Application: Cataloging and ordering the Archive With Taryn Simon
These submarine telecommunication cables extend thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean before reaching this endpoint in Avon, New Jersey. They transmit as many as 60 million simultaneous conversations. “There’s a humor because the cables are so important, yet they look so unguarded and unimportant,” Simon said.
Taryn Simon is an American born photographer working in New York. I first became aware of her work while I was still in undergrad and was fascinated by her drive to confront photography’s position as an artform of an objective truth. Her work is very interested in the relationships between order and disorder. In the past 5 years she has produced two bodies of work that I think are of interest to us in this class.
Following up on Hal Fosters discussion of the archive impulse, Simons early work “An American Index of the Hidden Unfamiliar” is clearly influenced by such an impulse. American index looks and feels like an archive. It is comprised of over 70 images, that seek to catalogue the “that which [is] integral to America’s foundation, mythology, and daily functioning” (Simon) but was hidden from public view. The work was inspired by the post 9/11 media landscape where, according to Simon, “People felt that didn’t have access to accurate information”. The results in a exploration of public and privileged access to knowledge.
The work is reflective of the archive in its methodological approach. Unlike other bodies of photographic work, Simon painstakingly took the time to “catalogue” each image with a concrete factual text. The plates could just as easily be found in a government archive as they could on a gallery wall. For me the cold, almost bureaucratic feel to the plates is aesthetically in line with the content of the photographs. Her drive to seek out subjects that were restricted in their accessibility in one way or another, follows Perec’s drive to put everything in just the right place. A if by catalouging all these pieces she would come up with some great revelation. Her drive to see the center with her own eyes is reflective of that archival impulse that Foster and Perec both allude to. Through the exploration of this work she comes to the echo Perec in her understanding that “There are no absolute all knowing insiders and the outsider can never really reach the core”.
Live HIV, HIV Research Laboratory, Boston Massachusetts
A large part of the work in addition to the photographs are the presence of the very detail factual texts. They read like an archivist entries. The work is methodological, and pristine. Simon is interested in “The invisible space between a text and it’s accompanying image. And how the images is transformed by the text and the text by the image”. So too in the archive are the notations left by the archivist essential for making sense of the deluge of data contained within. The archivist entries serves as a anchor, something to keep the record grounded. But as we have discussed, and as Simon revels in her work through contextualization, is that the work/archive is not static, its understanding is based on the artists/archivists intention, the viewer and the context in which it is presented. Levi Struss comes to the same conculsion saying “socialization shapes and constructs individual mind so that the objective world is understood from within a particular framework of classifications”. This is unaviodable, and it must be accounted for in ones reading of the archive. A record, though physically unchanged, can undergo a transformation of meaning through this process of classification and contextualization.
These texts serve to contextualize the sometimes abstract images, to give them some concrete footing. Like Perec, Simon almost has a fixation with language and its ability to contextualize her imagery functioning to bring order to the abstraction. In a sense it is meant to very specifically classify the images and what is contained within. But this concrete contextualizeation works counter to the entropy found between the images. The entropy is also effective in illustrating Perec problemtimization of classification “the sheer number of things needed to be arranged and the near impossibility of distributing them according to any truly satisfactory criteria means that I never finally manage it and that the arrangements I end up with are temporary and vague hardly more effective than the original anarchy”. The way that we organize the world is very personal, and it is something that we carry with us everywhere. We even bring it to the archive. We all might be curators, perhaps not to the extent that Simon is, but even she recognizes that her arrangements are not final and serve only as “another place from which to observe”.
Her most recent work, which just completed a 4 month run at the MOMA is entitled “A Living man Declared Dead, and Other Chapters“. This work is even more methodological than American Index and it serves to push the archiving principal a little further. Where in American Index there was a sense of entropy in trying to connect a series of abstract images under a similar theme, here the work is organized by bloodline, something that Simon explicitly selected. She specifically wanted something that she was unable to alter or curate, something that was a definite order. Form there she being to make her archive. These series is comprised of over 1000 images that serve to tell a complex and interwoven narrative. ” Archives exist” she states, ” because there is something that can’t necessarily be articulated. Something is said in between the gaps of all the information that is connected.”
This is similar to the conclusion that Boyne reaches about the Plato’s “The Sophist”. “Classification is not about equivalents but about Association”. The point of Simons work is not about finding equivelents and showing that these to disperate subjects belong in the same category, it extends beyond that. The associations between the items gathered by the curator/artist suggest a meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. This is what Simon is aluding to, there is a larger schema at work here, but as Perec describes the schema is unknowable for us because it is constantly shifting and changing. The world is not static, neither is the archive.
Boyne goes on to say that “that any given state of affairs is but a temporary resolution of the conflict of opposing forces”, this is true for Simons work as well. In A Living Man, she confronts the order of a bloodline with the disorder of circumstance. For me this is reflective of the archive as a whole. The archive suggests an order, but it is one that we know is temporary. In the end the classifications of the archive matter less than the inherent connections between items contained within it. What is in between the spaces of classification, the cracks where things don’t fit that is where the archive is, for me, most compelling.
Here is a brief interview with Taryn Simon about her recent work:
Works cited:
Boyne, Roy. “Classification.” Classification. Theory, Culture & Society, 2006. Web. 08 Oct. 2012. <http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2-3/21>.
Simon, Taryn. “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.” Lecture. Ted Talks. Oxford. July 2009. YouTube. YouTube, Sept. 2009. Web. 08 Oct. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded>.
“Species of Spaces and Other Pieces – Georges Perec.” Species of Spaces and Other Pieces – Georges Perec. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Oct. 2012. <http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/perecg/speciess.htm>.
Taryn Simon. “Taryn Simon: The Stories behind the Bloodlines.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Oct. 2012. <http://www.ted.com/talks/taryn_simon_the_stories_behind_the_bloodlines.html>.