Art (that's not) in America
ART travels and good art travels far. I
find that maddening, seeing as I always miss the moment. Last time I was
in Amsterdam, the Van Gogh Museum was closed while the paintings toured North
America’s second tier cities. In Paris, the Musée d’Orsay was a whole lot
of white walls because it’s all on loan to Los Angeles. When I get back
home, New York’s Guggenheim might be showing all the Spanish greats, and beyond
Manhattan, America’s “right now†art seems elusive. A body must travel in
order to access one’s own culture.
Luckily there’s London--a city where all you have to do is stand on a corner and some real art will hit you in the face. I found my fix near Leicester Square at the Photographers' Gallery, now showing American photographer Taryn Simon. Her show, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, archives those things that Americans subconsciously accept, but can never visualize. Photographs include a picture of art hanging on the walls of the CIA, a Braille edition of Playboy, military training camps, pet parrots in quarantine, nuclear waste capsules (pictured), a government-sanctioned marijuana greenhouse, and the throwaway offspring of inbred white tigers. As a series, the photos deliver a pensive gaze behind the status of all that is beautiful and safe about life in the States. It’s an intelligent yet spooky sideshow of contemporary America, and I’m loving it.
So, when’s the show coming to America? I even have to ask, determined to be in the moment when it comes. I discover (sigh) that this show already opened at New York’s Whitney Museum last summer. Like a bad American tourist I throw up my hands in protest: How was I supposed to know? Real Americans don’t go to the Whitney! No we don't. We just come to Leicester Square.
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