A COLD HOLE ASSEMBLED AUDIENCE
A Charged Atmosphere of Hope and Uncertainty1 Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole Assembled Audience by Alexandra Foradas
Taryn Simon’s artistic practice began with a desire to examine ourselves—physically, aesthetically, psychologically. She uses familiar systems— from bloodlines to flower arrangements—against themselves, making visible the structures and processes that we have accepted as part of the everyday. Her aesthetically rigorous works are shaped by years of intensive research and planning, including obtaining access and permissions from the CIA, Church of Scientology, China’s State Council Information Office, Central Zionist Archives, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, NASA, SPY-Fi Archives, U.S. Department of Defense, Playboy Enterprises, Inc., and U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 1
Simon is relentless in her pursuit of information and knowledge; she once said, “There is no version of a positive ‘not knowing.’ Lack of knowing itself is a gap easily and readily filled with obfuscation "to maintain and expand an unknowing state by the powerful.”2 Fittingly, Simon’s projects encompass not only photographs, films, texts, and installations in museums and galleries, but also bookwork, the first major museum installation of which is on view as part of her exhibition at MASS MoCA. Simon’s publications inhabit and probe the position of power that books themselves hold— as sources of authority or fact—and the belief that we invest in their contents and records. 1 “Healing rituals create a receptive person susceptible to the influences of authoritative culturally sanctioned ‘powers.’ The healer provides the sufferer with imaginative, emotional, sensory, moral and aesthetic input derived from the palpable symbols and procedures of the ritual process—in the process fusing the sufferer’s idiosyncratic narrative unto a universal cultural mythos. Healing rituals involve a drama of evocation, enactment, embodiment and evaluation in a charged atmosphere of hope and uncertainty.” Ted J. Kaptchuk, “Placebo studies and ritual theory: a comparative analysis of Navajo, acupuncture and biomedical healing,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366 (2011), 1849
2 Quotes from Taryn Simon are sourced from Markus Miessen in conversation with Taryn Simon and Liam Gillick, “The Dilemma of Instrumentalization (or: From which Position is one talking?)” In Rear Views, a Star-forming Nebula, and the Office of Foreign Propaganda: The Works of Taryn Simon (London: Tate Publishing, 2015); Taryn Simon, foreword from The Innocents (New York: Umbrage Editions, 2003); Taryn Simon, interviewed by Charlie Rose, April 26, 2016; and conversations with the author.
Simon’s earnest focus on belief is mingled with an uncertainty about its foundations: for The Innocents, her first major project, she photographed individuals who were convicted of violent acts—and later ruled innocent— at the scene of the crimes that they did not commit. In this act, she exposes this location as both “arbitrary and crucial; a place that changed their lives forever, but to which they had never been.” The skepticism that runs through Simon’s work often manifests itself as subtle absurdism, both in terms of subject matter and of her projects’ often-hyperbolic scopes: for a working week in 2010, Simon remained perpetually onsite at JFK Airport, ultimately making 1,075 photographs of objects detained upon entering the United States (Contraband). More recently, Simon cast herself in the role of the acclaimed American ornithologist, James Bond—the fictional spy’s namesake—documenting every bird that flew in each James Bond film (Birds of the West Indies). In her projects, Simon offers us the opportunity for what she describes as a “different mathematics of looking,” through which our usual way of seeing things—from crime scene photos to popular films—is disrupted. Simon’s new installations, Assembled Audience and A Cold Hole, examine the impulse to seek reassurance and empowerment through ritual. Drawing on the ancient practices of applause and cold-water immersion, Simon scrutinizes the ways in which individual and collective rituals can be used to shore up—or even to disrupt—dominant power structures. She has said, “I operate from within a given system. But [it] is not stagnant and not all-confining. It is a system that provides tools to alter its dimensions.” This blend of wry skepticism (about our relationship to the systems of power that structure our reality) and sincere hope (that these systems can be improved) links the three spaces that make up Simon’s exhibition at MASS MoCA.
distortions invite us to question books’ status as emissaries of authority and research, the things we take seriously and those that we do not, and the friction between images and text.
