Archive Fever-
Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art-
No single definition can convey the complexities of a concept like the archive. The standard view evokes a dim, musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets, and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts. Against this, we have another view of the archival impulse as a critical methodology for shaping and constructing the meaning of images. This latter formulation is the one that has engaged the attention of so many contemporary artists. Archive Fever explores the ways in which artists have appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured, and interrogated archival structures and materials. The principal vehicles of these artistic practices-photography and film-are also preeminent forms of archival material, and artists have used them in a variety of ways. The works presented here take many forms, including physical archives arranged by unusual cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums, and photomontages composed of historical photographs. In spite of the diversity of subject matter, these works are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential mediums of modern documentary truth.
Artistic explorations of the archive often examine historical constructions of the past. New relationships to information technologies and data storage can open new historical vistas; the archive thus functions as a force of active translation and a mechanism for reenacting historical events. In this way, the works in this exhibition, created between the early 1960s and the present, constitute a protracted, multigenerational meditation on the nature of historical truth, as revealed through the evidence of the photographic image.