An American Index of the Hidden and the Unfamiliar
Taryn Simon

Regarder l’index de Taryn Simon, l’équivalence entre le texte, l’image et la légende dont la rigueur témoigne une volonté objective - sinon scientifique - permet de voir et de comprendre l’Amérique un peu plus intimement. Photographier minutieusement, situer précisément, décrire sans commentaire, les planches qui résultent de ce travail d'investigation outrepassent le caractère uniquement artistique. C’est aussi là son intérêt, car même si l’on peut ressentir un certain maniérisme ou tout du moins un esthétisme - dans la répétition de la manière de photographier, l'obsession à produire des textes similaires sur des sujets aussi variés - il sensibilise à des dimensions politiques, économiques, administratives, religieuses, de sécurité... L’exhaustivité et l’objectivité de leur présence permet d’intégrer la variété et l’immense horizon des faits qui traverse la société américaine. En démultipliant les regards, en croisant les disciplines et les connaissances, et en les rangeant d’une manière totalement similaire, elle laisse l’imagination suffisante au lecteur pour se projeter dans tous ces univers. Il arrive même de penser que toutes ces photos aient pu être prises au même moment. Parviennent les murmures les oiseaux en quarantaine, le souffle des ventilateurs sur les piles de billets fraichement imprimés, l’odeur des saucisses du barbecue partagé en famille par un astronaute sur le départ. La neutralité apparente oblige à se concentrer plus intensément sur les détails qui sont discrètement livrés  dans les photographies ou les données ; offrant à décrire les choix, les démarches qu’elle a du effectuer pour obtenir les droits d’accès, les discussions, les refus, la patience.  A l’image des scientifiques qui accompagnait les expéditions vers les terres nouvelles et restituait par le langage universel du dessin leur découverte, Taryn Simon, en explorant une face cachée de la société apporte un témoignage et une certaine cartographie du monde américain d’aujourd’hui. 

Lucasfilm Archives, Props and Set Pieces

Skywalker Ranch

Marin Country, California

Protocol Droid RA-7

Luke skywalker X-wing fighter pilot jumpsuit

Boba Fett

EV-9D9

Indiana’s Jones’ bat and whip

Mannequins in Queen Amidala costumes

Ishi Tib head

Teebo head

Wampa Head

Ark of the Covenant

Death Star II Model

Chewbacca head

Top of the crate that held the Ark of the Covenant

C-3PO

R2-D2

Salacious Crumb

Power Drum played by Umpass-Stay & Ak-Rev in Jabba’s palace

Jury Simulator Deliberation Room with Two-Way Mirror

DOAR Litigation Consulting

Lynbrook, New York

Mock juries are an important part of litigation consulting, a little-known professional field with annual profits of approximately $3 billion.DOAR’s jury simulations offer attorneys the oportunity to practice case presentations as well as assess performances. The estimated cost of a single jury simultation is $60,000. They are most often employed on high-profile, high-stake cases, where cost is of little concern. Recently DOAR provided litigation consulting services to parties involved in the World Trade Center insurance litigation and the WorldCom Underwriters litigation. Participation of litigation consultants in trial preparations has many critics concerned that legal outcomes will increasingly depend on one’s ability to pay. 

Jurors for DOAR simultations are jury eligible individuals from jurisdiction where the actual case will be tried. They are recruited to accurately reflect the sociologdemographis backgrounds of that juridiction’s population. They are paid between $150 and $500 per dayx to participate in the simulation. All parties sign a confidentiality agreement. 

Akal Security 

Company Headquarters, Sikh Dharma Community

Espanola, New Mexico

Akal, one of the largest security companies in the US provides security for private and government sites. The company is managed by members of the Sikh Dharma religious community, which identifies self-defense and the protection of defenseless as duties of the highest honor.The federal government is Akal’s chief client, which contracts totaling over $1 billion. The company is the primary provider of guards to US federal courthouses and has contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcment, Federal Protective Services and the US Army.

