Taryn Simon’s Father Figures
In the mid-nineteen-eighties, at the age of nine, Taryn Simon helped her father transform the living room of her family’s home, on Long Island, into a replica of a teak-walled room that he had seen in Thailand in the late sixties. Her father had been stationed in Bangkok doing some kind of nebulous work for the U.S. government, and the inspiration had been the living room of his friend Jim Thompson, an intelligence officer and businessman there. (Thompson, who was known as the “Thai Silk King,” disappeared in 1967; Simon’s father had always believed that he was kidnapped by the Chinese government.) By the time Simon helped with the redecoration, her dad had settled into another chapter of life, selling arcade games and raising his family, and leaving the traces of his former career stored in a large collection of Kodachrome slides. Growing up, Simon heard tales of run-ins with yakuza and suitcases full of cash, but—as she reveals in “Father Country I Do Love You,” a new solo show at the Guggenheim—she “never got the full story.” Since 2020, when her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, almost all the details have disappeared. “Every morning he poured Diet Coke into a bowl of Life cereal for breakfast,” Simon writes of her father in his prime. “He didn’t follow anyone’s rules or opinions and had no time for a boring narrator. America, he said, was the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it.”
With “Father Country I Do Love You,” Simon seemingly found a non-boring narrator—and perhaps a stand-in for her dad—to tell “the best story on earth.” As she states in her introductory text, which hangs on another teak wall, now in the Guggenheim’s atrium, she first met a retired federal agent for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Maryland, in 2017. They continued to talk for years. “It was hard to believe that one man could have his hands in so much,” she writes. Ascending the museum’s spiral from the ground floor, the unnamed agent’s recollections unfold in forty-two chronological chapters illustrated with photographic, video, and sculptural installations.
Summarized in short wall texts, the agent’s memories detail a law-enforcement career that spanned multiple countries, beginning during the Cold War and reaching into the post-9/11 era. The associations between his words and Simon’s work are wide-ranging and jump through time. In a typical example, the agent recalls arriving at a hotel room in the Washington, D.C., area one night, where two children sat on the bed watching television. “A squad agent informed me I’d be babysitting and that their mom, Rasheeda, would be back before midnight,” he recounts. Later, he learned he was assisting in the F.B.I. sting that led to a misdemeanor drug charge for the mayor of the city at the time, Marion Barry, in 1990. Near these reminiscences is a video of the sister of Rasheeda Moore, the ex-girlfriend of Barry’s who helped set him up and then entered the federal witness-protection program, singing “This Little Light of Mine.” But efforts to establish a link between text and image feel forced at times, such as a portrait of Jodie Foster, who, while she was preparing for the role of Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs,” once sat in to observe the agent taking fingerprints. “I had no idea who she was,” he tells Simon. For a chapter in which the agent recalls an attack on the U.S. Capitol (likely the shooting, in 1998, by Russell Eugene Weston, Jr., a mentally ill man who killed two Capitol Police officers), Simon photographs Gina Bisignano, a notorious participant in the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The artist spent nearly a decade on this maximalist exhibition, which brings up many news headlines of the past forty years, not only the biggest spectacles (9/11, Hurricane Katrina) but also such pivotal moments as the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, in 1999, and the outing of Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. agent, by Bush Administration officials, in 2003. Simon, guided by the agent’s memories of investigating what happened to T.W.A. Flight 800, which crashed in the Atlantic in 1996, visited a storage warehouse of the National Transportation Safety Board, where she shot the reconstructed wreckage. For another installation, she collaged images of the stage of the 2024 Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee, into an altarpiece-like triptych, noting that the F.B.I. uses spherical imaging to insure a full view of a venue in case of a security breach.
Although it’s interesting to learn about the federal government’s photographic strategies (the T.W.A. fuselage, for example, was scanned before being destroyed), Simon’s documentation of the institutional uses of photography rarely coheres into a point of view, as if, for her, cataloguing them is enough. Of Simon’s contemporaries, Trevor Paglen has used photographs of the federal government’s surveillance infrastructure to reveal an unsettling network; LaToya Ruby Frazier has told an intimate story of the impact American industrialism had on the body, especially the bodies of her own family members. “Father Country I Do Love You” felt at times like a mashup of every tour of a federal building I’ve ever taken with visits to myriad far-away crises, as if one could hop on the Capitol subway system and take it all the way to the wreckage of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, say, after it was bombed by Al Qaeda, in 1998. I found myself searching in the agent’s recollections of the neoliberal era for some message that might help clarify the present, and saw, in a photograph of a gleaming pearl necklace that Hillary Clinton gifted to one of President Clinton’s defense attorneys during his impeachment trial, a hint of the national dysfunction to come, but also, in the agent’s confidence, a politics in which the right to pour Diet Coke on your breakfast cereal is mistaken for a sign of robust freedom.
