Posted on
2015-02-16
In 1936, an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it “flat and colourless,” a fitting choice for a character intended to be “anonymous. . . a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.” This co-opting of a name was the first in a series of substitutions and replacements that would become central to the construction of the Bond narrative. Conflating Bond the ornithologist with 007, Taryn Simon uses the title and format of the ornithologist’s taxonomy for her work Birds of the West Indies (2013–2014).
In Birds of the West Indies, 2014, Simon casts herself as James Bond (1900–1989) the ornithologist, and identifies, photographs, and classifies all the birds that appear within the twenty-four films of the James Bond franchise. The appearance of many of the birds was unplanned and virtually undetected, operating as background noise for whatever set they happened to fly into. Simon ventured through every scene to discover those moments of chance. The result is a taxonomy not unlike the original Birds of the West Indies. The artist has trained her eye away from the agents of seduction—glamour, luxury, power, violence, sex—to look only in the margins. She forces the viewer’s gaze off center, against the intentions of the franchise, by focusing on the forgotten, insignificant, and overlooked.
Each bird is classified by the time code of its appearance, its location, and the year in which it flew. The taxonomy is organized by country: some locations correspond to nations we acknowledge on our maps, including Switzerland, Afghanistan, and North Korea, while others exist solely in the fictionalized rendering of James Bond’s missions, including Republic of Isthmus, San Monique, and SPECTRE Island.
Exhibition runs through to March 14th, 2015
Almine Rech Gallery
64, rue de Turenne
F-75003 Paris
www.alminerech.com