The US based Sikh Dharma community was founded in 1971 by the late Indian-born Sikh spiritual leader and Kundilini Yoga Master, Yogi Bhajan. The community consists primarily of American-born converts. Yogi Bhajan advised disciples to build profitable companies that reflect Sikh spiritual goals. In addition to Akal, members of the Sikh Dharma community also manage diverse entreprises involving helath foods ( Yogi Tea, Golden Temple Cereals and Peace Cereals ), technology consulting ( Khalsa Consulting ) and yoga centers ( Yoga West ) 

Cryopreservation Unit

Cryonics Institue

Clinton Township, Michigan

The Cryonics Institute is a non-profit, member-run corporation which offers cryostasis (freezing) services to individuals and pets upon death. Cryostasis is practiced with the hope that lives will ultimately be extended through future developments in science, technology, and medicine. When, and if, these developments occur, members hope to ba awakened to an extend life in good health and free from disease or the aging process. Cryostasis must begin immediately upon legal death. Aperson or pet is infused with ice-preventive substances and quickly cooled to a temperature where physical decay virtually stops. They can be kept in this state indefinitely. For an additional cost, Cryonics Institute personnel wait out the last hours of an individual’s terminal illness and immediately begin cooling and cardiopulmonary support upon death in order to limit brain damage.

At present, the Cryonics Institue cryopreserves 74 legally dead human patients and 44 legally dead pets. It charges $28,000 for the process if it planned well in advance of legal death and $35,000 on shorter notice. The cost has not increased since 1976 when the Cryonics Instotute was etablished. The Institute is licensed as a cemetary in the state of Michigan.

Bureau of Engraving and Printing

US Department of the Treasury

Washington, District of Columbia

The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) designs and manufactures American paper currency and security documents for other federal government agencies. The BEP also reimburses individuals and businesses for paper money that has been irreparably damaged; a service used most often by victims of flood, fire, or other natural disasters. Producing 35 million notes per day with a total value of approximately $635 million, 45 percent of the notes printed are $1 notes. Notes are printed on a cotton and linen rag paper. Each year, 95 percent of the notes printed are used to replace those already in circulation.

The US government began printing paper money in 1861 to help protect against coin counterfeiting. Nicknamed greenbacks, these early bills were issued to finance the Civil War. Recent advancements in copying and printing technologies have raised the incidence of counterfeiting. Since 1996, the BEP has been adding security features to its paper money, constituting the first major production change since 1928. BEP enhances designs every seven to ten year. The illicit manufacture of US currency, including the altering of genuine currency, is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and by emprisonment up to 15 years. Currently, the US dollar is the most frequently used currency in the world. The $100 note has been the largest denomination in circulation since 1969.

Cheyenne Moutain Directorate, Recreationnal Basketball Court

Chamber D

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Cheyenne Moutain Directorate (CMD) was built to project personnel and equipment from a thermonuclear weapon attack. Designed by Parsons Brinckheroff, CMD was built in the early 1960s as US-Canadian response to potential Cold Wat threats. It serves as an undergound surveillance post where the US and Canadian governments defend North America borders by scanning for enemy intruders. The complex is built inside a hollowed out natural mountain. Its structure and supplies can sustain life within the mountain for at least one month.

Overseen by the Army Corps of Enginneers and executed by the Utah Mining and Construction Company 1.5 million pounds of TNT was used to excavate 700,000 tons of granite. To protect the mountain’s integrity and to prevent implosion, 110,000 rock-bolts ( 6 to 32 feet in lenght ) and 7,164,080 sqUare feet of wire mesh support the mountain’s interior tunnel system. All rock-bolts undergo annual testing, CMD’s main entrance is a 1/3 mile long tunnel leading to a pair of 25 ton blast doors. Its building’outer shell is made of low-carbon steel plates. The walls and tunnels are designed to attenuate Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP°

The mountain contains divisions of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), US Northern Command, US Strategis Command, and Air Force Space Command. CMD is the central data collection and coordination installation for many early warning, detection, and defense centers.

Nixon Gift Vault

US National Archives and Records Administration

College Park, Maryland

President Richard M. Nixon is the only US President whose presidential materials and records are governed by the 1974 Presidential Recordings and Material Preservation Act (PRMPA). This Act of Congress stipulated, among other things, that presidential materials related to abuse of governmental power be processed and retained by the National Archives in the Washington DC area.

After Nixon’s resignations in 1974 as a result of the Watergate scandal and an impending threat of impeachment, clonflict ensued over custody of his presidential materials and recordings. These include millions of documents, thousands of hours of audio recordings and film reels, hundreds of thousand of photographs, and thousands of gifts from dignitaries and the public. Until his death in 1994, Nixon made sustained efforts to block the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) from processing and releasing president materials. To this day, there are Nixon White House Tapes that have neither been processed nor made available to the public.  

