Review: Taryn Simon, Paperwork and the Will of the Capital

The substance of the photographs and sculptures was juridical history. The countries present in the historical events documented in Simon’s work were all countries that took part in the Bretton Woods Conference, a conference set to regulate the international monetary and financial order. The conference represented a moment in which relationships that would otherwise develop and evolve were put together and fabricated in one event, and each attending party made legislative changes to reflect the established order. The settlement established the rules and institutions that would govern international trade, and ensured that the Americans and Europeans had primacy in the system going forward. The meeting was one of the most important events that happened internationally at the end of World War II, worthy of both comment and highlight. It represented a moment in which documents were drafted that reflected the will of the world leaders and had incredible effect on people internationally.

The works surveyed documents drafted by world leaders that impact international relationships via government and economics and paired them with photographs of replicas of “impossible bouquets” that were present at the meetings. Simon considered the flowers as “witnesses” to the classified events, their ornament emphasizing the importance of the agreements. Impossible bouquets are first part of the canon of art history within seventeenth century Dutch still-life painting reacting to the development of modern capitalism. These flowers, which could never bloom together naturally, represent the success and possibility industry provides. The bouquets in Simon’s work were a critique of the dominant structure of power, while they are “silent witnesses” to the signings; we are also silent witnesses to the agreements and passive recipients of new laws forced upon us. Simon then took another step to present the photographs and sculptures as archival. Simon’s reference to George Sinclair’s archival horticulture study that influenced Darwin’s research on evolution in conjunction with her appropriation of law highlights that the juridical structure is a living organism that evolves.

Simon borrowed the subject from the Dutch still-life paintings, but rather than displaying the flowers in their actual form or painting them, she photographed them. One of my initial reactions to the exhibit was to consider why Simon photographed the bouquets she meticulously researched, ordered, and presented rather than exhibiting the bouquets themselves. The photographic element is a nod to Walter Benjamin and likewise Karl Marx, a reaction to power structures that law enforces. The mechanical reproduction element of Simon’s work, as Benjamin would put it, emancipated the work from “parasitical dependence on ritual”. Rather than the audience reacting to elaborate bouquets or skillful paintings, they were presented with re-contextualized historical documentaries. Likewise, the images and sculptures made the “impossible” bouquets reproducible and accessible to the public. It allowed the viewer to move past the “aura” and absorb the political commentary and Marxist consciousness of the photographs. The quiet subtlety of the images compelled the depths of the subject, in this way the works were able to be highly politicized, a move from manual labor to intellectual labor in a Benjaminian respect.

(Taryn Simon’s exhibition, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, took place at the Gagosian Gallery from February 18, 2016 to March 26, 2016).

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