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“隐藏与陌生之物的美国索引”—Taryn Simon在法兰克福现代艺术博物馆的个展

出生于1975年的纽约艺术家Taryn Simon在法兰克福现代艺术博物馆所作个展的题目已经很好地说明了这个展览所包含的内容。展览包括60张她在过去四年中拍摄的大幅照片。Taryn Simon的镜头的关注常常超出艺术之外而瞄向美国的政治、自然、科技、药物、宗教等等领域。她有着惊人的说服别人的能力，因此往往能进入并拍摄公众无法涉足之地。她拍盛放核废料的放射性容器，拍某所戒备森严的监狱里的休闲设施，拍3K党的总部及里面的巫师及管理人员，她甚至设法拍摄了肯塔基州的防空模拟训练基地、中情局的密封式大厅、某严格保护中的动物传染病研究所乃至一间进行处女膜修复的手术室。

她认为要将局限我们所见所识的界限退至更远，以接近那些隐秘的、边缘的地带，因为那里潜藏着身体上的、心智上的、道德上的的种种危险。她的作品就是要发现这些无人探索的领域。

（展览图片）




原文如下：

"I am always immensely grateful to people who do impossible things on my behalf and bring back the picture. It means I don't have to do it, but at least I know what it looks like. So one's first feeling on looking at many of these extraordinary images is gratitude (followed quickly by a momentary pang of envy: the sedentary writer's salute to the woman of action)."
-- Salman Rushdie on Taryn Simon --

Our image of America is changing. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is the title of a new series of works by Taryn Simon (b. 1975), which is being exhibited in full for the first time at the MMK Museum fur Moderne Kunst. For this project, the New York-based artist, whose works often bridge art and politics, has documented places that are integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but remain inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. More than sixty large-format photographs taken over the past four years often required protracted negotiations before Simon was granted access to the otherwise inaccessible. When circumstances permitted, she photographed with a large-format camera and elaborate lighting, quite explicitly not following the tradition of the journalistic snapshot. Simon explores a society by carefully documenting sites and subjects from domains including science, government, medicine, nature, and religion that remain hidden and out-of-view for natural, social, or political reasons. Her photographs include radioactive containers in a storage facility for nuclear waste, the recreational facility of a high-security prison, and the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan with its Wizards, Night Hawks, and Kleagles. Her enormous powers of persuasion enabled her to gain access to a Scientology screening room and to visit MOUT, a simulated city in Kentucky built as a training ground for urban warfare. She was in the sealed-off halls of the CIA headquarters, in a highly protected research institute studying animal epidemics, and in an operating room in which a woman had her hymen and thus her virginity restored.

Taryn Simon gives a visible and clear form to sites with no popularly distributed visual anchor. In doing so she confronts the divide between the privileged access of the few and the limited access of the public. Making the hidden visible is linked to the task of providing information. Simon makes use of the annotated photograph's capacity to engage and inform. One aspect of her understanding of aesthetics is expanding the limits of what we are permitted to see and know, to approach those obscure marginal areas in which physical, intellectual, and moral dangers lurk. Although An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar forces us to confront some of the excesses that a democratic society can produce, these images also convey the fascination that goes along with discovering unexplored territories. Simon captures the strange magic locked beneath the surface, at the foundation of a national identity.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book, published by Steidl Verlag, which includes color reproductions of all works as well as texts by Salman Rushdie and others.
All photographs Copyright 2007, Taryn Simon, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.