Sean Snyder’s recent work seems to represent a moment of pause and methodological reflection in his practice. Of the two sections constituting this exhibition, this is perhaps more evident in “Index,” 2007–2009: a series of black-and-white photographs of his working tools and media-storage facilities, including digital cameras, a USB drive, a pencil, and a microscope. Here, Snyder’s project—to digitize his own archive—seems to have prompted him to carry out an archaeological investigation of the media technologies of past decades. In a sense, “Index” becomes a monument to our rapidly aging means of inscribing memory, and by extension it directs attention to the fragility and volatility of the archives and monuments from which history derives its substance.
The main work on view, however, is Snyder’s film Exhibition, 2008, based on a 1965 educational and propagandist documentary from Soviet-era Ukraine about an exhibition of Mexican art. The basic aim of Exhibition appears fairly straightforward: It is an anachronistic remontage of the found film, in which Snyder, by omitting certain sequences and adding his own intertitles, has edited out the ideological content of the original material and instead reinscribed the images into the patterns and conventions of contemporary exhibition making. The sequences are reduced, recomposed, and presented under familiar categories, such as “installation,” “exhibition,” and “seminar.” The film not only subjects the material to a critical work of distortion and reinterpretation that provokes a set of complicated questions about historiographical models and responsibility but also economically juxtaposes two historically and ideologically differing modes of displaying and communicating documents—in this case, the Mexican artworks of a 1965 exhibition, presented by Snyder as if it took place today. Thus, both Snyder’s film and photographs subtly address a fundamental problem: In what ways—and using what means, with their various inherent qualities and limitations—is history recorded and transmitted? How do the transformations of historiography’s tools over time affect the narratives that are written?
