Visual Resources
an international journal on images and their uses
ISSN: 0197-3762 (Print) 1477-2809 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvir20
The shape of evidence: contemporary art and the
document
Erin Silver
To cite this article: Erin Silver (2016): The shape of evidence: contemporary art and the
document, Visual Resources, DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2016.1229384
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2016.1229384
Published online: 06 Nov 2016.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 4
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gvir20
Download by: [UVA Universiteitsbibliotheek SZ]
Date: 24 November 2016, At: 01:27
BOOK REVIEW
The shape of evidence: contemporary art and the document
by Sophie Berrebi
Amsterdam, Valiz Press, 2015
256 pp, $31.50 (paperback), ISBN 9789078088981
Reviewed by Erin Silver
Over the past decade, both the document and the archive
have functioned as central sites of study for contemporary
artists, as well as contemporary curators. Key theoretical
texts date back to the 1980s, from Allan Sekula’s (1951–
2013) “The Body and the Archive” (1986), and followed
up, in subsequent decades, by Jacques Derrida’s now-canonical “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” (1995)
and Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse” (2004).1 The artistic and curatorial preoccupation with the document
and the archive hit a fever pitch in 2008 with curator
Okwui Enwezor’s Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in
Contemporary Art.2 In these contemporary archival excavations, the document is often made to stand as a representation of the archive itself and to evince its affective dimensions.
Sophie Berrebi’s The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document might
itself be positioned as a document, continuing the affective engagement with photography as the author simultaneously narrates the theoretical and historical trajectory of a
set of specific artistic examples and her experiences engaging with the images. The
book, Berrebi explains, is about “ways in which contemporary art critically addresses
the questions of the document as evidence” (p. 12), focusing on the work of artists
in the 1990s and 2000s who place the document at the center of their inquiry. In
her prologue, she makes evident the personal dimensions of her study, recalling anecdotally her grandmother having been taught by Roland Barthes, with evidence of their
correspondence reproduced alongside the book’s footnotes.
Berrebi’s inquiry follows three lines: an analysis of how the featured artists appropriate the document in order to reveal – and to dismantle – its authoritative function;
the construction of a working history of the document; and a consideration of the significance of artists operating between the historical and the contemporary as well as the
shift from analogue to digital. Berrebi argues this shift to be of particular import for
Visual Resources, 2016
ISSN 0197-3762
2
Review
how it positions the artists in her study as some of the last to uphold the prominence of
the material archive.
In her introduction, Berrebi maps out the theoretical and art historical inquiries
that at once position the document as an object of study, but also question the distinction between the document and the artwork, drawing, in particular, from the Surrealist
fascination with the document, the theoretical work on mechanical reproduction by
Walter Benjamin, and the nineteenth-century preoccupation with reproduction following the invention of photography. Berrebi outlines the documentary impulse embedded within painting during the rise of photography, analyzing the work of
Édouard Manet (1832–1883), in particular his Portrait d’Émile Zola (1868), where
she draws attention away from the relationship between Manet and Émile Zola
(1840–1902) and towards Manet’s strategy of representing three distinct forms of mechanical reproduction within the painting. Manet’s portrait of Zola, Berrebi argues,
tells the short history of mechanical reproduction and also signals a shift in the spectatorial position – as Berrebi notes, from viewing with contemplation to probing the
image, which developed concurrently with the invention of photography.
In her first chapter, on the Paris-based artist Jean-Luc Moulène (b. 1955), Berrebi
considers the artist’s upending of authorship, considering, as well, the historical origins
of photography and the enduring debates about the status of photography as an art
form versus a scientific process. Drawing links to Surrealism’s always deferring authorship, Berrebi reflexively relates the experience of holding Moulène’s bookwork Personne (2009). Leafing through its pages to reveal nothing of an “explicit” connection
between the images other than the title of the work, Personne, Berrebi is brought
back to the phrase, “Il n’y a personne dans ces images,” echoing a historical view of
the camera as a scanning mechanism that makes no distinction between what it captures. Berrebi notes the quick adoption of photography as a surveillance technology,3
which, she observes, also requires a high degree of “objectivity” in the picture-taking to
create uniform documents. She concludes: “The document, in other words, can only
bear authority if it is anonymous in its constitution” (p. 53).
Berrebi considers the work of American photographer Zoe Leonard (b. 1961),
thinking through “the quest for the objective image and the subjectivity of the photographer” and investigating Leonard’s interrogation of the technical aspects of photography (p. 95). Tracing the historical pursuit of mechanical objectivity via photography,
Berrebi posits that Leonard employs her camera as a “recording instrument,”
drawing comparisons to Sekula’s Fish Story (1989–1995) and Berenice Abbott’s
(1898–1991) street photography (p. 44). Berrebi makes an argument that Leonard’s
cloud photographs reveal more about the process of the photograph than the cloud
itself, Leonard’s cloud a placeholder for examinations of the artist’s undeniably subjective relationship to the supposedly objective medium of photography.
