Thanks to search, lists have become ubiquitous. They are everywhere. Surely they have always been a cultural technique, but as the digital is spreading, they have became more and more important. Which is usually not seen as a good thing. Isn’t the list another sign of knowledge becoming shallow?
It is true, at first sight it doesn’t seem as if the list is a complex thing. In the past they have told us that there was just one position important on the list, and that is to be number one. Lists were there for ranking. Or even more simple, to register something. A shopping list. For sure, a list isn’t seen as a complex or even poetic technique. That might be a mistake.
At the moment Taryn Simon turns this prejudice upside down in her excellent art work ‘A Living Man Declared Dead And Other Chapters I-XVIII’, which should be looked at in the Tate Modern (or in the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin in September). I am still impressed with her multilayered approach of photography. She is reporting in a very journalistic way what this thing is, ‘life’, and what we do to each other while living – Simon has worked for the New York Times magazine before becoming an artist.
An artist she is. There are lists everywhere but the lists aren’t behaving. The stories her lists tell are grouped around families, orphans, concerned persons, political issues, individual cases and rabbits. Nepal girls that are thought to be the living goddess Kumari until they menstruate and become a normal person again. Two Brazilian feuding families. A huge Kenyan polygamy family. Ukraine orphans that are forced to leave the sheltered orphanage with 16 with the high probability of then being trafficked.
Simon tells all these stories by creating lists. She proves that lists are a much more complex format than we ever thought; for example, when suddenly in the middle of one list another story evolves – like the absent pictures of three children of a Kenyan doctor for fear of being kidnapped by the father.
Will lists ever become a highly regarded cultural technique? How are media changing the way we tell stories and narrations? And will I ever be able to escape the algorithms?
Sorry, but I have to ask myself that question for today I made an exception, and exchanged my extended living room, the British Library, with the Tate Modern. Usually, I am quite concentrated on my manuscript these days hiding from social contacts like a mole. I ended up noticing something which is very much about my book topic on how algorithms are changing our society. Obviously, I went outside but the mole came along. Well, I suppose we will both go and watch Barcelona vs. ManU then.
