Taryn Simon: Birds of the West Indies - Tapa dura

Taryn Simon's Birds of the West Indies serves as a meticulous and mesmerizing meditation on materialism, masculinity and geopolitical movements over the course of the last fifty years, via the vehicles, weapons, and women that have featured in Bond films during the same period of time.--Aaron Schuman "TIME " American artist Taryn Simon has won acclaim by using photography to document scenes usually kept hidden from the public eye, like confiscated items at JFK Airport or the CIA's art collection. Her latest book, Birds of the West Indies (Hatje Cantz Verlag), takes on a much more familiar subject: the women, weapons and cars of the James Bond film franchise. " I wanted to look at the accessories that helped construct the powerful Western male fantasy in these films," says Simon.--Jen Renzi "WSJ Magazine "

In 1936, an ornithologist called James Bond released the definitive taxonomy of birds found in the Caribbean, titled Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird watcher living in Jamaica, subsequently appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it to be perfectly “ordinary”, “brief”, “Anglo-Saxon” and “masculine”. This co-opting of names was the first replacement in a series of substitutions that would become central to the construction of the Bond narrative. In a meticulous and comprehensive dissection of the Bond films, artist Taryn Simon (*1975 in New York) inventoried women, weapons and vehicles in Bond. The contents of these categories function as essential accessories to the narrative’s myth of the seductive, powerful, and invincible western male. In Birds of the West Indies, Simon presents a visual database of interchangeable variables used in the production of fantasy, through which she examines the economic and emotional value generated by their repetition.Exhibition schedule: 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh October 5, 2013–March 16, 2014