Archive Fever - Now
September 8 to October 6, 2022, (Tuesday to Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm)
Opening: September 8, 6-8 pm
Les Enluminures, 23 East 73rd Street, 7th Floor, Penthouse, New York, NY 10021
Les Enluminures New York is back and in full swing. Join us for a series of exciting and innovative events throughout the year.
Our inaugural exhibition this fall “Archive Fever - Now” takes Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay “Archive Fever” (1995) as a starting point to explore the idea of the archive in art from the Middle Ages to the present.
Seventeen 19th-century photographs of medieval French architecture and sculpture form the core of the exhibition. The represent the first public photography project known as the Mission Héliographique, which included pioneering photographers Henri Le Secq and Emile Pécarrère, along with others under their influence such as the Frères Bisson and Charles Marville. Apart from their importance as an early archive of medieval art, these photographs reveal a critical moment in the development of photography, documenting a shift from glass to calotypes printed on salt paper. Their artistic merit also lies in the experimental strategies employed toward composition and shading.
Medieval manuscripts and contemporary art accompany and complement the collection of photographs, exploring further the notion of the archive. Books of Hours have been called an “archive of prayer”; they also functioned as memory banks for family events. Cartas ejecutorias likewise document genealogical strains of upwardly mobile families in 16th- and 17th-century Spain. A medieval manuscript with a chain reminds us that hte ultimate archival repository, the library, sought to preserve its treasures, chaining them to the shelves at readers’ desks.
Three series of contemporary photographs round out the exhibition. Works by Thomas Ruff, Stan Douglas, and Robert Polidori, each resonate on their own terms with the 19th-century photographic collection. Ruff’s Zeitungsfotos and Negatives question the archive, reappropriating and recontextualizing them, leading the viewer to question assumptions. Douglas questions the very intention of photography as a record while still capturing the American past. Polidori, much like the Mission Héliographique, portrays a French monument, Versailles, yet his approach is steeped in a critical understanding of the socio-political realities involving the building and renovation of Versailles under François Mitterand.
Identity, objectivity, and originality are all concepts at play in this unusual display of art in “Archive Fever - Now.”