Taryn Simon. Birds 1 + 2
Set of 2 volumes: Taryn Simon. Birds of the West Indies + Taryn Simon. Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies.
Taryn Simon. Birds 1 + 2
Set of 2 volumes: Taryn Simon. Birds of the West Indies + Taryn Simon. Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies.
English
2016. 1076 pp., 577 ills.
»Birds of the West Indies« and »Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies...«,
2 volumes in custom made slipcase, 2016
Volume 1 with embossing on bookend paper, numbered and signed
Edition of 300
20.50 x 29.70 cm
ISBN 978-3-7757-4140-8
Every bird that ever flew in a James Bond film, meticulously recorded by Taryn Simon
Content of Birds 1:
In a meticulous and comprehensive dissection of the Bond films, artist Taryn Simon inventoried women, weapons and vehicles in Bond. The contents of these categories function as essential accessories to the narrative’s myth of the seductive, powerful, and invincible western male. In Birds of the West Indies, Simon presents a visual database of interchangeable variables used in the production of fantasy, through which she examines the economic and emotional value generated by their repetition.
Content of Birds 2:
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.”
In Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, Taryn Simon (*1975) 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’s ornithological discoveries occupy a liminal space—confined within the fiction of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it. This taxonomy of 331 birds is a precise consideration of a new nature found in an alternate reality.
