Was that a review I just read or did the snooze alarm go off again?  The way they box up the art reviews in the Los Angeles Times, it’s sometimes hard to tell.  The reviewer, Sharon Mizota’s focus seems to be on formula – which is not inappropriate here: the subject of her review is Taryn Simon’s show at the Gagosian Gallery, “Birds of the West Indies,” which is so formula, you’d think it was an app.  Mizota comes close to saying something like this in the second paragraph, though it doesn’t help that the key words in the last sentence are “kind of.”  Unfortunately, she doesn’t really tell us what she thought of the show.  So I’ll just tell you what she seems to be getting at, where she goes off-track with this, and try to open up this box a bit – ya know, open up the cage and let these birds fly free, so to speak. 

The key device, the ultimate ‘tool’ in every sense, for the Simon show, as many readers of this blog are probably already aware, is “Bond – James Bond,” whose name was borrowed from a American ornithologist, whose own work was probably at least as fascinating as any of the fictional Bond’s adventures.  Simon’s particular fascination seems to be instrumentality and taxonomy – though her deconstructive approach to this taxonomy is both random and formulaic.  The sequencing of the photographs of cars and weapons and portraits of actresses who played the ‘Bond girls’ in the 24 films in the Bond franchise (photographed in contemporary garb of their own choosing, and looking a bit like hapless butterfly specimens under Simon’s lens) was determined by an algorithm to ensure ‘perfect randomness,’ according to Simon.  The photographs of birds in the second gallery – cropped frames from the various Bond films, decolorized and rendered uniformly in black-and-white – are arranged somewhat less randomly, by year and location; but with rare exception, the species are completely indeterminate.  

One question I might ask Mizota is, did the “masculine fantasy” of the Bond franchise really need “revealing”?  Is that something we really need to look at in an art gallery show? 

Yes, this is certainly “big data” art – but exactly what “point of view emerges from the cataloging of sheer accumulation”?  (my emphasis)  How does the treatment of the ‘Bond birds’ as specimens offer a “rebuke” to the franchise formula?  Let’s face it – this is simply another device. 

I don’t have a problem with that.  Devices are common motives and strategies in art-making, and certainly everywhere in contemporary art – from Duchamp to Johns, Nauman, Graham – there are hundreds, if not thousands of examples.  But they’re devices – one element of the finished work, not the artwork itself.  With any delivery system, formulaic or not, there’s usually a payoff.  Here the payoff feels almost incidental – the terror of being reduced to specimens.  Goddess only knows we need more terror in art – but shouldn’t the scope be a bit more expansive?  Art should be more than simply another device; and even if it is, shouldn’t we feel something besides numb?

I actually enjoyed looking at the cropped frames of bird/location shots from the Bond films in the Simon show; but that has as much to do with my love of cinema as it has to do with art.  I think they might make a terrific art book – so maybe Simon and/or Gagosian should talk to someone at Steidl or some other art publishing house.  In the meantime, speaking as one of “the birds,” I’ll just take my Bond straight – neither shaken nor stirred.  There is more art, strictly speaking, in some of the sequences of For Your Eyes Only than the entirety of this show.