Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art by Okwui Enwezor

Publisher : Steidl/ICP; First Edition (February 1, 2008)
Paperback : 264 pages
Dimensions : 8 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
ISBN-10 : 3865216226
ISBN-13 : 978-3865216229
Language: : English

Organized and written by renowned scholar and ICP Adjunct Curator Okwui Enwezor, and taking its title from Jacques Derrida's book of the same name, Archive Fever gathers leading contemporary artists who use archival materials in the fabrication of their work. As Derrida notes, the Greek etymology of "archive" connotes both "commencement" and "commandment," implying that authority is as much at stake as authenticity. For artists, of course, these imperatives provoke all kinds of exciting opportunities for eccentricity and falsification, and the works included herein take many forms, including physical archives arranged by bizarre cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, film versions of photographic albums and photomontages composed from historical photographs. These images offer a wide-ranging subject matter, but are linked by the artists' shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. Artists include Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Zoe Leonard, Ilán Lieberman, Walid Raad, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Fazal Sheikh, Eyal Sivan, Lorna Simpson and Vivan Sundaram, among others.