Copyright The Jewish Week Feb 26, 1999Rescuing History: The Manhattan-based Joint Distribution Committee opened its photo archives to eight artists. The result is a highly personal reinterpretation of the Jewish story.
JOHN MENDELSOHN
Special To The Jewish Week
`How do you look at 50,000 photographs?"
This may sound like a trick question, but five years ago curators Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric were faced with exactly that daunting task. They had been asked by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to delve into its archive, and then present images that embody the JDC's 85 years of humanitarian work. The curators' ultimate answer comes in the form of an exhibition, "To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive," which opened last Friday at the International Center of Photography Midtown.
As they note in their catalogue essay, the curators "opened every drawer, took out every folder, touched every picture." They encountered images of people in need, in exile, and in migration, beginning with the JDC's work during World War I and extending through a century's worth of turmoil, both in Europe and around the world.
In a recent interview, Heiferman explained that while looking through the news photographs and personal snapshots, "We found ourselves in tears. It was a very moving experience. ... For me personally as a first-generation American, I was looking at these places and thinking, `This is where my father came from, this is where my grandmother lived, this is what my life might have been like. ... It was an amazing thing to look at and try to understand how to use that archive."
The curators arrived at a solution that reproduced eight-fold their initial encounter with the 50,000 pictures. They invited eight contemporary artists to go into the archive, and to respond to it according to their own aesthetic strategies. This kaleidoscopic approach is distinctly postmodern, discarding the single authoritative statement in favor of a diverse chorus of voices. The curators did, in their words, choose "artists whose commitment to a humanistic tradition is palpable." Those artists have loosened history's grip on the images' documentary identity with their highly personal responses. The curators expressed the hope that, like the artists, "anyone who comes to the show becomes a witness" to human suffering and communal compassion.
The artists' projects range from the poetic, to the conceptual, to the abstract. Some have a strong documentary feeling, while others take imaginative liberties. There are user-friendly information stations featuring a "backstage" look at each artist's process, somewhat downplaying mystery in favor of education.
Among the most poetic and playful responses is Pepon Osorio's installation, "The magic act of no return." Osorio has assembled old furniture, magician's tables, and miniature video monitors on a sisal rug. Drawing upon the JDC's collection of pictures of Jewish immigrants to Latin America, he creates magic lanterns to project memories and to suggest that the persistence of images mirrors the enigma of human survival.
The mystery of appearance and disappearance is evoked in Alan Berliner's video installation. A room-sized bed of stones is the "screen" for the projection of white-bordered images of Jews from earlier in this century. The initial five images each morph into a series of different faces, overlapping in extremely slow motion, at times with disconcerting effect. The result is like a rather mournful family album whose images cannot rest.
This sense of discomfort pervades the work of Magdelana Abakanowicz, the Polish artist well known for her cast burlap figures. Inspired by images from the archive, the artist has combined two previously completed sets of figures to create the current installation. These rows of headless personages evoke both the notion of universal suffering and the artist's very personal memories of World War II.
The war also plays a role in the installation created by Leon Golub. Golub is a painter of horrific scenes of political terror, but here he uses enlarged photographic images on transparent plastic, hanging them in a room with walls painted in primary colors. The images are of World War II partisans, and they give Golub the opportunity to again rework the idea of history painting. Instead of valorizing those in power, these heroic images remind us that, in the artist's words, "those who could, fought back."
Gilles Peress, who has produced photographic books on genocide in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, also takes documentary evidence and reconfigures its context. He has produced "Album of Fears," two books in which the nearly yard-square pages are digitally transcribed with the history of European Jews from World War I to 1947. It begins with pogroms in Russia, moves to pre-war anti-Semitism, and concludes with the Holocaust and its aftermath.
Wendy Ewald screens a video of her project which involved taking documentation of the Holocaust to school children in North Carolina. The video begins with letters recounting some of the children's rather bazaar misapprehensions of European Jewry. It moves on to students' touching reenactment of the testimony of both victims and victimizers.
Fred Wilson's project is the most conceptual of all the installations. By selecting and then cropping tiny sections of JDC photographs, Wilson enquires into the process that edits historical evidence, unmooring it from an ongoing narrative. The artist reflects on both the unknowabilty of the archive and, by extension, experience itself.
The room of Terry Winters' large black-and-white drawings includes some photographs which caught Winters' attention in the archive. They consist of images of forced emigration and of maps. Winters, a noted abstract painter, took this imagery and the feelings it evoked to create dense webs of dark lines and open circles, ambiguously suggesting the myriad of tangled routes and shifting destinations that 20th century Jews have traveled.
"To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive" runs through May 16 at the International Center of Photography Midtown, 1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street. (212) 860-1777.
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