Consultant Dan
28 October 2010
Taryn Simon - photographic uncovering of modern America
This week I went to see the Taryn Simon exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, which my sister Naomi Cass runs.
Two years ago I came across the book of this exhibition, ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’ and found the work powerful.
In the Index, Simon has documented the unfamiliar or secret side of the USA – nuclear submarines and waste dumps, medical procedures, freakish animals, the KKK – in pictures which I find cinematic and still. Of course many of the hidden things she finds relate to environmentalism, from industrial threats to ecology to nature’s remnants.
In an interview, Simon locates the historical moment that inspired her approach in the Index, over a 5 year period following 9/11. During this time the USA was looking for ‘secrets’ around the world, such as the Iraqi WMD. Simon instead stayed at home and tried to look ‘inside’ American secrecy.
The picture ‘Nuclear Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility’ is iconic and worth looking at now. It shows the blue glow of nuclear waste canisters in their watery grave at the Hanford waste facility in Washington State. Did you pick the ghostly outline of continental USA with a hollowed-out centre? Have a look at ‘U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Contraband Room’. Does it remind you of seventeenth century still-life paintings or say, the Dutch School (is it called that?)?
These two examples show a side to Simon’s approach that is conscientious and whimsical, poetic but not evasive.
The nuclear image also triggers for us some of the most powerful visual imagery and politically relevant examples of concealment and revelation. From the first X-ray, nuclear technology has promised to reveal hidden truths from our own bodies to the cosmos. Yet the dangers posed by the Peaceful Atom – let alone the military Atom – are so acute that they require us to protect ourselves within a secret nuclear state.
Nuclear power is for these and other reasons the quintessential, conflicted modern technology, that promises enlightened progress and undermines it at the same time.
In a previous series of work, Simon photographed ‘The Innocents’, prisoners on death row in American prisons who were wrongly convicted of violent crimes. She talks about these and the Index series in a TED talk.
For several years I have sought out climate art and Simon’s work speaks to some of concerns that drive me. We are in a global climate crisis partly because we are unable to see what we are doing to the planet and who are are when we do it. The uncovering required is not generally possible in mainstream public discourse and so I look for art – broadly speaking – that unpacks our destructive relationship with the environment and ourselves.
There is also a strong theme in Simon’s Index series about both bellicose and peaceful nuclear technologies. Peace is a key dimension to ecological thinking and the images make her project more complete.
The Contraband Room is very Dutch still-life … particularly because still lifes were often of over-ripe fruit… and back then those scenes had quite a moral tone to them (except that was all about sex and temptation and all those naughty things). So … I like the moral / ethical connection there with the contraband room. I’m not sure about the submarine cable photograph though — sometimes I think her titles provide too little explanation of what is photographed. But then, it is art, maybe she is leaving it to others to do the yakking.
Thanks John – I will try to get there tomorrow. The British Council is leading the way on climate – art dialogue.
Thanks Jesse. You can imagine the experience of seeing the photograph in person, that over-ripe visual lushness of the Contraband Room. I’m intrigued that the series seems to be naturalistic but is so carefully contrived.
The idea of that vital submarine cable, flopped casually onto the sea bed is funny and alarming; what if a crab took a munch out of our information superhighway?
RSS
Dan,
Assuming you know about this. Starts tomorrow.
http://tippingpointaustralia.com/
Climate and art.
John.