An Historical Materialist Covers the News: Fernando Bryce at Alexander and Bonin Gallery

By Daniel Solecki

“Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated by it by a thousand years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” – Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History, Thesis XVIII”, from Illuminations

In his new show at the Alexander and Bonin gallery, Berlin-based Peruvian artist Fernando Bryce conducts a playful and whimsical take on history from a Benjaminian Historical Materialist perspective. A self-proclaimed para-historian and specialist in what he calls “mimetic copying,” Bryce’s work copying historical documents seeks the 21^st century response to 19^th century history painting—visions of history in art from a contemporary perspective. Taking on the Second World War and its recognizable plot-line as his base narrative, Bryce renders this modern myth into newspaper front-pages, turning the history of the war from a plot-driven narrative to a series of data points, leaving the viewers the task to create the story of World War Two for themselves.

Called El Mundo en Llamas (The World in Names), Bryce’s new show is a series of ninety-two large drawings of European and American newspaper front-pages and Peruvian posters for Hollywood films from 1939 to 1945. The papers are handwritten (or, in the case of the news photos and posters, hand-drawn) copies of original World-War-Two-era documents and images. The newspapers are from all over Europe and the Americas in a variety of languages, positions on the war, and design layouts. Each paper front details a different event in the war, starting with the invasion of Poland on one wall and concluding with VJ Day on the opposite.

In between front pages from The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, Das Reich, and Le Matin are Peruvian posters for Hollywood films. The films are contemporaneous with the events in the war and reflect on the themes of the war—submarine films, Frankenstein’s monster, “El Super-Hombre.” These serve as Bryce’s way of showing the Latin American perspective on the conflict—not as mediated through the news, but as coming from the unreal world of Hollywood cinema. The film posters add a sense of chaos and break up the newspaper data. The posters parallel the overall theme of the show—just as the posters are representations of narrative, so are the newspapers and so is the whole exhibition.

If we take the front page of a newspaper as a symbol or representation of an actual event, all we see in Bryce’s exhibition are the representations, the contemporaneous interpretations, of pieces of data that constitute World War Two. There are no rumbling tanks, airplanes, whistling bombs, or German boots in Bryce’s version of the war—all we see is newsprint and portraits of the human parties involved (pictures of Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Tojo, etc). To Bryce, this is history: what is written, what is said, and what is drawn. We, the “posthumous” witnesses to history, assemble these images facts into a working narrative. Bryce is encouraging his viewers to acknowledge that history isn’t the perfect, rational plot-driven narrative we learn from textbooks and nationalist historians—history is a collection of memories, newspapers, and images; a vast and incomprehensible array of inconsistent data. We, now living after the fact, are tasked with making sense of it all.