History Lesson

Fazal Sheikh, "Haji Qiamuddin holding a photograph of his brother,
Asamuddin," 1998 (courtesy of the artist and Pace/MacGill)

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art
International Center of Photography
January 18 – May 4, 2008

John Milton at 400: A Life Beyond Life
New York Public Library
February 29 - June 14, 2008

Pop quiz: What possibly could a contemporary art show at the ICP have in common with an exhibit on John Milton at the New York Public Library? Their shared proximity to Bryant Park doesn't count.

Answer: history, or better yet, historiography, the study of historic methods.

The clever concept behind ICP's "Archive Fever" is contemporary art that re-frames or remixes archival images. It's also about reconsidering recent history, especially moments of war and revolution.

One example is Fazal Sheikh's simple and affecting photos ("Afghan Images," 1998), each showing an Afghani hand holding a small black and white portrait of a relative killed in combat, accompanied by text quoting memories of the deceased (see above image). Here is a history lesson: how foreign occupation and war in Afghanistan impacts families. It's also a stark reminder of how photos can be very personal, and mean different things depending on who's looking.

In a similar exercise, Lamia Joreige's "Objects of War" (1999-2006), presents video interviews with Lebanese men and women relating their experience of war. Each talks about an object -- a rosary, book, photo, etc. -- that they associate with their memory. Standing next to the three video monitors, a glass case holds dozen or so objects.

Hans-Peter Feldman's "9/12 Front Page" (2001) is four walls with 100 newspaper international front-pages from 9/12/2001, a collective global reaction of horror with only slight variations in the photos and layout.

"The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1999) by Eyal Simon recuts footage from the 1960 war crimes trial, juxtaposing testimony of Holocaust survivors with Nazi criminal Eichmann's cold denials.

My favorite piece is mediation on memory and history by Albanian artist Anri Sala ("Intervista," 1998), a 26-minute video that documents Sala's discovery of an old film reel showing his mother as a young woman meeting the country's communist-era leader. To better understand the footage, which has no soundtrack, has a lip-reader decipher what is being said, and interviews his mother, bringing up her ambivalent feelings about the old regime and her young idealism.

Less about a specific history, and more about the idea of history, memory and authorship is Sherrie Levine's "After Walker Evans" (1991) a series of of rephotographs of Evans' famous photos of rural American during the Depression. Levine's classic pomo jujitsu has the viewer reconsider the older images and how their meaning has shifted, taking on an almost religious aura, stripped of their original documentary power. (Have a look here.)

For a chronologically deeper slice of history, we head over to the Main Branch of the Library, lately named for a hedge fund billionaire, for a small show celebrating the quadricentennial of the birth of John Milton.

It figures that the author of "Paradise Lost," an epic poem that fleshes out the story of man's fall, telling it from Satan's point of view. A polemicist, he wrote in support of radical ideas like regicide and divorce (the former got him in hot water after Cromwell was defeated). He also met Galileo.

But the bulk of the show isn't biography, but rather how Milton and his famous book were reinterpreted and rediscovered through subsequent generations. He was embraced by the Classical period, and even more emphatically by the Romantics, notably through the visionary illustrations of William Blake. An 1804 edition is on display, although I would have like to have seen more than a single image. (There are a few more of Blake's illustrations from the 1808 edition on view here.)

We learn that Milton's proponents include this crazy group: Darwin, Malcolm X and Helen Keller. Among his detractors are T.S. Elliot and Virginia Woolf.

Amusingly the show has a soundtrack -- music inspired by "Paradise Lost." It's mostly Handel and the like, but every 10 minutes or so there's a jarring blast of heavy metal courtesy of Cradle of Filth. I was waiting for one of the geriatric visitors to freak, but alas everyone was blasé.