Among the best pieces shown at the opening of the new Museum of Contemporary Art six years ago were two wall drawings by an African-American artist in his early 30s — Gary Simmons. One was of a lighthouse; the other, of a field of shooting stars. What distinguished them beyond symbolic appropriateness was their technique of erasure, which suggests they were from first sight receding in the viewer’s memory.
Since then, the artist’s drawings and sculpture both have become recognized as having been fueled by some of the strongest concerns — race, class, popular culture — of art of our period. So the time has come not only to remember Simmons’ work but also to view it in greater depth, in his first full-scale museum retrospective, again at the MCA.
Born in New York in 1964, Simmons now divides his time between Manhattan and Los Angeles, where — crucially — he worked with such conceptually oriented artists as John Baldessari and Michael Asher. Simmons says all his friends are still back east, though clearly he finds Los Angeles — where he teaches at the University of Southern California — a rich working environment.
Back to basics
The show presents 35 pieces including photographs and sculpture. But the greatest number of pieces on view are drawings, for even at a time when art seems dominated by electronic media, Simmons’ allegiance is to the most basic and venerable of art disciplines.
“I’m a romantic at heart,” Simmons says. “I can be very critical of certain things but at the same time love beauty. Drawing is for me probably the purest form of that point at which an idea becomes documented. You’ll always hear people refer to something and say, ‘We want to keep the integrity of it.’ That’s all about drawing. I continue to do the wall drawings because they’re so about my emotion. Once I have the ideas down and the images down, it becomes a formal act of me creating a beautiful mark. That’s something I don’t think we should lose.”
Simmons’ formal acts have the energy of a sportsman applied to images from popular culture that he uses to express ideas about race and class. The success of his art comes from how it conveys all this directly, at once, in balance.
“It has to be all at once,” Simmons says, “with no one thing being ‘louder’ than any other. It’s like when you eat a really great meal. You shouldn’t notice the tarragon that much.”
The eyes have it
One of his most powerful pieces, the 1993 drawing “Wall of Eyes,” reproduces eyes from cartoon characters, smudging and partly erasing them on what looks to be a giant blackboard. This drawing, with its hint of a classroom, is the arena in which Simmons inverts comedy, playing upon the cliche “Don’t shoot ’til you see the whites of their eyes” even as he suggests the crowded, darkened quarters of a slave ship. Mixing comedy and tragedy is typical of the artist.
“I do it consistently,” Simmons says. “And I’m knowingly doing it. Something horrific can even be beautiful if its reframed and understood. That’s something I try to play with all the time.”
The two new pieces created especially for the exhibition — a wall drawing and a sculpture — both refer to movies, one indirectly, with a Cinemascope format, the other, directly, through two particular film characters. Each is an exploration of “otherness,” as typified by aspects of hillbilly life. But the sculpture, which is cast in the form of a bobble-head collectible, adds a dash of something else.
“Those guys come from the movie ‘Deliverance,'” Simmons says. “Everybody knows the things with the cute bobbing heads. I wanted to apply them to the moment in the movie when one of the guys says to Ned Beatty, ‘I’m going to make you squeal like a pig.’ That act of being terrorized is so instilled in people’s memory that it is the film. The title here, ‘Piggy, Piggy,’ refers to that moment. It’s not so much about rape as how it fits in with the terror of your memory.”
Obscuring identity
Simmons painted the grinning hillbilly sculptures the same white as the gallery to give them a blankness that would strip away personal identity. He did not want the piece to be about identity politics. Nor did he want the figures to be anchored exclusively to the film. He presents them more generally, as ghosts, which mean to the artist haunting embodiments of memory. He suggests his drawings — smudged, partially erased and existing fully only for a brief time — even work along the same lines as memory.
“If we think about things in life,” Simmons says, “they’re constantly shifting. Shifts happen between the actual thing when we see it, what we remember of it and how it looks when we go back and see it again. I like the way such things come in and out of focus.”
Gary Simmons on …
THE SPORTSMAN AS ARTIST:
“Sports was a great foundation to become an artist because there’s a lot of preparation that goes into playing a sport. The processing of the preparation that goes in comes back out as product or production. On that level I think [sports and art] are almost exactly alike.”
THE ARTIST AS ARTIST:
“Art is really important to slow you down and make you stop. We have the luxury of placing an object in a space and having you come to it. We don’t make something that you come into a theater to be entertained by for two hours. That’s a different thing.
I’m not an entertainer.
THE ARTIST AS DEEJAY:
“I see myself more as a visual deejay because I’m taking images that you’ve seen before, that you’ve experienced before in your past, and changing and manipulating them, laying them over each other, putting them back together and presenting them to you. It’s taking from here and there and everywhere, giving you something new out of the old.”
— Alan Artner
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Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, “Gary Simmons” will continue at the MCA, 220 E. Chicago, and the studio Museum in Harlem, ” Gary Simmmons” will continue at the MCA, 220 E. Chicago Ave., through May 19