Government bureaucracy and pomp have been the long-running preoccupations of Simon’s career. For “Contraband” (2010), she spent a week inside of the Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site and the U.S. Postal Service International Mail Facility at J.F.K., emerging with more than a thousand photographs of confiscated goods. “An Occupation of Loss” (2016), a live installation at the Armory I wrote about in which she gathered professional mourners from various countries to enact their culturally specific death rituals, was as much about the bureaucratic process of securing entry visas as it was about the performance itself.
In this exhibit, Simon uses the palette favored by heads of state: Communist red; United Nations blue; Saudi green; the gold of the Oval Office drapes. One image, of eighty orders of large McDonald’s French fries, plays with the agent’s observation that McDonald’s shares its corporate colors with the Chinese flag. After pictures of a crowning baby and a placenta set us on our way along the agent’s early life, the first major installation, two stories high, is an homage to Cold War spycraft, a photographic grid of neckties, slide carrousels, VHS tapes, hockey players, a Soviet Life magazine, seventies-era eyeglasses, a picture of Henry Kissinger—many of which could be set dressing for an adaptation of a John le Carré novel (except, perhaps, the photograph of a John le Carré novel). This is fun, if a little on the nose, and perhaps meant to be read ironically, evidence of how one era’s urgent fears decay into another’s kitsch. The agent tells several stories of catching informants—the wall text refers to them as “un-American Rats”—and photographs of dead rats are a repeated motif.
Simon walks the thin blue line in a trusting manner: here, bad agents get caught by good ones, victims and survivors have support groups and settlements, and nobody’s ever heard of COINTELPRO, a program that, in the sixties, targeted left-wing movements that the government deemed subversive, a precursor to the Trump Administration’s current fixation on rooting out “radical left terrorism.” During the national uprisings against police violence that came to define the summer of 2020, many absorbed the notion of “copaganda”—the idea that Hollywood’s depictions of law enforcement have a rhetorical agenda to downplay bias and ineptitude in police work in favor of idealized heroism and competence. The federal agent tells Simon that his “oath was to the American people and the Constitution,” and the artist appears to be searching for solace in the idea of the F.B.I. agent as an uncomplicated protector of American life. She doesn’t challenge his version of the story. Her father’s true activities while on assignment in Southeast Asia went unrecorded, but given the time and place they likely were not morally uncomplicated. As the title of the show indicates, the artist is willing to play with the idea of patriarchy and patriotism being restored—the title could mean “I do [in spite of everything] love you,” or “I do [really and truly] love you.” Love of father and country has, in some sense, been made great again, uncomfortably so, given the political moment.
It took me nearly five hours to complete my tour of Simon’s exhibition, including a stop for a croque monsieur in the café. The totality of the thing is exhausting, yet as is common in durational experiences of art, meaning and unexpected contradictions emerged. When Simon does observe institutional failure, it tends to be in patterns that fail to repeat themselves, in glitches that disrupt the smooth unfurling of events. We learn on a lower level that pit bulls were banned for many years in Prince George’s County, in Maryland, in the name of safety; on a higher floor is an installation with photographs of human limbs injured by police attack dogs in the same jurisdiction. Trauma flickers in and out—the F.B.I. agent loses a colleague when a gunman with a grudge shoots up the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. (Simon photographs the man who, as a teen-ager, was held up by the shooter inside the building and gave him directions to the wrong office.) In one video, the artist interviews a public-affairs officer who had a mental break during Simon’s visit to a Department of Defense storage facility and threatened Simon and her team. The man has only a vague memory of “fighting a vampire” and “flailing against something that wasn’t there.” He, almost as an aside, reveals that, while serving in Afghanistan in the Navy, his job was to stand guard with his hand on the trigger of a gun in case a member of a class of Afghan trainees should attempt violence. Fugue states are a precursor to the breakdown of memory; Simon’s agent begins experiencing episodes of a condition called transient global amnesia. The end point, dementia, hovers at the top of the Guggenheim’s ramp.
The F.B.I. mandates that agents retire at fifty-seven. Simon’s narrator, after he returns to civilian life, works as a private-school security guard. The agent’s story peters out at the end; Simon photographs a quilt made out of T-shirts from his many law-enforcement jobs which his girlfriend commissioned for him from Etsy. The exhibition concludes with a dedication to Simon’s father, whose aged hand is recorded tapping a Kodachrome slide in a video. Beneath it, museumgoers line up to drop a ball into a teak ramp that descends down the length of the Guggenheim spiral. We were in the pinball machine of history all along. ♦
