Taryn Simon Transforms the Guggenheim Into a 42-Chapter American Spy Novel

If you haven’t visited the Guggenheim Museum lately, now is a historic time to go. Seventy years after ground was broken on Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic building, Taryn Simon’s “Father Country I Do Love You” is the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist in its rotunda – and a provocative portrait of America in its 250th birthday year.The essence of Ms. Simon’s exhibition is found in the gift store: A 1,000-piece puzzle of a grinning Ronald Reagan figurine, Russian folk ceramics, and a Japanese doll, keepsakes of the Kremlin’s Cold War interpreter. The artwork it reproduces itself is a puzzle of 1,100 photographs. The more you look, the more it makes sense.The show is structured into 42 chapters, tracing modern America through the career of an FBI agent. Ms. Simon transforms the six turns of the museum’s celebrated spiral ramp into a network of photography, video, text, and sculpture. Each chapter carries two texts: One apparently factual, the other a first-hand testimony from our FBI narrator.Taryn Simon, ‘What to do when a person has six fingers.’ Picture of Jodie Foster. 2026. Sebastian DoggartBut who is that narrator? It is the first puzzle of this detective story. On the first of my two visits, I was convinced it was Ms. Simon’s father, Richard Simon. The clues were in the title and in the opening panel: “America, [my father] said, was the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it.” The audio guide was voiced by an AI replica of Mr. Simon, and the final panel read: “This project is dedicated to my father. He worked for the US government before changing lanes to manufacture pool tables and pinball machines.”My partner Anadis, who had no patience for the audio guide or most of the written explanations, was convinced the narrator was Ms. Simon herself. “I loved it,” she said, “especially the strong female presence.” When I showed her proof that it was Ms. Simon’s father, her view changed: “Now I hate it.”But I was initially wrong too. I had missed an early panel: “On November 14, 2017, I met a retired federal agent for lunch at Los Portales, a Mexican restaurant off an airport service road in Maryland. He told me story after story. We kept talking for nearly a decade.” This unnamed man is Ms. Simon’s first-person narrator.Taryn Simon, ‘One Little Room on Fire,’ 2026. Guggenheim MuseumHe shares with Forrest Gump and Zelig an uncanny ability to turn up at history’s juiciest moments — from the TWA Flight 800 investigation to the 1998 US Embassy bombing in Nairobi; from Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Washington to the ashes of 9/11; from the impeachment of President Clinton to Donald Trump’s triumphant 2024 Republican National Convention. Ms. Simon uses each story as a springboard into a rabbit hole of others.One chapter, “We were the diggers,” centers on the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, a deputy White House counsel found dead in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia. Two years later, our narrator was among the FBI team sent back to dig up the park after “some young-gun lawyer named Brett Kavanaugh had some questions.” They never found the bullet but unearthed other objects which Ms. Simon shoots in close-up: Soda can tabs, a door key, even Civil War artifacts.Our narrator also recalls showing a “woman in sweats” how to take fingerprints during his first week at the FBI Academy. She turned out to be Jodie Foster, preparing to play Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Ms. Simon follows the thread, photographing Ms. Foster fingerprinted in five colors of ink in 2022. Ms. Foster also co-narrates the audio guide with the AI Mr. Simon.The result is an extraordinary portrait of the American security state over half a century, in which the actions and inactions of one federal agent ripple out to change dozens of lives.From Quantico to Moscow, the range is huge: Memory, treachery, guns, duty, democracy, child pornography — even cicadas trying to mate with binder clips. The project took ten years. “It’s sucked me dry,” Ms. Simon has said. With over 1,000 photographs, it needs at least three hours; on my first visit, security guards ushered me out when I was only two-thirds through since the Guggenheim was about to close.The show packs a powerful emotional punch. “A chunk of flesh” focuses on Stephanie Mohr, a Maryland police corporal, the first female canine handler in her department’s history, who served ten years in federal prison for setting her German shepherd on an undocumented immigrant. “Her dog bit a chunk of flesh out of a guy with no papers,” our narrator