Art
The Agent in the Spiral, Taryn Simon at the Guggenheim
Taryn Simon fills the Guggenheim rotunda with one FBI career and the country that orbits it
At the top of the Guggenheim, there is a ball. Visitors who make it all the way up the ramp can let it go, and it rolls down a teak track that runs to the bottom of the rotunda. W Magazine describes it as billiard like, and where it goes is left to chance. It is a small gesture that sends something back through the whole story.
That story belongs to a man most visitors will never be able to name. Father Country I Do Love You, Taryn Simon's new exhibition, opened on September 18 and runs through March 14, 2027. It fills Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral with photographs, text, video, and sculpture, all built around the life of a retired FBI agent whose identity Simon keeps private.
It is a first for the museum. W reports that no photography based artist had ever been given a solo show in the Guggenheim's main space, and that no artist had ever debuted this much new work there at once.
One Life, Forty Two Chapters
Simon met the agent for the first time on November 14, 2017, at a Mexican restaurant in Maryland, where he lives. Nearly a decade of conversations followed. The result is an exhibition broken into forty two chapters, staged along the ramp like pages in a very long book.
His career runs through the headlines of recent American history. According to Hyperallergic, the record includes the investigation of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, debris work at the Pentagon after September 11, the 1998 embassy bombing in Nairobi, the 1990 sting that caught Washington mayor Marion Barry, and the evidence room during the Clinton impeachment.
Simon is interested in more than the famous moments. She follows what happened after. The debris. The people. The objects that outlived the event. Gagosian, which represents her, frames the whole rotunda as one interactive installation, with no fixed route. Each visitor picks a way through.
What the Ramp Holds
The small things land hardest. After leaving the Bureau, the agent took a job as a school security officer. He kept a Superman cape in his office there. His girlfriend gathered the T-shirts he wore across his career and made them into a quilt. He sleeps under it every night, W reports. Those are the textures the show trades in.
Elsewhere the work turns cold and official. Portraits of Paul Ames, whose father Aldrich Ames was arrested for espionage in 1994 when Paul was five, hang next to luxury goods the government seized in other cases. There are black and white photocopies from Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the 2002 D.C. snipers, who is in prison. According to W, Simon sent him photographs of what he has publicly said he misses about growing up in Jamaica, among them fruit and sunsets. Prison rules let him keep only photocopies, so he returned the copies to her with poems and drawings.
In many ways he stands in for all of us
That is how Simon put it to W, and the exhibition is built to make that feel true. The agent is not a hero here, and not a villain. He is a witness who happened to be in the room for a remarkable number of American turning points.
Simon's own family runs through the show as well. Her father, a government employee, took thousands of Kodachrome slides over his life. Some of her images show his hand holding them. The critic Avalon Ashley Bellos, writing in amNewYork, notes that he was later diagnosed with Alzheimer's. One of the two text panels that open the show, Hyperallergic reports, recounts a story her father told about a spy in Bangkok. The panels sit against teak paneling that Hyperallergic calls a replica of a replica of that spy's living room. Simon helped her father build the first copy in their family home when she was a child.
Reading It at Night
The critics are not in full agreement. Aruna D'Souza, writing in a sharp review for Hyperallergic, argues that in this show wrongdoing comes across as the product of systems, never of particular people behaving badly. She also notes that opening with her father's tales, which Simon herself could never confirm, leaves doubt hanging over everything that follows. It is a fair challenge. It is also, arguably, the point.
Bellos describes starting at the bottom and working up. The ramp opens on birth, with a photograph of a placenta and an image of an infant emerging into the world. The chapters that follow carry titles like How Democracy Started. The final one is called You Have to Backfill It. Bellos writes that it centers on Election Day 2020, when the agent suffered transient global amnesia. A photograph shows he voted, but he could not find his way home.
The timing matters too. Gagosian notes that the show arrives during the 250th anniversary of the United States. It is a detective story told in the round, full of bright walls and heavy drapes, as Hyperallergic describes the design, where the evidence keeps multiplying and the case never quite closes.
It rewards a slow walk. It also rewards leaving with the questions still open. Step out onto Fifth Avenue as the park goes dark and the story keeps unspooling.
A single act of participation and touch unfolds in ways that can't be calculated
Simon offered that line to W, and it fits the ball at the top as neatly as it fits the whole exhibition. One man, one career, one push, and the consequences roll all the way down.
If this kind of museum night is your speed, read our guide to galleries after hours before you plan the next one.