Taryn Simon

Never before has an age been so informed about itself…

… Never before has a period known so little about itself. ^[1]

Taryn Simon. The Picture collection.

Typing into a Google search window the word ‘Homer’ what one might anticipate to find is might be not exactly what one would be encountered with.  In case when the anticipation was not based on any previously acquired knowledge, this person searching for results evoked by the entered word maybe inundated by a massive wave of yellowish images of an animation character. If the person searching for a Homer had no preceding notion of any other figure associated with such name, then her or his conception of Homer would be, at for some time, bound to animation series.

Nowadays we live in a gradually more and more mediated environment, where information is constantly circulating, being a commodity and a value at once. The Internet has become one of the main sources of information, to which people turn in order to learn something; while an image is now generally viewed as a universal means of communication transmitting a message, concurrent or substituting a text. An image, specifically a photograph is often rendered more telling and factual, therefore more reliable, than a written word. At the same time search engines show results that are dependent on the top results of previous searches. Their relation to the subject of search is being constantly reviewed, retagged and resubmitted.

While images meaning at large is to the greatest extent subject to the context, photography is probably one of the most intricate and enigmatic of all kinds of images. Since its one end always points at reality, photographic image with all its plausibility tempts the viewer to entitle it with an evidential value. However with a closer look a photographic image doesn’t cease to be problematic as its relation to actual reality very much is formed within and/or by our mind.

***

In the illuminated space of the gallery Jeu de Paume in Paris what may appear as results of laboratory finding underway is presented.  The outcome of this research is the arrangements of images carefully placed in rectangular panels, put in wire-hung frames and neatly spread around gallery room seemingly to following a certain intricate taxonomy logic of classification in its organisation.

Given a closer look to the content of each frame in the room the first impression of scientific rationality is changed by that of a contingent, arbitrary groupings of haphazard imagery ranging from the early twenty-century photo prints to periodical clippings. Each frame comes accompanied by a title, which non the less does not clarify the purpose of the eccentric collection, such as Alley, Snow—Avalanches, Beards & Moustaches, Cats, Television Programmes, Rear Views… etc. The whole impression is somewhat confusing.

 What is on the display is The Picture Collection (2013), one of the works of American artist Taryn Simon partaking of her vast exhibition occupying two floors of the institution entitled Rear Views, A Star-Forming Nebula, and The Office of Foreign Propaganda that took place in 2015.

Resulting from the artist meticulous research on the premises of New York picture archive, of Taryn Simon’s The Picture Collection partakes of what Hal Fosters defined as an Archive Impulse  ^[2]in its drive to probe traces of modern history, investigating the link between facts and fiction. The archive [re]created, [re]collected, [re]constructed by the artist oscillates between the factual representation, evidences of certain facts/events/knowledge and the fictional basis of these evidences. The artists who might be related to this strand embark on a shattered legacies of past reconstituting them in their own contingent taxonomies.

The Picture Collection in a certain way encapsulates the problematics transcending the whole corpus of Simon’s work of the last decade that is to say the relation between the image and the reality this image is claimed to represent, the relation that, as seen in the artist’s oeuvre, appears rather doubtful and weak.

Simon’s The Picture Collection resulted from the meticulous research undertaken by the artist in the picture archive of the eponymous department of New York Public Library, which contains over 1.2 million prints, postcards, posters, and printed images. It is the largest circulating picture library in the world, organised according to a complex cataloguing system of over 12,000 subject headings.

The collection was organised, soon after the opening of the library in 1911, as a direct response to the overwhelming amount of requests descending on the library’s Print Room demanding for images “strictly from a subject point of view.”^[3]

In the advent of new technological possibilities that enabled mechanic reproduction and colour print, a steadily growing need for the visuals emerged. It caused the professionals from various industries  — publishing, advertisement, cinema , architecture, fashion — to search for new graphic material. For this demand the picture collection was established as an archive accumulating imagery of various kinds organised according to a subject they represented.

The fund of the newly established collection was multiplying rapidly: apart from the regular contribution of the collection’s main supporters, each week images clipped from more than sixty publications would be added by library staff. It reached it climax in the most active period for the collection moment from 1929 to 1968. As Romana Javitz, the collection’s curator at the time describes:

“The entire panorama of the history of the world, its architecture, science, people, apparel, art, and everything that has been recorded graphically make up this collection.”^[4]