1959-1975)" (detail) (1976). 33 framed collages of newspaper reproductions, photographs, and paper, 16 x 23 each.

March 2009 Reviews

The Double Club

Prospect.1, theanyspacewhatever, The Art of Participation

Keltie Ferris

Nayland Blake

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Mika Tajima

Anne Truitt

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Phillip Allen

Native Land, Stop Eject

Katja Strunz

Robert Rauschenberg Thomas Ruff Douglas Huebler Christopher Williams Dealer Holly Solomon’s Papers Headed to Smithsonian Ryan McGinness Cuts Out the Middleman A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s Gerhard Richter

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

That the last decade has seen a steady rise in archival art, related discourse, and exhibitions probably comes as no surprise, what with the paradigmatic importance of the Internet, the dominance of postconceptual (i.e., curatorial, research-based) artmaking practices, and the unremitting deluge of images in all spheres of life. Recently, as part of their Documents of Contemporary Art series, the MIT Press published The Archive (edited by Charles Merewether), an anthology of texts and reflections on its titular subject; and early last year, the International Center of Photography in New York hosted "Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art," curated by Okwui Enwezor. Now with "The Order of Things," curated by in-house MuHKA curator Dieter Roelstraete, the archive and its discursive wake broadens. Contrary to Enwezor’s more elastic meditation on documents of manipulation, identity, fiction, and politics, Roelstraete has assembled a 27-artist survey that reflects on the methodology of archives themselves (as suggested by the show’s Foucault-derived title) and the sheer profusion of images in which certain ones traffic. The Internet plays a large role in this exhibition, gesturing to its mercurial capacity to generate, upset, and rearrange archives at will, and as such, function as a dystopian agent of instability. Consequently, though it includes a sculpture, a few book-based projects, and video, the exhibition is of a primarily two-dimensional nature, privileging photography to an overwhelming degree.

The colossal image archive of Canadian artist Roy Arden, titled "The World as Will and Representation," whose only criteria for exclusion is "no art," was the source of inspiration for the exhibition. Arden’s archive is incarnated here in a number of forms, such as framed Photoshop collages in which images are grouped according to theme, and a video, which alphabetically groups images ("Buttons" for B, "Car" for C, etc.) each of which is vouchsafed no more than half a second to shine. The video, with its steady stream of material, sets the democratic, if banalizing tone of the show: all images are equal and subject to the same incontrovertible laws of organization within a given archive. Something of the unorthodox methodology of art historian Aby Warburg, and his dismissal of traditional hierarchies, hovers over the spirit of this exhibition. Warburg’s influence can clearly be descried in Luis Jacob’s Album II (2004), which featured prominently in Documenta 12. Jacob juxtaposes recognizable images of art with images from magazines and other sources, linking them often in the most formal and superficial ways; and presenting them in laminated sheets of plastic, one next to the other. The magic of this work stems largely from its playful formal connections combined with its cavalier disregard for hierarchy. Jacob’s exploration of the potentially arbitrary nature of the archive achieves greater cogency in Archiv Peter Piller nimmt Schaden (2007). Consisting of a series of initially unremarkable and thoroughly opaque snapshots of tiled and carpeted interiors, exteriors of housing, buildings, and outdoor scenes, this series of images comes from a Swiss insurance claim archive, and it is not until one learns about the images’ origins that they blossom with archival significance and narrative content.

A number of key historical precedents appear in the show, some of which make more sense than others. A 1970 print by Rauschenberg, Signs, featuring a collage of imagery, foreshadows the democratizing effect of archival practices to come, while Douglas Huebler’s hyperbolic exercise in archival failure Variable Piece #70 [in process] (1971), in which he states his goal of trying to photograph everyone alive, addresses an enterprise that Facebook is currently carrying out with a bit more success. It’s hard not to admire the canny boldness of including Sanja Ivekovic’s "Double Life [1959-1975]" (1976) series, which pairs photos of the artist in poses reminiscent of ads with actual ads, though it feels like this project was a little flattened by this single-minded context. The awesome and elegiac solemnity of Christopher Williams’s Angola to Vietnam (1989) suffers a similar disservice, although its concealed meaning (photographs of Harvard’s glass botanical archive depict flowers from countries whose repressive regimes practice "disappearance" as a means to suppress dissent) undoubtedly speaks to the floating signifier that characterizes the archive in the age of the Internet.