At the Guggenheim, Taryn Simon Mounts a Rare America 250th Anniversary Show Worth Celebrating

When people remember what art museums did this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, they will not recall the plethora of anodyne collection shows staged across the nation, many of which have centered on vague notions of democracy and discontent. Instead, I hope they remember Taryn Simon’s paranoid freak-out of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, whose rotunda she has filled with photographs about surveillance, lies, violence, and—that most American topic of all—foreign intervention.

Opening to the public on Friday, the show is entirely composed of a single new body of work: Father Country I Do Love You, an exhilarating 42-part installation that doubles as a hefty conceptual artwork and an unconventional form of investigative reporting. It began in 2017, when Simon came across an agent’s name in FBI files from the ’90s. She tracked him down, met with him at a Mexican restaurant in Maryland, and established a rapport, interviewing him repeatedly over much of the past decade. (Simon has concealed the agent’s identity, in part to create the sense that he could be anybody, she has said.)

Conceived by Nancy Spector and brought to fruition by Nat Trotman, Simon’s exhibition does narrate the agent’s life story, beginning with his birth in an undisclosed year at a hospital in Exeter, New Hampshire, and continuing through his involvement in US operations in countries including China and Saudi Arabia. But Simon’s project is not so much a biography of the agent as a sprawling mosaic composed of more than 1,000 photographs presented alongside thousands more words of text, only some of which come from Simon’s interviews with him. (I saw most, but not all, of those pictures during the hour or so allotted for the press to view the exhibition on Thursday; a proper visit to the show requires at least triple that amount of time.)

That mosaic’s tesserae include an array of people and companies whom Simon draws into the agent’s orbit, among them a Beverly Hills beauty business run by a January 6 insurrectionist, a YMCA summer camp in New Hampshire and the children who attend it, witnesses to a bombing in Nairobi, and the maker of garments known as MooreWraps. It is an astonishing amount of information to take in; absorbing it all in one go is pretty much impossible.

But that is exactly Simon’s point: American history has become difficult to tell linearly or concisely, since a good chunk of the world has become snarled in it, willingly or not. And because American history has become so omnipresent and all-encompassing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see, in Simon’s view.

She often realizes that idea by presenting images that seem innocent before revealing themselves to be otherwise. One grid of photographs features an array of people standing around bridges in sunny forests. In one, a woman stands near a placid brook. A caption beneath the image reveals that she is a Saudi immigrant whose time in the US has allowed her to “deeply appreciate how strange it is in the grand sweep of history,” as she puts it. “The ability to move earth at this scale would have seemed like magic when I was a kid.” An adjacent wall text reveals that the woman is named Sakeena Majul, and that this is no ordinary setting: the forest is in Foxstone Park in Virginia, where Robert Hanssen, a double agent working for the FBI, once left secret messages intended for the KGB.

If you follow Simon’s logic, Majul is connected to Hanssen, who is then linked to her anonymous agent because he apparently monitored a spy working for the Russians. The connections Simon makes are diffuse, and the details of them are typically hazy, seemingly by design. Their accuracy, then, is not always easy to confirm. (The Hanssen drop site, however, is real—at least according to the FBI.) Yet whether we are seeing fact or fiction often doesn’t matter, as the agent himself reminds Simon. Alongside photographs of the site on Long Island where a TWA plane exploded and crashed amid a mysterious streak of light in 1996, Simon features the agent’s words: “Some things can’t be proven.”

This is a sentiment that has coursed through much of Simon’s output since the early 2000s. The Innocents (2000–03), the project that first gained her widespread recognition, pictured wrongfully convicted men, often at sites where they were alleged to have committed crimes. She followed it with installations that established her signature formula of pairing masses of images with explanatory text. One of them was the deliciously named A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII, a 2008–11 project in which Simon charted an array of bloodlines; it took its name from four Indian men who were declared dead as part of an inheritance plot, even though they were still alive.

Visible and invisible, alive and dead, fact and fiction: all have become blurred in Simon’s art, which seeks to get to the bottom of things. Her obsessive search for honesty in others’ stories is an impulse shared by many journalists, so I’ve sometimes thought Simon’s art might better exist as reporting. Is it really necessary, I’ve wondered, to see so many beautifully shot pictures when the text next to them speaks well enough on its own?

The Guggenheim project finds a clever solution by rendering any notion of truth obsolete: the facts, as presented by Simon, cannot exist in isolation. She seeds Father Country I Do Love You with fictions and falsehoods, photographing Jodie Foster, the actress who memorably played FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, for one work placed near the beginning. The agent claims to have personally witnessed Foster training for the role at an FBI fingerprinting lab, a coincidence that feels both inconceivable and difficult to invalidate beyond any shadow of a doubt. But whether we know any of that, or can even authenticate any of it, feels beside the point, since many of us will look at Simon’s image of Foster with inked fingers and conjure her Oscar-winning performance.

She also turns her lens on subjects with faulty memories. One is a public affairs officer at the Defense Logistics Agency who “repeatedly injured himself and threatened Taryn Simon and her crew” over the course of a four-hour photoshoot in 2021, according to Simon’s wall text. In a two-channel video presented here, the man says he doesn’t remember doing that, though he doesn’t exactly dispute Simon’s account, either. Periodically, one of the installation’s two screens goes dark, as if to mirror all the unretrievable answers needed to explain the encounter.

In the face of all this misdirection, a discerning mind turns conspiratorial: What is Simon not telling us? Can she be trusted? Is all of this really connected? What are we not seeing? But this, I think, is exactly what makes Father Country I Do Love You so great: The piece creates the sense that American history is edgeless, chaotic, incomplete, and permanently subject to change, resisting the notion that the nation’s past was ever set in stone or simply confined to the country’s borders, as those in power wish it to be.

“People come in with their story all tangled up inside of them,” a psychiatrist who treats members of the intelligence community tells Simon. Playing therapist to an addled American id, Simon lets the nation continue to tie itself in knots as it processes 250 years of grief, anger, and anxiety.