Floral Borders: Physical and Semiotic Uprooting in Taryn Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015)

Abstract

An exposé of the “stagecraft” and performance of politics, the multimedia series Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) sees American artist Taryn Simon recreate the floral arrangements displayed at thirty-six political treatise signings involving countries present at the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, which responded to economic globalization, establishing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In citing the Dutch Golden Age 'impossible bouquet' as Paperwork’s historical precursor, Simon sets the cash-led movement of flowers in relation to the contents of the featured political treatises: the forced, cash-led movement of people, the reclassification of humans as goods, and the prioritization of economic benefit over the imbricated concerns of human lives and environmental sustainability. This paper examines Simon's articulation of the implications of 'fake nature,' of an anthropocentric era of capitalism and global environmental crisis wherein human and nonhuman beings are divorced of their ontological meanings and reassigned artificial values.