ASSEMBLED AUDIENCE
Taryn Simon, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, 2015 (detail) Source image with botanist’s identifications, nuclear fuel agreement, Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, Bushehr, Iran, February 27, 2005
BOOKWORK “Ostranenie”—a term coined by Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky and often translated with the neologism “enstrangement [sic]”—describes the process by which art can make commonplace situations, forms, or actions strange by recontextualizing them, making us notice them anew and thereby lengthening and complicating our focus. Simon expands the radical possibilities of ostranenie, directing our attention to linger on the apparatuses of control— not just looking but actually seeing them through encountering them in unexpected ways. Roland Barthes observed that a photograph operates in the popular imagination as a “certificate of presence”—a notion that we cling to despite the possibility that these “certificates” are manufactured. For Simon, her presence—whether at the scene of a murder, or within the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Federal Inspection Site—does
not indicate that she has truly accessed her subject. She contends, “There are no insiders. And the outsider can never reach a core. He or she can only find another perch from which to observe. In my work, ‘entering’ [is] testing physical and intellectual boundaries; confronting the divide between public and expert access and knowledge.” The “divide between public and expert knowledge” is mirrored by the presumed relationship between a book’s reader and author. In Simon’s bookwork, she assumes the position of author, occupying the visual and linguistic characteristics of academic studies, historical tomes, and governmental dossiers. The content and tone, however, play with the expectations that these characteristics set up: for her recent project Paperwork and the Will of Capital, Simon focused not on the people who attended meetings that have shaped the world’s political and economic scaffolding, but rather on the flower arrangements that “listened in.” Simon’s sly
A dynamic analogous to the relationship between “public and expert” and “reader and author” exists between members of an applauding crowd and the object of their applause. Written accounts as far back as the Biblical Old Testament and ancient Rome reference leaders using applause to assess public opinion: the Emperor Augustus reportedly requested on his deathbed, “Since well I’ve played my part, all clap your hands / And from the stage dismiss me with applause.”3 In the darkened interior of Simon’s Assembled Audience, the sonic space shifts rapidly from conference room to stadium to convention hall, and back again, before settling into an acoustically 3 Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars transl. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1913), 281.
unmoored space occupied by an unseen applauding crowd. Over the course of a year, Simon worked with local producers in Columbus, Ohio, to solicit applause from individuals at each event at three of the city’s largest venues: the Nationwide Arena, the Greater Columbus Convention Center, and The Ohio State University’s Jerome Schottenstein Center. Events ranged from an Ohio Youth Ministries conference, the 78th Conference on Glass Problems, and the Pretty Princess Ball to Women’s March Ohio: Power to the Polls, monthly Herbalife payouts, a Columbus Blue Jackets v. Vancouver Canucks hockey game, and Janet Jackson, Lorde, and Tim McGraw concerts. Columbus, known among product developers as “Test City USA,” is a key barometer for predicting the success of both consumer goods and political candidates. With demographics—including age, ethnicity, income, and education—closely mirroring those of the United States as a whole, the city is the test market for many of the nation’s largest brands, including McDonald's, Victoria’s Secret, and Starbucks. This status has become a part of the local culture and economy, with Ohio State University’s Sensory Evaluation Center collaborating with many of these companies to
Applause is more than a show of approval or adoration: as sociologist J. Maxwell Atkinson observed, it is a “coordinated behavior,”6 and failure to participate tends to make us feel very uncomfortable. A recent study went further, referring to applause as a “social contagion,”7 in which members of an audience participate automatically. What CEOs and presidents may take for public approval is in fact an oftenunthinking response to individuals’ desire not to stand out from the crowd.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Greater Columbus Convention Center on Monday, August 1, 2016. (Columbus Dispatch, photo by Fred Squillante)
analyze, according to their website, the “neural and physiological underpinnings of sensation, reward and consumer decision.” Columbus is located in the heart of Ohio, the nation’s most accurate political bellwether: for more than 50 years, every presidential candidate who won Ohio has been inaugurated the following year. Every successful presidential candidate since 1996 has campaigned in at least one of the three venues included in Assembled Audience. As the marketing director for a local trade group bluntly noted, “We decide the fate of cheeseburgers and presidents here in Columbus.”4 Written accounts of applause document the potential to control, augment, and manufacture public adulation. Professionals—often called “claques” or “ringers”—have been hired to incite audiences to applaud since before Augustus’ time: speaking as far back as 56 BCE, the orator Cicero described
“the crowd of spectators in the theatre and at the gladiatorial games, [who] pour forth their purchased applauses […] at the caprice of a few directors.”5 Centuries later, incorporating technological advancements, yearly Nazi rallies at Nuremberg used dozens of mushroom-style speakers to beam cheers and chants of “Heil Hitler!” across the crowds. In Soviet Russia, legal insistence intervened: the first attendees to stop applauding at public speeches by Joseph Stalin risked arrest. Today, “likes” on social media are available for purchase in bulk, and newspapers reveal that politicians including President Donald Trump—who called Senators who did not applaud his State of the Union address “treasonous”—have filled out rallies with modern-day claques from firms such as Crowds On Demand, Easy Work, and Extra Mile. Assembled Audience plays with the history of manufactured adulation, compressing individuals with different social, cultural, and political loyalties into a clapping crowd.
