Taryn Simon's FBI Detective Story Draws Crowds Up the Guggenheim Ramp

Taryn Simon's exhibition "Father Country I Do Love You" has turned the Guggenheim Museum's spiraling galleries into a detective story about an FBI agent whose alleged career touches some of the darkest chapters of recent American history. That's the strongest photography news of the week, and it comes with sharp teeth.

Hyperallergic editor-in-chief Hakim Bishara walked the show on a gray day over the brooding Harlem River, past the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, and filed a dispatch that doubles as a skeptical review. Simon's cold, antiseptic photographs, encased neatly in plexiglass, link her protagonist to the explosion of TWA Flight 800, the 9/11 attacks, the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, and Bill Clinton's impeachment.

The reading load is heavy. Jodie Foster narrates the audio guide for visitors without the patience for long-winded wall texts. Bishara's verdict cuts deep: "Simon makes you read a lot, but all that reading is just meant to distract you from thinking." He wondered aloud whether the patriotic show was organized and sponsored by the US State Department.

What else happened this week?

The newsletter round-up Bishara anchored carries hard numbers:

• Georgia O'Keeffe's long-lost painting "Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I," stashed in an East Village closet for decades, goes to auction with an estimate of up to $3 million.
• Daniel Sikkema received a life sentence for his role in the murder-for-hire of his estranged husband, New York art dealer Brent Sikkema.
• The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, and M+ Hong Kong signed an agreement granting unprecedented access to each museum's holdings.
• A group representing over a quarter of Art Basel Paris exhibitors released a letter demanding compensation after the fair's abrupt closure.

More institutional movement: with less than a month before the 61st Venice Biennale closes, US pavilion commissioner Jenni Parido is pleading for donations to ship Alma Allen's sculptures home from Italy. The Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities appointed curator and Hyperallergic contributor Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert as senior curator. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts will soon let visitors watch a year-long restoration of Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy's "The Founders of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants Guild" (1625). The Met Gala's new theme promises celebrities in jeans and "humble, even 'disposable' materials."

What does the week mean for photography?

The strongest photography-adjacent signals sit in the critics' section and the documentary thread running through Bishara's own dispatch. A major Ana Mendieta survey at Tate Modern asks viewers, in Anna Souter's reading, to take notice of the earth and the power of the female body. Photographer Mark Alice Durant's memoiristic new book weaves personal experience into a rebuke of the economic inequality that governs the art world, reviewed by Melissa Holbrook Pierson. And two anonymous documenta 15 artists published advice for peers invited to documenta 16, weighing whether to accept, refuse, or withdraw later — an invitation that is "hard to turn down, and these days, it is also becoming hard to accept."

Politics framed the whole week. News of a sweeping Democratic victory in the midterm elections, which Bishara compares to a Gustave Courbet wave, broke with no champagne in the streets. Claire Valdez, an artist and union organizer, won a US House seat by nearly 70 percentage points. Americans placed "I Voted" stickers on memorials to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Alex Pretti, both killed by ICE agents earlier this year. Doris Salcedo, interviewed by Valentina Di Liscia after Colombia's far-right president removed works from the National Museum, put it plainly: "Works of art last much longer than their governments."

Bishara closed his diary the way it ran: through the Guggenheim's mandatory gift shop, out past a sign pleading "Please don't sit on the flowers," and into Central Park, where a child throwing a tantrum did exactly that. With Simon's dense, text-heavy photographs now anchoring the museum's ramp, the debate over how much reading a photograph should demand — and how much thinking it should replace — is only beginning.