Avian Quarantine Facility

The New York Animal Import Center

NewBurgh, New York

All imported birds that are not of US or canadian origin must undergo a 30 day quarantine in a US Department of Agriculture animal import quarantine facility. The quarantine is mandatory and at the owner’s expense. Birds are immediately placed in incubators called isolettes that control the spread of disease and prevent cross-contamination by strategically placed Hig Efficiency Particulate Air Filters. Before each quarantined bird is cleared for released, it is tested for Avian Influenza and Exotic Newcastle Disease.

The New York Animal Import Center opened in 1980 at Stewart International Airport in NewBurgh, New York. The center is adjacent to one of the runaways, providing for secure transfer of animals to the guarded facility. Each year they process upwards of 4,000 horses, 400 swine, 40 llamas, 50 zoo ruminants and 1,100 different species of birds. In order to maintain bio-security integrity, all employees must wear government issued clothing. Persons entering and leaving quarantine areas must wash their boots in a chemical footbath. Before entering or leaving the facility or traveling between some og the barns, employees must take showers. The World Health Organization maintains that an Avian Flu pandemic is inevitable. 

NASA, The beach House

John F.Kennedy Space Center

Cape Canaveral, Florida

American actronauts have traditionnaly spent their last, pre-departure moments with family and loved ones at the NASA Beach House which is situated within the Kennedy Space Center on a secluded section of Neptune Beach. The Beach House is intented to offer at last break from an astronaut’s rigorous schedule prior to liftoff. 

Built in 1962 ad purchased by NASA in 1963 for $32,500, the Beach House was originally called the Astronaut Training and Rehabilitation Building. Its official current title is the Kennedy Space Center Conference Center. The house is located between the launch pads for Air Force’s newest rockets, Atlas 5 and Delta 4. The Atlas pas, Launch Complex 41 can be seen in the background. Pluto-Bound New Horizons launched from this pad.

Every astronaut since the beginning of the Shuttle Program has visited the Beach House prior to launch. All guests must pass a primary contact physical by a NASA flight Surgeon prior to entering and socializing with the derpating shuttle crew, who are kept in quarantine leading up to the launch. Customarily, the Beahc House prelaunch meal is a barbecue or picnic. 

CONCORDE
Wolfgang Tillmans

Concorde is perhaps the last example of a techno-utopian invention from the sixties still to be operating and fully functioning today. It's futuristic shape, speed and ear-numbing thunder grabs people's imagination today as much as it did when it first took off in 1969. It's environmental nightmare conceived in 1962 when technology and progress was the answer to everything and the sky was no longer a limit. It flies at more than double the speed of sound, at a maximum of 2 333km/h in an altitude of 16 000 m. It's empty weight is 85 900kg and it takes up to 94 750kg fuel at a capacity of 100 passengers. Due to rising fuel prices and environmental pressures, supersonic travel never really became a reality. Only fourteen Concordes, excluding prototypes, have ever been built and were flying between Paris, New York and London in just three hour and half. For the chosen few, flying Concorde was  a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine whilst to watch it in air, landing and taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance though technology.

Unidentified Modern City

Gabriele Basilico & Dan Graham

As we all know Gabrielo Basilico left us the last 13th of february, provocating a big lack in photographs and architects' world (see here). Throwing an eye in bookshop to find something for an homage, I found a small book about a discussion between him and Dan Graham in Brescia.

Brescia is the second largest city, after Milan, it's a typical italian city of the Lombardia's industrial region, with an historic hearth and a peripheral postwar development area.  

Gabriele Basilico appears to observe the town, creating relation bewteen a building and the rest of the urban setting to which it belongs. Dan Graham focuses more on details, parts of the town, as if his observation identified with the state of flux of those accustomed to living in it. Both were especially more interested on the new part of the city, the one related to the economy development with typical high rise and mass-housing building, shopping mall and branded-shops links to this way of living. They have analyzed aspects Brescia has in common with numerous towns in other countries with the same architectural characteristics, regardless of the size : Lyon or Nice in France, Manchester or Liverpool in England, San Francisco in USA and Gwangju in Korea. The reflection on the urban space revealing its apparent anomie the identity of a middle class common to many town eslewhere in the world.  Photographs of Dan Graham are emblematic representation of modular, common place architecture that are infinitely replicated in Modern Towns, in the East and the West, in Europe, United States and Asia alike. And this possibility of repetition contains the seed of a new lifestyle identity. The repetitivness of the architecture holds a new identity - or absence of it - that represents a new community style.

