June 23, 1991
VIVIEN RAYNOR
THOUGH it was closed as an institution in 1954, Ellis Island has not gone away but has, rather, become a tourist attraction. And while the extraordinary faces documented by Lewis Hine seem to have disappeared from the population, the memories of the experience have lived on unto the present generation.
For almost a decade, nostalgia for the steerage days has been fanned by Klaus Schnitzer, who teaches in the fine arts department of Montclair State College and is himself an immigrant (from Germany, in the post-Ellis Island era). His latest effort is “The Ellis Island Artifact Project” at the Montclair Art Museum here.
Since 1982, Mr. Schnitzer has been taking his photography students to the human entrepot, what’s left of it, getting them to focus, as the press release says, on the “mystery of memory and time.” Some of the results appeared at the Montclair and Jersey City Museums in 1984; others are in a recently published Aperture book, “Ellis Island: Echoes From a Nation’s Past,” as well as in the current display in the island’s museum that was organized by Brian Feeney, the resident National Park Service photographer and a former student of Mr. Schnitzer’s.
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But the Montclair show is different. For one thing, its subject is not Ellis Island alone but “social concerns” and “antisocial acts,” too, and for another it includes works done jointly by Mr. Schnitzer and Robert Sennhauser, who also teaches at Montclair State. Add the miscellany of photographs, prints, paintings and objects produced by a group of 24, called the Ellis Island Artifact Collaborators, and you have a large, rambling exhibition, of which only a small portion is itemized in the brochure.
There are several of the familiar Schnitzer-Sennhauser images of disintegrating interiors but, as the title indicates, the photographs emphasize objects and the associations they arouse. Some are depicted in situ (the bedsteads and springs parked like bicycles in the room); others are rendered separately (a pitcher, a toolbox, a stack of plates). These black-and-whites, many of them platinum prints, are framed in groups.
When the utensils are given a functional context, they are rephotographed in color, and the result is a series of before-and-after couplings. The pitcher in black-and-white is paired with the same pitcher in color, filled with poppies and tulips; a cake pan stands empty, then reposes, fulfilled by golden muffins, on an oven door, and so on. Surrealist reconstructions include Eric Hummel’s three views of an old metal colander placed on a pile of earth. The earth is sown with seed in the first print and sprouts bright green grass in the second, only to wither away in the third.
At times, the nostalgia gets labyrinthine, as in the assemblage incorporating a pair of wings draped over a chair standing on a mat. The feathers are simulated by cutout photographs of slipper soles; the mat is made of other photographic images — a picture of a harbor tug, color reproductions of maps — repeated and arranged in decorative bands. As far as this reviewer could tell, it is the joint work of artists named Freeman and Tauscher.
Bill McCreath’s assemblage of Liberty souvenirs on a checkerboard of mat and varnished wood is titled “Beyond Ellis.” It could be either a sincere statement or a sardonic comment on free-world kitsch; there is no telling in these revisionist days.