recalls. “They shipped him back to Mexico with a fresh wound. I felt bad for her.” Ms. Simon juxtaposes a full-length portrait of an elegantly-gowned Ms. Mohr with a collage of sickening photos of dog-bite wounds, stuck together into the shape of a limb.Taryn Simon, ‘I sleep under it every night,’ 2026. Sebastian DoggartWhen our protagonist loses his FBI partner, in a 1994 shooting at Washington’s police headquarters, we feel his pain. “I sleep under it every night” shows the quilt his girlfriend had made from his FBI shirts, bags, flags and badges for his retirement. It hums with a dignified resonance.There are moments of humor too. “Hiding in plain sight was his thing” follows Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for Moscow until his arrest in 2001. Hanssen’s wife claimed he gave his treacherous earnings to Mother Teresa’s charities. In fact, he lavished much of it on a stripper, Priscilla Sue Galey, including a Mercedes-Benz. Decades later, Ms. Simon photographs Ms. Galey, naked but for red lingerie, saluting the viewer beside a bronze duplicate of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Mother Teresa. Gallows humor comes from a fire chief’s tale of an elderly Florida man with his testicles stuck between the slats of a beach chair: the youngest firefighter “tried to get them out with some grease but it didn’t work, so he had to cut him loose.”Taryn Simon, ‘Un-American Rat 4: Hiding in Plain Sight Was His Thing.’ Picture of Priscilla Sue Galey. 2026. Sebastian DoggartBefore the show, I knew Ms. Simon only as the wife of Gwyneth Paltrow’s brother, Jake. In fact, the New York-born artist has shown at the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, and Nat Trotman, the show’s curator, calls her “the foremost artistic storyteller of her generation.” Her own female perspective plays yin to the yang of two men — the unnamed agent and her hauntingly present father.Wandering up the ramp feels like reading America’s great non-linear novelists. Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” (1990), the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” (2025), also untangled the tentacles of the security state. Don DeLillo’s “Underworld” (1997) follows a single home-run baseball from hand to hand through the Cold War. That parallels one of Ms. Simon’s installations: A teak track down the rotunda’s parapet wall, down which visitors send billiard-like balls that wind past every chapter. “A single act of participation,” Ms. Simon says, “unfolds in ways that can’t be calculated.” On screen, the show recalls David Lynch’s portrayal of the FBI as an absurd, dreamlike institution in “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017), and Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” (2012), which shows memory to be porous and unreliable.Jake Paltrow and Taryn Simon attend the 2016 Guggenheim International Gala Made Possible at the Guggenheim Museum on November 17, 2016. Via Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for Christian Dior CoutureThe show is less satisfying in its implied claim to be photojournalism. Ms. Simon declines to name her narrator and gives no reason why for this. That undermines any claim to factual accuracy — and spies are notoriously unreliable narrators. As an Adam Curtis-style archival collage of American power, it also falls short. Inventive as her rabbit-hole method is, Ms. Simon rarely transforms the photographs and videos themselves, and that stops her achieving real transcendence. You may also find, as Anadis did, that so much written text proves a drag. I’ve never had to read so much in a museum; at times it felt like watching a subtitled, dialogue-heavy Chinese movie.Taryn Simon, ‘I’m lovin’ it when China wins,’ 2026. Sebastian DoggartAs indigestion follows a Big Mac — and McDonald’s features in this exhibit — I felt icky for days afterwards. As its title proclaims, this is at heart a hagiography of the patriarchal surveillance state. There is little mention of the harm the FBI — and its parent, the Department of Justice — has caused. Ms. Mohr simply ends up with “a full and unconditional pardon” from President Trump in 2020. Where a contemporary like Trevor Paglen photographs the government’s secret surveillance sites to expose an unsettling network of power, Ms. Simon seemingly rests on an implicit trust in the state. As someone who still holds out hope for a just America, I left feeling exhilarated but empty, sadly skeptical of her as a portraitist of her country.

Taryn Simon Transforms the Guggenheim Into a 42-Chapter American Spy Novel

Taryn Simon Transforms the Guggenheim Into a 42-Chapter American Spy Novel

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