“Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence”

Like some other recent Independent Curators International exhibitions —“Space Is the Place” and “Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art”—“Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence” is thematically loose, easily digested, intelligently interactive, unapologetically populist, and mostly successful. The title of the exhibition alludes to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatrical performances that used magic lanterns and rear-screen shadow projections to stage ghostly, ethereal spectacles that played on the public’s attraction to the paranormal and the occult. Though such terms are eschewed in the context of this exhibition and replaced with a more familiar postmodern lexicon—questions of absence, disappearance, loss, and the unnamable are at stake here—many of the works in the show prey on our importunate fascination with apparitions and enigmatic visions. The works that hew too closely to this idea are generally the least inspired—the inadvertent camp-horror aesthetic of Michael Delacroix’s sculptural installation Lisetta, Ferdinand, Saverio, Edward, 1995, for example, is almost comical. One exception is a wispy, ethereal exercise in shadow play by Christian Boltanski, tantalizingly installed behind a half-open door that refuses to budge and reveal the work’s apparatus. The installation implies an intriguing slippage between artistic sleight-of-hand and the inexplicable, even the paranormal. Some of the most arresting works in the show, however, turn the formal possibilities of shadows and specters toward topical sociopolitical issues. Most impressive is South African artist William Kentridge’s Shadow Procession, 1999, which describes the labored progress of an endless stream of unidentified displaced refugees from one side of the blank screen to the other, effectively evoking the helplessness and homelessness of their predicament. Kentridge uses his procession of stuttering, ghostly silhouettes not to invoke the paranormal, but to make the incomprehensible newly visible.