Contemplating art along the curvilinear ramps on the edge of the open air atrium at the Guggenheim Museum is always a little dizzying, whether it’s Warhol, Rauschenberg or Maurizio Catalan. But Taryn Simon’s Father Country I Do Love You, the six story building-wide exhibition of photos and video related to an anonymous FBI agent’s career, is an exceptionally queasy stroll. The major crimes and catastrophes of America’s last three decades make strange and haunting art: Clinton impeachment, Vince Foster, embassy bombings, mysterious plane crashes, child porn, the predations of al Qaeda.
Remember TWA Flight 800, down off Long Island in July 1997? Crashed after takeoff from JFK with 11 eyewitnesses from different points on the ground claiming they saw missile-like flash in sky just before the explosion. Cause unknown to this day. Text near a giant photograph of the wreckage says the FBI suspected a bomb hidden in a box of iced corneas for transplant loaded on the plane just before takeoff.
The 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi killed 210 innocent people. That horror show had dropped out of my head, maybe somewhere after the televised ISIS beheadings. Here on the Guggenheim wall is the reminder, including a dog nosing up a body in the cracked concrete pile and a wall of photos of survivors, in color.
The Clinton impeachment is here represented by large scale photos of cairns of messy files and CDs - just some of the mountains of evidence gathered and entered into the impeachment trial. A life size photo of Clinton defense lawyer Cheryl Mills, stalwart friend of Hillary, looking cold daggers at the camera, accompanies the images.
Anonymous FBI agent also looked into Vince Foster, Exhibit A in the Clinton body count conspiracy. When the FBI combed the grounds of Fort Marcy National Park where Foster shot himself, they recovered dozens of Civil War era projectiles but never found the suicide bullet. Did everyone know that? Here is a wall of photographs of the Civil War artifacts.
Photos of dead rats are leitmotif throughout the building. Rats. Get it? Simon snapped them on the gutters and crannies of the city in her daily walks around Washington Square Park.
The FBI’s own rats get their own star turn: Here is FBI cooperator Rasheeda Moore, disgraced DC Mayor Marion Barry’s ex girlfriend, turned state’s evidence, now geriatric, and here starring in three huge videos teaching viewers how to properly wrap a turquoise jersey wrapdress.
Simon also persuaded Priscilla Sue Galey, a DC stripper, to get back in a red bikini and pose for another large scale photo. Galey was the love obsession of convicted FBI double agent Robert Hanssen, the Opus Dei Catholic who turned out to be selling secrets to the Soviets. Galey believed he was just a rich gentleman who wanted to rescue her from the demimonde, and only learned after he pled guilty (to avoid the death penalty) that he was gifting her from his earnings from the Russians. In the show, Galey presides over her own corner of the Goog, larger than life, septuagenarian skin and varicose veins on unabashed display.
Behind a red velvet curtain with a posted warning that the space beyond will expose visitors to mentions of sexual abuse , there is a closet door sized video screen with individual women of Phoenix 11, an advocacy group of people in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) recounting horror stories of childhood victimization by predators. The CSAM women presumably stand in for the dozens (or per Pam Bondi, thousand) Epstein survivors, some of whose calls to the FBI (see the Farmer sisters) went ignored.
Next to that, an exhibit centers a giant horizontal photo of January 6 felon Gina Bisignano. Blonde, supine and enclosed in an anti-aging cryotherapy machine - one of the devices in the beauty salon she operates out west. In the photo, the 1776 patriot is posed reading her phone, only her upper torso, head and calves and naked feet visible, a court-ordered cellular tracking bracelet gracing one ankle.
My old friend and colleague Washington political journalist Matt Cooper got the Simon treatment in a series of black and white video and stills shots taken while he was undergoing HMU before a cable TV hit in DC. The audio on one of the screens picks up the makeup artist prattling on about Tucker Carlson’s phenomenal TV skills.
The immediate effect of this barrage of bizarre sidelong glances at relics of forgotten national traumas and famous era-defining crimes, is to disinter the accretion of buried disgust, horror and dread that has shaped our collective insecurity since the 1990s.
On reflection, “Father Country I Do Love You” is something else too: It strikes one as being a contender as the first major piece of post-woke Big Art - that is, art not curated by Trump administration anti-intellectual patriotic art philistines but by a major New York cultural institution. It is not explicitly pro-cop. But it is uncritical, red white and blue, an artworld mashup with the surrealism of X-Files and the white hats FBI: Most Wanted.
One begins the journey up the Goog ramp expecting Simon to do what modern art always does with the security state, which is to say, ridicule, monsterize and expose the soul-dead machine. But advancing up the ramp, one realizes that what’s going on here is more complicated. Around every curve, the show is imbued with the now familiar Trump era sensibility in which evil coexists with, nestles within, the clownish and bizarre. We consume the caricature and roll our eyes.
The show also leans into homage of the hardworking G-man - not necessarily without reason. Who wants to pick through bits of flesh in airplane and bomb wreckage, look at CSAM, surveil phones and lure in and wire up collaborators? Simon includes a prominent call-out to the IDF for, according to the artist label next to a 12 by 12 foot wall size photo of a body in wreckage, being first on scene at the Nairobi embassy bombing.
So. Post-Woke Art - with the very notable exception of an epater le bourgeoisie close-up blow-up photo taken by the artist herself, a perfect circle of a vagina around the crowning head of a baby - vagina and baby both anonymous - meant to represent the birth of unnamed FBI agent, now reportedly 70.
Simon is a Gen X East Coast establishment thoroughbred - Philips Exeter, Brown University. She lives in downtown Manhattan and was at the opening, distinctive and fey with long, dark hair styled half pinned up, clad in a lacy black jumper that resembled an Amish Goth birthday party dress - a self-designed daily uniform of which she has, according to the New York Times, 100 versions.
Google search tells us major New York art museums and galleries give solo exhibitions to women only 25 percent of the time. I would have guessed a lot lower than that. By that metric, the show is obviously Big Woke, not post-woke. I’m all for galleries giving female artists big shows and can forgive garish close-ups of childbirth, but maybe not the gratuitous aspect. Using that image to complement art made from a quarter century of federal police work is the epitome of aesthetic equivocation, a strange-bedfellows, culture wars political rapprochement — but one whose time has maybe come around.
Great piece! Thanks for writing this Nina.