Her chapter on American conceptual artist Christopher Williams (b. 1956) works
through the histories of photography’s accessibility, theories of deskilling (drawing
from Jeff Wall’s 1995 essay “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or
as, Conceptual Art”) and the idea of photography as an autonomous medium that required an emphasis on deskilling until deskilling became a proper strategy unto itself.4
Berrebi argues that Williams’ work mimics the visual strategies of fashion photography,
Review
3
but with flaws that make them at once unsuitable for advertising and a commentary on
the advertisements themselves. Berrebi also traces the history of photo-conceptual art
practices and, in particular, the emphasis on evidence, deskilling, and the archive,
arguing that Williams’ photographs recall the work of Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) and
Douglas Huebler (1924–1997) but diverge in their use of found photographic materials
for his series SOURCE: The Photographic Archive, which, in presenting archival photographs of John F. Kennedy, always viewed from the back, hauntingly “anticipates”
Kennedy’s 1964 assassination from the privilege of the present, to re-center on the photographic print itself and on strategies of reframing.
Berrebi makes a more overt political turn in her final chapter, “Decolonising the
Archive,” in which she examines three video works: Amsterdam-based artist Fiona
Tan’s (b. 1966) Facing Forward (2009), Brussels-based Sven Augustijnen’s (b. 1970)
Spectres (2011), and Rotterdam-based artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s (b. 1962)
Maurits Script (2006). These video works are discussed in relation to the production
of archival documents in the colonial archive, calling on the work of anthropologist
Ann Laura Stoler, who demands that scholars ask themselves “what insights about
the colonial might be gained from attending not only to colonialism’s archival
content, but to its particular and sometimes peculiar form.”5 Pointing to the earlier
work of French historian Marc Ferro, for whom film’s immersive potential causes it
to reveal the mechanisms of society, Berrebi reads the videos for their involvement
of the viewer. Her analysis shows “the impossibility to take distance” (p. 185) as
opening up the colonial archive. In analyzing Augustijnen’s Spectres, which traces the
events and circumstances behind the assassination of Congo independent leader
Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and van Oldenborgh’s Maurits Script, in which the artist
gathers a group of people together to read aloud from the archives of the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of Brazil, Berrebi argues for the ways in which the
viewer also acts as a witness. It is the witness who enables the rupturing of the colonial
document.
Through her analyses of these distinct bodies of work, Berrebi concludes that they
respond to specific categories: the artwork-document; the museum-archive complex;
the shape of thinking; and amnesic recording. These categories neatly encapsulate
the author’s conclusions. The incompleteness of the artwork-document signals the relationship between the autonomy of art and its entry into the institution and social, political, and historical discourse. The museum-archive complex relocates archives and
archival practices to museum space. Amnesic recording is a key characteristic of our
era, referring to the paradox between the increased capacity of the digital archive
and the ways in which material evidence vanishes. Finally, the shape of thinking,
which ultimately structures the entire book, is summarized as “an invitation to drop
the pseudo-objectivity of scholarly research and to develop forms of academic
writing that acknowledge the vagaries and undecided self-position of the author”
(p. 217).
Although Berrebi begins her book with an anecdote about Roland Barthes, it is the
art historian Hubert Damisch to whom she dedicates it, and whose influence can most
strongly be felt: notably, among the photographic reproductions on the cover of The
Shape of Evidence, one of Zoe Leonard’s cloud photographs is displayed prominently,
4
Review
drawing a link to Damisch’s 2002 A Theory of /Cloud/, whose cover is also a reproduction of a photograph of a cloud.6 Damisch uses the cloud as a sign rather than a realistic
element; as Berrebi quotes Damisch, “That’s what I want to do, to succeed each time in
displacing the objects slightly, and at that point they gain their function as theoretical
objects.”7 The Shape of Evidence might thus be read as a document in and of itself,
marking the author’s own attempts at reconciling the historical through the lens of
the present, opening up understandings of the document and demonstrating how
the archive accommodates, responds to, and reflects the demands made on it in the
present moment.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64; Jacques
Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25,
no. 2 (Summer 1995): 9–63; Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall
2004): 3–22.
Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art was curated by Enwezor for the
International Center of Photography (New York) and ran from January 18 to May 4,
2008.
Elaborated in Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish, Panopticism,” in Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison, ed. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977),
195–228; Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”; and John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988).
Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,”
in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object in Art, 1965–1975, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 247–67.
Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 2
(2002): 87.
Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hubert Damisch, “A Conversation
with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (Summer 1998): 8.
ERIN SILVER is an art historian and independent curator. She is an emerging scholar of
queer feminist visual culture, performance, activism, and art history, and obtained a
PhD in Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies from McGill University in 2013.
She is the co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2015).
© 2016, Erin Silver
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2016.1229384