Assembled Audience intervenes in the typical dynamics of applause, shifting the context of clapping from conformity to exposed, individual action: the behavior of the individuals recorded for the installation is not coordinated with those around them at the moment of recording, but rather is an outlier, drawing the attention of bystanders. Their applause is not automatic, but rather a considered decision to
participate on the part of each of the hundreds of individuals gathered together sonically by Simon’s work. She is not, however, fully hopeful about the individuating potential of this decision to participate: the installation blends a gathering of individuals, each clapping at their own pace, for no one but themselves, into a crowd used to the artist’s own ends, each new group gathered at random by a computer program.
4 Irene Alvarez, quoted in David, Gelles, “An Alternate Universe of Shopping, in Ohio” The New York Times, October 17, 2017. 5 M. Tullius Cicero, “The Speech of M. T. Cicero in Defence of Publius Sestius” (56 BCE), in C. D. Yonge transl., The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, (Covent Garden: George Bell & Sons, 1891) 6 J. Maxwell Atkinson, Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), 18. 7 Richard P. Mann, Jolyon Faria, David J. T. Sumpter, and Jens Krause, “The dynamics of audience applause,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 10, June 19, 2013, 4.
Reichsparteitag (Reich Party Day), 1934, Nuremberg, Germany. Speakers are visible at the edges of the columns of the crowd. (Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-16196 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
A COLD HOLE The hope for individual, considered decisionmaking rather than automatic participation is further complicated in Simon’s A Cold Hole. In winter 2015, Simon took a cold-water plunge, having read about its capacity to provide physical and psychic re-set. Her mingled hope and skepticism initiated a deep dive into humans’ impulse to seek, as she terms it, a “quick fix.” Millennia of participants have praised cold-water immersion as psychically cleansing, bolstering resistance to illness, and renewing strength, alertness, and vigor. Pliny the Elder, renowned philosopher and naval army commander of the Roman Empire, famously took regular cold-water baths; Charles Darwin turned to cold-water immersion after conventional remedies failed to cure his illnesses; the formidable U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt, swam naked in the Potomac River through the winter; Geronimo, a prominent Apache leader, used cold-water plunging to prepare boys for manhood and battle; Nellie Bly, while reporting undercover at Blackwell's Island Asylum, was forcibly submerged in cold water in an attempt to cure her supposed hysteria; endurance athlete Lynne Cox swam across the Bering Strait from U.S. to Soviet territory in August 1987, an action she hoped would “create a thaw in the Cold War”; and self-help guru Tony Robbins starts every day with a cold-water plunge, which he believes increases happiness, boosts metabolism, and provides long-lasting changes to the circulatory system. In Simon’s A Cold Hole, the private impulse towards repair and purification collides with public performance. Participants—a mixture of performers and members of the public—walk across an icy expanse in a brightly lit, all-white space. They approach a black square cut through the center of the ice, pausing for a moment at the edge of the hole before jumping in. Their bodies
are immersed in shockingly cold water, triggering an automatic flight response. As they emerge with a gasp, visitors look on from a darkened room, separated from the brightly lit space of the plunge by a cinemascopic glass aperture set in a tall, thick wall. When the participant leaves the space, the scene’s solitary stillness takes on the qualities of a black-and-white landscape photograph: perpetual winter frozen in time, pulled from its natural context. Performance of the cold-water plunge as a public act recurs in cultures spanning centuries and a broad geography: Kanchu Misogi rituals in Japan promote purification and good fortune; Eastern Orthodox Epiphany celebrations reenact Jesus’ cleansing baptism in the Jordan River; Finnish avanto swimming, literally translated as “hole in the ice,” aims to spiritually invigorate and physically rejuvenate; and corporate-sponsored polar plunges raise money for ALS, the Special Olympics, and other charitable organizations. Prayers said over the waters in the Russian Orthodox Church on Epiphany ask “that [the water] may be the cleansing of the souls and bodies of all those who with faith draw nigh and partake of it, let us pray unto the Lord.”8 The Russian tradition of plunging into icy waters on Epiphany emerged as a widely accepted practice following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The coldness of the water is a coincidence of the frigid Russian climate—temperatures in the Jordan River at the same time of the year are much higher—but it has been embraced as a form of “mortification of the flesh,” signifying a denial of worldly desires. While the ritual is not officially recognized as a rite by the Russian Orthodox Church, it has gained enough traction that Vladimir Putin chose to observe the tradition in January 2017 rather than watch Donald Trump’s inauguration. As one participant rather optimistically put it, “My soul is cleansed and I’m charged with a good mood for the whole year ahead.”9
Anthropologist Catherine Bell argues that ritualization is a space for the “embodiment of power relations.”10 Dominant power structures rely on rituals for legitimacy and to enforce “social cohesion and control.” Individual participation often results from social or legal pressure. As is the case with the Oath of Allegiance, administered at naturalization ceremonies for new American citizens, when rituals are deliberate choices, they can be both a requirement and digested as sources of power for participants. In A Cold Hole, Simon dramatizes the penetration of power into the body through ritual. Participation is not mandated, but rather must be sought out deliberately; entrance is not based on expert knowledge or powerful standing, but rather invitation and personal volition. Simon’s selection of a healing ritual as the subject of her installation introduces systematic doubt: while participants may believe in healing rituals’ capacity for betterment, uncertainty about the outcome remains. In the cold-water plunge, this doubt has a very real, scientific basis: immersion
