Taryn Simon is seated in a conference room at the Guggenheim, looking dazed. Her new show, Father Country I Do Love You, opens in under three weeks. It’s a big deal, the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist in the iconic spiral rotunda, and the largest debut of new work ever staged at the museum.
There’s still a lot of work to be done. Downstairs, the lobby is being transformed into the Bangkok living room of Jim Thompson, a silk businessman-slash-spy who disappeared in 1967. Simon’s father, a US government worker, was living in Thailand at the time and figured that the Chinese got him, if not a tiger.
When Simon was nine, the father and daughter recreated Thompson’s famous wood-panelled den back in Long Island. I’ve spent so much time trying to make non-teak look like teak.” Attention to detail is a defining quality of Simon’s practice, which spans photo, video, performance, sculpture and bookmaking. An academic’s artist, she applies journalistic rigor and archival methodology to art photography, turning research, preparation and curiosity into artistic mediums of their own.
Developed over 10 years, Father Country is based on Simon’s extended correspondence with a retired federal agent. She follows the ripples of this middleman figure, identifying witnesses – tangential or immediate, innocent or otherwise – to acts of espionage, conspiracy and violence. She has spent 25 years using a symbiosis of image and text to examine systems of information, organization and power from borders to botany to genealogy.
Her breakthrough, The Innocents from the early 2000s, depicted exonerees at the site of their alleged crimes, exploring photography’s role in wrongful convictions. Simon has spent five days cataloguing seized contraband at John F Kennedy international airport (“It was an exercise in sleeplessness”); imported more than 4,000 specimens to recreate floral centerpieces from the signings of international treaties; and traced and documented the bloodlines, including those of the first female airplane hijacker, the body double of Saddam Hussein’s son, and a lab rabbit. She spent years writing letters and making phone calls to gain access to sites and objects typically unseen by American eyes, from a federal biothreat research facility to a braille edition of Playboy.
What kind of person would have the idea, let alone the patience, to go to such lengths? Simon, 51, has requested that our interview not be recorded. When asked, the New York City-based artist explains that she prefers to talk “normally” and gestures at an invisible recorder between us, an unsavory intruder.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