The following conversation, in which the city of Brescia is a pretext,  explains their vision, culture and the most influenced references, from Walker Evans to Aldo Rossi, with a large tribute to Venturi. This dialogue helps to understand what motivations they have for taking photographs, and why their gaze are so different, but also so common. 

GB  Dear Dan, first of all I would like to thank you for accepting Minini Gallery’s exhibition in Brescia curated by Maurizio Bortolotti. They have asked us to conduct a written dialogue to bear witness to our work in Brescia, which will be published in a book.

The first question does not come easily. You are universally recognized in the world of art as an artist who has worked conceptually on various topics, with projects linked to intersubjectivity and relationships with space and places, using diverse languages ranging from video to performance to installation.

I photograph buildings and urban landscapes and for over 30 years I have been obessessed with recording the things I want to capture. At times I fell rather like a collector of pictures of towns who wants to complete his series but never manages to stop taking photographs…Could architecture be the subject that allows an exchange between us, and an interaction ?

I, with my obessively repetitive method, you, with your speculative and philosophical approach and the development of a theoretical way of thinking that continues to renew itself.

A person who has played a key role in terms of the quality of his work and its ethical dimension becomes a necessary reference at this point in the subject, which can occupy the entire life of an artist or a man. I am talking about Walker Evans, with his extraordinary ability to discover and recount people and places in a rigoursly aesthetic and highly respectful way. I would call him a man with a vision that is straightforward, fair, and refined at the same time.

There was an exhibition in Rotterdam in 1992 that showed your work in relation to that of Walker Evans. I have seen the catalogue unfortunately, so I am not in a position to make any comments. But I do want to ask you simply and directly : What effect did Evan’s personality have on you, and how do you relate it in your work as an artist and researcher ?

DG You ask me about my relation to Walker Evans.

Although I am not directly infleunced by his work, I feel an affinity in that his work makes use of the magazine page and is in the genre of photojournalism. We noth relate te seriality as a Minimal art and billboard images as in Pop art. I think we were both fascinated by the petit bourgeois on the edge of industrial slums. In other words, the edge of the city’s urbanism.

Your work seems to be involved with the postwar Italian city in terms of the new urban plan. Have you been influenced by Aldo Rossi’s book The Architecture of the City ?

GB Aldo Rossi was a person of great importance to me, as he was for architectural culture as a whole and for the debate after 1968. I met him in the 1960s when he was teaching at the Milan Polytechnic’s Faculty of Architecture where I was student.

His book The Architecture of the City ( 1966 ) was – and still is – a fundamental text around which the architectural debate revolves. Rossi’s analytical method of comparing single buildings with the urban fabric, of giving depth to history in dialoguing with the modern, his respect and study of the locus are some of the stenghts of his untiring research.

The notion of "urban fact", the theme of the relationship with the history of the city and monuments ( theory of permanence ), and insistent analysis of types are some of the topics that have related architecture to philosophy and art, and have animated scholars and schools of architecture for decades.

As regards the identity of place, the main theme of photographic research in the 1970s, Aldo Rossi wrote : "Every place is undoubtedly singular to the extent to which it possesses endless affinities or analogies with other places. Even the concept of identity, and hence foreign-ness, is relative", "I’ve always claimed that places are stronger than happenings. "In my opinion place and time are the first condition of architecture, so the hardest […]" After the 1980s, photography in Italy and the rest of Europe, commited to observing the new urban landscape, was influenced by American art and the theoretical debate that marked the previous decades. I remember Robert Venturi’s books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), important volumes in the open discussions of the post modern era, not only for architecture, but for the art world in general.

I have a question for you now : how has Robert Venturi’s way of thinking influenced your life?

DG Robert Venturi’s way of thinking was very important to me. He truly love the same art I loved – Ed Ruscha and Claes Oldenburg. His understanding of upper-lower-class-suburban vernacular architecture was extremly important to me. I think that there is a real relation Aldo Rossi’s use of poetic vernacular and Venturi’s use of poetry and wit in his work. My favorite Venturi is his musem for Benjamin Franklin for the American Biennial in Philadelphia. I’ve met Venturi and h’s a very sweet person. In an Interview I did with him he mentionned that he would like to retire to Northen New Jersey – the italian upper-middle-class suburbs that also influenced me. It interests him to see the neighboring New York skyline from New Jersey. ( His wife Denise Scott Brown says, « this is a nightmare I hope will never happen »)

GB  I have never been lucky enough to meet Robert Venturi, but his two books Complexity and Contradiction and Learning from Las Vegas causes a great deal in Europe. They can be said to have caused a revolution in thinking, in the criticism of modernism, making a clean sweep of that reverential fear that was the ideological credo of so many generations after Bauhaus.

