Archive Fever

"Archive Fever," a current show at the International Center of Photography, includes "Front Page 9/12," a collection of 100 front page world newspapers from September 12, 2001. There is, in the caption on the wall identifying the artist as Hans-Peter Feldmann, from Dusseldorf, a phrase. Something to the effect of "revisiting not the event but its aftermath through its mediatized manifestations."

Better than all the 9/12 newspaper covers, whose purpose and critiques are hardly clear, is Harun Farocki’s and Andrei Ujica's Videograms of a Revolution -- "a montage drawn from 125 hours of amateur and professional archival video footage shot by journalists and ordinary people during the chaotic ten days of the Romanian Revolution in December 1990. The film not only refutes conventional models of media critique and theories of spectacle, it exploits the techniques of spectacle as a tool with which to construct a view of history."

- freddy