Until I got back to my notes, I couldn't remember the name of this show. I knew it was R-something Reality: Reassessing? Resurrecting? I was almost certain it was Repurposing, but no, it's Reprocessing.
It's an international group show, first exhibited at the Château de Nyon in Switzerland. The New York production was sponsored by Swiss Roots, Switzerland's cultural advocacy program to the United States.
Coming into the exhibit, the first thing you see is a squared-off white pillar. You see a shadow move across it. Is it you? Someone else in the room? A projection? There's no right answer: it could be any of the above.
Next up, there's a globe right in the middle of the room with several cameras on it, projecting bits of it at the wall. A sign invites you to turn the globe, but admonishes you not to touch the cameras. All around the room you see stark, bright, uncommented photographs of places all of which sounded familiar because they'd been the site of disaster and/or upheaval: Lockerbie, Chiapas, the site right across the river where a couple of buildings came down a few years ago, and so on. Presumably the idea is that, in a ghastly inverse of Dr. Seuss's "funny things are everywhere," however you spin the globe, something horrible is happening somewhere.
How does this set you up for the rest of the exhibit? Well, according to the show's introductory materials, it's all about the relation between art and documentary-making. Some of the pieces refer to their own content and raw materials, acting as commentaries on or sequels to themselves; others are barely-tweaked reworkings of home movies or news footage.
To me, this focus on "documentary-making" sounds an awful lot like this last half-century's version of the previous half-century's beard-stroking about the role of painting in a world with photography, which is so broad a topic it might as well include anything at all you feel like throwing in.
Still, maybe it's quibbling to complain about the conceptual excuse for bundling up a bunch of works by an odd group of artists and taking them on the road. Check out the exhibit's site, take the Flash tour, then email me and tell me what you think!
