in hysterics

Archive Fever. The title of a book by Jacques Derrida I haven’t read.

Archive Fever. The title of a 2008 exhibition at the International Center of  Photography.           Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art will present works by leading contemporary artists who use archival documents to rethink the meaning of identity, history, memory, and loss…These images have a wide-ranging subject matter yet are linked by the artists’ shared meditation on photography and film as the quintessential media of the archive. • from ICP site

The invocation of the idea of the body in the context of the archive is fully compelling to me. The apparent irony: are archives really as hot and sweaty as the dancefloor? Objects of feverish lust and desire?

Well, no. Well, they can be.

Oh they can be?

They can be. Yes.

And so before I enter the floating world of lost, forgotten, orphaned, and neglected archival films at the Orphan Film Symposium, I’ll first revisit an archive I know at the Whitney Biennial, @ the Whitney Museum of American Art. A contextual exhibition, entitled “Collecting Biennials,” contains materials from Biennials past:

As a prelude, counterpoint, and coda to the Biennial, the Museum’s fifth floor is devoted to artists in the Whitney’s collection whose works were shown in Biennials over the past eight decades. Collecting Biennials, opening on January 16, is installed as a kind of historical survey within the Biennial, underscoring the importance of previous Biennial exhibitions in the Museum’s history and the formation of its collection. • from Whitney site

In the spring of 1994 I was just a year out of college, living in New York, and working as a Production Assistant on films, commercials, and TV shows. My friend Alison, who later became a union Property Master, was doing wardrobe for Cheryl Dunye‘s historic (first feature film directed by a black lesbian) film The Watermelon Woman and got me a gig doing props on part of the film. What I worked on was, in fact, a photo shoot by the fabulous photographer Zoe Leonard. We spent a week in Philadelphia building and staging sets and shooting Dunye + Leonard’s photographs, presented in the film as faux-archival material, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, that “documents” the life of the “Watermelon Woman” character, a black lesbian actress lost to history.

Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993-1996)

And of course, like in any other low- low- budget, independent film, crew members often doubled as extras. In addition to “propping” the sets and locations in which the photos were shot, I also played “White Bar Dyke” in a 1920s gay nightclub shoot. Fantastic.

The Fae Richards Photo Archive was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, and is being exhibited again this year in “Collecting Biennials.”

So you could say I’m “in” the Biennial. Evidence of my work, a few images of me. I feel lucky to have been able to be a part of such a beautiful, brilliant project. I didn’t get to see it at the Biennial the first time around. I’m thrilled that I will next week.

And what of archive fever? That feverish year in New York was filled with lust: film lust, queer lust, city lust. My own archive of that time, now in disarray, in boxes, in my writing, in letters, in stories, old friends, in every glittering memory that passes through me, leaving me sweaty, delirious, on the dancefloor.

What’s Cheryl Dunye doing now? She’s just premiered her new film, The Owls, at the Berlin Film Festival. Film site/trailer HERE

A funny, mysterious and humane generational anthem, THE OWLS is an experimental thriller/film noir about four “Older-Wiser-Lesbians” who accidentally kill a young lesbian and try to get away with it. Raised in the shadow of “pathological lesbian” films like THE FOX, THE CHILDREN’S HOUR and THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE, the OWLs once embraced the utopian vision of Lesbian Nation. Now, approaching middle age, the revolution has eluded their dreams. Caught between a culture that still has no place for them, and a younger generation indifferent to their contributions, the OWLs face an emotionally complex set of circumstances that have yet to be compassionately and truthfully addressed. • from film site