Taryn Simon and John Singer Sargent

In August I went to two lectures, one at the Gallery of Modern Art and the other at the Queensland Art Gallery. The first was by Taryn Simon, a photographer of things not usually photographed. Her latest project is called An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, currently on exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Her lecture consisted of a slide show of images from this exhibition, as well as an earlier one called The Innocents, with her brief comments in her crisp, clear manner, followed by a question and answer session with the audience.

From American Index we saw a collection of confiscated goods from airport inspections, the things that people were not allowed to bring into the country. Simon had arranged them to look like a still life classical painting. We saw a photo from the cryogenics laboratory, where people are snap frozen in the hope that at some time in the future we will have developed the technology to bring them back to life. There was a picture of the telecommunications cables that travel from the US to Europe, of birds in quarantine, of live HIV in a bottle. The fragility of the protective devices around these things struck the photographer, as it struck us in the audience.

The braille version of Playboy drew laughter, while the story of the breeding of white tigers drew a different response, one of disbelief. There was Kenny the tiger, severely deformed from inbreeding, posed heroically in his delapidated cage, bones distorted and face abnormal, the result of one of the less-admired qualities of humanity.
[caption id="attachment_264" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="White Tiger (Kenny) Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge Eureka Springs, Ark.: In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born in the care of a breeder in Bentonville, Ark., on Feb. 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded."][/caption]


The Innocents was Simon's photography project from 2003. She photographed people who had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned, and then released when their innocence was proven, usually after many years of incarceration. These pictures needed text to explain their origin, and Simon is acutely aware of what photos cannot communicate, as well as what they can. She incorporates the text as part of the art of her photographs in American Index. The text is a part of the whole, inseparable from the image.

Later that afternoon I went to a conversation between Mark Pennings and Rex Butler at the Queensland Art Gallery on John Singer Sargent. Rex Butler is an established art historian of some note, and a modest and down-to-earth one, who waved his hand to stop the person introducing him from listing his achievements. He spoke with great passion about the paintings of Sargent, drawing us into the paintings in an easy and skilful way, so we saw what he saw, and were moved by what moved him.

I learnt a lot about how to look at a painting. Too often I find myself paying too little attention to the canvas in front of me, not really knowing what I should be paying attention to, whether there is something I am missing that reveals the key to its meaning, its secrets, if they exist. Butler took us on a journey over the face of the beautiful Lady Agnew, showing us its two moods, and how Sargent had created that effect. He revealed to us the power of technique in El Jaleo, although we all gasped when he first showed us the slide representation. Such drama! Such light and dark! But the figures of the musicians in the background, the way the skirt does not follow the dancer's legs at all, but fold and crease according to some other rules.

Who would think such exhilaration could come from sitting in a lecture?