Works Exhibited
About
Archiving systems impose an illusory structural order on the radically chaotic and indeterminate nature of everything.
—Taryn Simon
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce The Picture Collection, a new series by Taryn Simon.
The Picture Collection comprises forty-nine works inspired by the New York Public Library’s picture archive, one of the august institution’s lesser-known troves. The archive contains 1.2 million prints, postcards, posters, and printed images, most of which have been cut from secondary sources, such as books and magazines. It is the largest circulating picture library in the world, organized according to a complex cataloging system of over 12,000 subject headings. Since its inception in 1915, it has been an important resource for writers, historians, artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, and advertising agencies. Diego Rivera, who made use of it for his legendary mural for the Rockefeller Center, Man at the Crossroads (1934), noted how the scope of this picture collection might go on to shape contemporary visions of America.
On the heels of such ambitious research projects as An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar and A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, Simon taps this vast yet idiosyncratic archive to further explore the taxonomic, classificatory, and revelatory purposes of photography. The process of archiving images from many disparate sources inevitably exposes the wayward desires at work in the seemingly neutral or objective process of generic image-gathering. Not only does The Picture Collection underscore the extent to which chance, incident, and arbitrary inclusion or exclusion are written into analog cataloging systems, driven as they are by the persistent human impulse to identify, select, collate, and systematize information; as well it suggests how the earlier systems presaged digital search engines and anticipated the widespread use of applications like Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
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In Conversation
Taryn Simon and Teju Cole
This spring, as part of the Lambert Family Lecture Series at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Taryn Simon joined Teju Cole for an online conversation about her artistic practice and creative process.
Taryn Simon: An Occupation of Loss
In Taryn Simon’s performance work An Occupation of Loss (2016), professional mourners enact rituals of grief, simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations from within a sculptural installation. This video by filmmaker Boris B. Bertram documents the April 2018 performance of this work with Artangel in Islington, London.
The New York Public Library’s Picture Collection
Joshua Chuang, the Robert B. Menschel Senior Curator of Photography at the New York Public Library, discusses the institution’s singular Picture Collection, the artist Taryn Simon’s rigorous engagement with it, and four instances of its little-known role in the history of art making.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
Cast of Characters
James Lawrence explores how contemporary artists have grappled with the subject of the library.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2019
The Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring a detail from Afrylic by Ellen Gallagher on its cover.
