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A room filled with marijuana plants and a vivid green glow. A tiger with an unusual face striking a pose in its cage. Abstract art hanging in a government agency known for keeping secrets. An anonymous woman with her legs apart cloaked beneath a sterile cloth while waiting for a medical procedure.
These images and more make up the solo show “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” by Taryn Simon currently on view at Guild Hall in East Hampton. The show features 18 photographs with accompanying text that allow a viewer access to places and scenes not typically viewed by the public.
The images are a selection from a book with the same name. In 2007, the book was published and all of the images exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. Excerpts from that show have been traveling around the world ever since.
“An American Index” has alighted at museums in Germany, London, England, Austria and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. A selection is also currently on view at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland, and at the Centre Pompidou-Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris.
The photographs were made in a post-9/11 world where ferreting out the hidden took on new importance on an international scale (think weapons of mass destruction or Osama bin Laden). This got Ms. Simon wondering about the types of places and activities that were concealed here in America, she said in a telephone interview this week.
The resulting images cut across the disciplines of science, government, medicine, religion, nature, security and entertainment. The show at Guild Hall includes images of a cryopreservation unit (where the dead are preserved by freezing), a glass flask containing live HIV cells, and a decomposing corpse that’s part of the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, known in popular culture as the Body Farm.
A jury simulation room in Lynbrook, New York, came before the lens of Ms. Simon’s wide-format camera. So did the Death Row Outdoor Recreational Facility known as “the Cage” at a prison in Ohio.
While each of Ms. Simon’s photographs is designed to reveal activities that most people never get to see, the process of making the image was anything but secret. For one thing, her images are taken with a bulky wide-format camera that can’t be used surreptitiously. The compositions are professionally illuminated by a team of assistants, with instruments arranged to add layers and depth to the photograph. Obtaining permission to photograph each site took hours of letter writing, phone calls and e-mails, the artist said. It took years to obtain permission to photograph some of the sites.
Part of the project was an exploration of the question: how much access does the average citizen have? Ms. Simon found that most places she wanted to go were eventually accessible. Helping her case was that she wasn’t exposing activities that were covert or security sensitive, but revealing slices of life that are not often thought about or part of the culture’s mass consciousness. All of the spots were chosen by Ms. Simon, and “An American Index” took five years to create.
The project was right up her alley, the artist said, as she had recently completed work for “The Innocent Project,” an attorney-driven effort to free those wrongfully imprisoned. For that project, Ms. Simon created portraits of prisoners who had been released, either at the scene of the crime they didn’t commit, the place of their arrest, or a location that was meaningful to their story. The project also resulted in a book of images and a traveling exhibition.
When it came time to make work for “An American Index,” Ms. Simon was familiar with ways to make an effective environmental portrait, she said. The first step was to strip away people as the subject and bring the activity into view.
Another important component is the text accompanying the photographs. The image-text combination is arranged to keep viewers off balance and unsure of what they’re seeing or interpreting.
The text is printed in small type and positioned so that viewers have to step closer to the photograph to read it. When they do, the image cannot be seen. After reading the text, the viewer takes a step back and sees the photograph in a new way. This dance of approach and retreat is part of the artist’s intention, Ms. Simon said. The show is curated in this fashion: there is no through line from image to image. No narrative exists to lead the viewer through the show, she said.
The best example of this interplay is the image of “Cherenkov Radiation,” she said. The photograph appears abstract with dots framed by what could be blue spray paint or neon lights against a black background. The text tells the story: the “dots” are actually stainless-steel nuclear-waste capsules that are submerged in a pool of water in a Department of Energy facility in Washington State.
Combined, the 1,936 capsules contain the most curies of radioactivity in the United States, according to the text. The panel also provides this sentence: “…a human standing one foot from an unshielded capsule would receive a lethal dose of radiation in less than 10 seconds.”
Ms. Simon said her photographs are not meant to be political statements, but each raises issues connected to politics and the personal beliefs of the viewer, and explores how these issues are perceived at a given time. Even while she was making the images, some of the “hidden” subjects were brought into the public view, changing how they may be received in this exhibition.
The clearest example is her image of polygamy, which was beneath the radar of public consciousness at the time she made it. After the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the alternate lifestyle became the subject of extensive commentary, negating the hidden component. This was fine, Ms. Simon explained. Over time, all of the images may shed their hidden aspect, only to fall into obscurity or fade again from sight. Ultimately, each image is made to encourage personal interaction and examination between the viewer and the artwork.
“The photographs are complex,” Ms. Simon said. “They are meant to be a performance, with the viewers making this physical dance with the photographs. I’m most interested in the space I didn’t create and what happens to our brains as we move between the photograph and the text and our changing perceptions.”
“An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” by Taryn Simon will remain on view through July 26 at Guild Hall, 158 Main Street, East Hampton. Ms. Simon will give a slide lecture on July 11 at 3 p.m. Also on view at Guild Hall is the solo exhibition, “Grace Hartigan: A Survey,” the group show, “Artists By Artists,” and an installation of four sculptures by Dina Recanati in the outdoor garden. For information, visit www.guildhall.org or call 324-0806.
on Jun 23, 2009