Venturi has taught us to look at the world around us with new, disenchanted eyes, to observe and accept the landscape and the town with curiosity, with attention – I would almost say democratically – finally putting on the same plane refined architecture, that by the great designers, and ordinary, commonplace architecture, where the ephemeral, superstructural language of advertising has been integrated with or replaced building construction, concealing it.

This visual and critical approach, which wa can ultimately define es « democratic » - without or without rhetoric – has been fundamental for architecture and for art. Even photography has embraced it fully, as in the case of Ed Ruscha’s fascinating research in his Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1963)

I have been working on towns and urban landscapes for 30 years or so. It all started in 1978 with a project on the industrial suburb of Milan, the town I was born and still live in. At that time there were already many abandoned areas next to factories still in operation. I was really fascinated by Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Anonyme Skulpture, the frontal rigor with which they photographed various types of industrial archeology in black and withe, their cataloguing, their taxonomic approach to the object, their maniacal, obsessive, and potentially infinite research.

My work on the outskirts of my town, which led a few years later to an exhibition and a book entitled Milano Rittrati di Fabbriche (1978-1980), never had the rigor or purity of the Becher’s work, not the equidistant viewpoint of Ed Ruscha. It is a work on spaces, streets, and places, and is undoubtedly influenced by the photographic style, which, from the 1930s onward, with the Farm Security Administration’s mission, had unequivocally conditionned the world of documentary photography. I ferer again here to the teachings of the Greater Walker Evans, with his comprehensive and rigorous approach, aestethic yet uncondescending, and to his definition/notion of "documentary style". Walker Evans’ pictures are the expression of an ethical vision ; in the words of my friend Luigi Ghirri, they are like "caressing the world".

Talking about these approaches and the influence of these important protagonists of culture and artistic research, it is evident that the field, the object of analyses and ideas, is stiil the town iself.

Seen the other way around, the town itself provides an opportunity for comparing only apparently diverging theories and thoughts, like those of Robert Ventury’s critical approach implies an ironic attitude, which is vital for a thorough, unprejudiced understanding of the identity of the new urban landscape.

The inventory of shpaes that Aldo Rossi rediscovered and relaunched as a fragment for a recomposition of the city – a Rossian Collage City as Colin Rowe calls it – does not appear to contain an ironic allusion, rather it is rooted in history, in the search for geometric rigor and essentially of architecture.

When I saw your photographs of Brescia, especially the objects you captured – shop windows, roads signs, parked cars, doors, windows, fences, bariers, fragment of a chaotic and confused urban landscape – my toughts inevitably went back to other pictures by Lee Friedlander came to mind, but they are obviously more constructed, more thoroughly « photographic » whereas yours are more like true documents, apparently less dependent on the construction of a style. Would you agree ? And What do you have to say about this ?

DG Venturi’s work didn’t directly influence my early photographs of New Jersey suburban houses, roadside factories, and signage, but after discovering his architetural work, such as the Guild House and the Lieb House on the New Jersey coast, two of my first architectural models, Alteration of a Suburban House and Video Projection Outside Home (1978) were in response to his work. Venturi’s Lieb House period work noted symbolism of the typical ornamental decoration outside Italian-American owned single-family houses, such as a plastic Madonna in the birdbath placed next door to the Lieb House.

My placement of a large videao projector on the front lawn of a house displaying whatever was on the family’s inside TV set was intented to create an emblem of the family’s lifestyle on the roadside for passing observers. It relates to the proposed « gold » painted TW antenna on the top of the Guild House for retired Quaker Families in Philadelphia, the intention of which was to symbolize the custom of retired residents watching television while resting in their rooms.

Venturi was directly influenced by Ed Ruscha’s photographs, as well as by Pop artist such Claes Oldenburg. I see a parallel between Rossi and Venturi’s work in that both deal with childhood memories of the vernacular suburban architectural landscape in a poetic (and in Rossi’s case, cinematic, phantasmagoric) manner. Rossi’s Modena Cemetery reminds me the interior of a suburban shopping mall. Venturi’s use of irony is more about  with than about being a caustic or critical. Finally, both architects are drawan to seaside houses or makeshift seasiders shelters.