Vladimir Putin, Epiphany, January 2018 (Photo: www.kremlin.ru)
in very cold water overrides the body’s automatic response. The initial gasp reflects the sharply drawn breath experienced during sudden death, sleep arrhythmia, and birth. A Cold Hole exists in conversation with Simon’s Black Square series, titled after Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting of the same name. Malevich referred to the square as “a living, regal infant. The first step of pure creation in art.” Installed by Malevich in the upper corner of the room, Black Square took the place traditionally
8 See John, Marquess of Bute and E.A. Walls Budge transl., The Blessing of the Waters on the Eve of Epiphany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1901), 55. The prayers said over water at Epiphany are intended to sanctify it, giving it the same properties—the ability to “cleans[e] souls and bodies”—ascribed to the waters in which Jesus was baptized. The belief in the ability of such rites to work on both physical and spiritual levels is central to the Eastern Orthodox faith: the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom—used in Russian, Coptic, and Greek Orthodox churches nearly every day of the year—refers to God as the “Physician of souls and bodies.” 9 “In Russia, Epiphany Comes With A Shockingly Cold Swim,” Morning Edition, January 20, 2016, NPR. 10 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Pages cited: 170 + 177.
An installation of works by Kazimir Malevich, 0,10 exhibition, Petrograd, 1915. Black Square can be seen at the top in the room's corner.
occupied by a religious icon, replacing it with a dark void. Malevich wrote that “Life must be purified of the clutter of the past!” and Black Square was, he believed, a first step: a new icon for a new age.
Simon herself stands poised between earnestness and absurdity, between the uncertain void of the black square hole and the lightness of the squares on the ceiling above.
Like Malevich’s “infant,” the black square hole cut through the center of A Cold Hole is filled with potential and uncertainty. A trio of bright squares on the ceiling is a counterpoint of levity. The frequent blending of light and dark—absurdism and seriousness—in Russian culture crystallizes in the form of the holy fool. Referenced by Russian authors including Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the holy fool’s absurd actions challenge accepted norms and encourage selfreflection. In A Cold Hole, the considerable labor involved with bringing the experience of the cold water plunge into the gallery, when participation in the ritual can take place for free at nearby Windsor Lake all winter, is itself absurd—but perhaps no more absurd, the installation suggests, than believing in the plunge’s potential for repair.
Breaking the tension of an earnest conceptual discussion, Simon once sardonically described A Cold Hole—with participants plunging into and emerging from the frigid water at its center— as a self-portrait. Perhaps the cold hole is as unfeeling and unyielding as its title suggests. Or perhaps, although shot through with skepticism, the offer to participants to enter into the installation is one of radical generosity: claiming the position of the penetrated subject while also offering it to others, Simon invests A Cold Hole with the potential—however uncertain—to be a space for reciprocal repair.
“Would you call yourself a romantic? “Never. But I am.”
Black Square VI. Blue buckets were mounted atop civilian vehicles in Moscow to protest the misuse of emergency blue rotating lights by businessmen, celebrities, and officials to bypass Moscow traffic.
Framed archival inkjet print and Letraset on wall 31½ x 31½ in.
A multidisciplinary artist working in photography, text, sculpture, and performance, Taryn Simon (b. 1975) creates work resulting from rigorous research guided by an interest in systems of categorization and the precarious nature of survival. Her works have been the subject of exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2016-17); the Albertinum, Dresden (2016); Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague (2016); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2015); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); the Tate Modern, London (2011); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2011); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007). Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Simon's work was included in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). Her installation An Occupation of Loss (2016), co-commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory and Artangel, premiered in New York in 2016 and in London in 2018. Simon is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives and works in New York.
TARYN SIMON A COLD HOLE ASSEMBLED AUDIENCE On view beginning May 26, 2018 Principal exhibition support is provided by Anne and Gregory Avis with contributing support from Raymond Learsy and Mary Ann and Bruno A. Quinson. Major exhibition support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Mass Cultural Council. Institutional exhibition support is provided by MASS MoCA's Director's Advisory Council. Related programming is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Mass Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Special thanks to Bob Bielecki, Marisa Espe, Maria Joranko, Tala Kanani, James McKee, Hans and Kate Morris, Juli Sasaki, Ricardo Partida, Nicole Potts, and Peter Tender.
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