Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII

by Taryn Simon (Artist), Geoffrey Batchen, Homi K. Bhabha

A significant and extensive book on a major new body of work by the American artist Taryn Simon. Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I–XVIII was produced over a four-year period (2008–2011), during which Simon travelled the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen "chapters" that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. Her subjects feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. This volume accompanies the exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (May 2011), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (September 2011), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (May–September 2012).

Genres: Art

864 pages, Hardcover

First published June 26, 2012

About the author

Taryn Simon’s practice features rigorous research and an extensive engagement with archives, which help the artist explore systems of power. Her subjects have included bloodlines, the structure of the criminal justice system, and flower arrangements from photographs of political signings. Simon explores these interests in taxonomic photographs, text works, sculptures, films, and performances that critique long-standing institutions and the ways art has supported them.

The Innocents (2002), for example, documents wrongful conviction cases in the United States and considers how photography and mistaken identification can undermine criminal justice efforts. For An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), Simon photographed traditionally out-of-sight objects and spaces—from a braille edition of Playboy to the CIA’s art collection—that she believed to be foundational to American mythologies.

Simon’s work belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate.