Haunted may be a bit of a misnomer for the Guggenheim's latest exhibition. It's a title that implies eeriness, artwork with an emphasis on the supernatural. Granted, the rotunda may be darker, but that isn't for atmosphere's sake; it's to accommodate the looped film on the building's top floor. Haunted (through September 6th) is about the enigmatic, nearly invisible threads that bind photography and video; the ephemerality of the subject, nostalgia for places and people long gone, and the postmodern predilection for archives and documentation. A worthy premise, no doubt. But haunting?

According to curators, photographers and video artists are plagued by the past; haunted by outmoded subjects and media. But after viewing the whole exhibition, it remains to be seen whether photographic artists are any more influenced by the past than other visual artists. The show moves roughly chronologically from the building's ground level to the top, each floor marking a new era in the history of art. But with each era comes a heavy-handed explanation of the art's formal qualities, making the show read more like a lesson in postmodern and contemporary art than an interactive exhibition. That's not to say that the work isn't interesting; the show features work by some of the twentieth century's most influential artists; Barbara Kruger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Wall are among the artists represented. But the ambiguities and mysteries that the exhibition seeks to highlight are exactly what defy the works' classification. Of course similarities do exist among them; the appropriation of media images into art and Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" are too pervasive and significant to be denied. But trying to tie the works all together into neat, chronological categories feels too narrow and academic; it forces some of the images into categories that just aren't fluid enough.

The show starts with the exhibition's two heaviest hitters: Andy Warhol's notorious "Orange Disaster #5" (1963) and Robert Rauschenberg's "Untitled" (1963). Not only are the two iconic works early examples of image appropriation, they mark the start of art's journey in the past fifty years. Luis Jacob's "Peru Album IV" (2004-2005) assembles 84 laminate panels that contain casually linked media images, but it's up to the viewer to make the associations. The second floor is dedicated to landscape photography like Ori Gersht's painterly vistas and An My Le's "Small War Series," (1999-2002), images that capture startlingly realistic and elaborate re-enactments of Vietnam War battles. Three images from Sally Mann's "Virginia Series" (1992) rise into view as languidly as tendrils of smoke. Captured on an antique camera, her photographs of the Virginian wilderness are colorless except for rich golden tans and sooty charcoals, yet the lushness of the landscape still translates to paper.

The conceptual role of the photograph takes precedence on the museum's higher floors; when video or photography captures a piece of performance art, is it art or an artifact? It is a topic that would be difficult to tackle in an entire exhibition, let alone one floor, but it feels especially timely with Marina Abramovic's retrospective going on at MOMA. While the instinct to preserve is strong, performance art is ephemeral by nature; need it be reproduced? And for artists like Gabriel Orozco, who create evanescent sculpture, the photograph is only evidence of the real work that has long disappeared. However, the price tag attached to said evidence infers otherwise; is evidence the new art object? The question isn't resolved but, Abramovic is represented with "Cleaning the Mirror #1" (1995), also on view at MOMA. A video playing simultaneously on a stack of three television screens, viewers can watch Abramovic vigorously scrubbing clean the bones of a human skeleton, part of a Tibetan death rite. Robert Smithson's "Yucatan Mirror Displacements" (1969) captures a piece of small-scale land art. Smithson placed groups of 12" by 12" mirrors in various sites in Yucatan, Mexico. They reflect the glow of the sun and cease to resemble objects as banal as mirrors. Instead, they become small squares of light struggling to shine through pebbles on a beach.


The show ends with works that convey what the curators refer to as "trauma" and a sense of the uncanny. This is one of the most interesting chords that the exhibition strikes; the desire to photograph and archive leads to a sort of doubling of our lives. And while it's easy to reminisce over the good times, another look at the bad times can feel like watching one's own slow march to nowhere. Sophie Calle's "Father Mother (The Graves #17)" (1990, above) channels the theme quite literally, as does Adam Mcwan's obituary for Richard Prince. The exhibition culminates on the building's darkened sixth floor with Tacita Dean's multi-media work "Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage's composition 4"33'" (2008). Projected on six screens illuminated by antique film projectors, the recently deceased Cunningham (dancer, choreographer, and the late Cage's life partner) moves ever so slightly to each peal of sound from the speakers.

The only place that the viewer can get the visceral, chilling experience promised by the show's title is early in the show, on the building's first floor. A Paul Chan light installation is tucked inside of a small side gallery with Andy Warhol's aforementioned "Orange Disaster #5." Chan's "6th Light" (2005-2007, at top), part of his 7 Lights series, is a square of light projected on the floor, bisected by shadows vertically and horizontally to look like an ordinary window. At first glance, the piece seems almost sweet; what looks like tiny pieces of organic matter like petals or leaves drift downward in the form of shadows in the square. To the viewer's horror, they are quickly obscured by much bigger, amorphous shapes, evocative of falling debris or, worse still, bodies. While Warhol's tried to nullify the horror of the electric chair through repetition, when placed next to Chan's window, it's the only pairing in the show worthy of being called "haunting."

(photo credits: Greene Naftali Gallery, New York, photo by Jean Vong; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)