Gary Simmons at The Contemporary and Metro Pictures - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

At Simon Watson's not long ago opened and slightly disheveled space, The Contemporary, Gary Simmons exhibited 10 works from his 1993 "Erasure" series. Originally shown in the Hirshhorn Museum's mini-survey of Simmons's work last year, the "Erasure" series consists of black and verdant chalkboards featuring images and characters from cartoons of the 1930 and '40s; primarily MGM's "Bosko" series, as well as Walter Lantz's "Woody Woodpecker" Max Fleischer's "Betty Boop" and Disney's feature film Dumbo This venue tendered a fitting context for these haunting works. At first, they have a warm, inviting charm. The pleasure of identification, however, is in a short time eclipsed by the viewer's gradual recognition that these friendly characters betray a more sinister subtext

Simmons has drawn heavily from the "Bosko" series, where a happy-go-lucky Affican-American male child holds on to his cookies despite the best efforts of the local frog The creators of Bosko and the frog designed their characters with exaggerated african features. Simmons increases the racial tension through fragmenting and juxtaposing the imagery. In Black Chalkboard (Yo Ho Ho) for example, a brain-pan and crossbones crown the head of a frog whose organ of visions leer over an enormous cavity between the jaws the madness of desire attenuated by means of the smears of Simmons's "erasure." The proces of "erasure" is really a smearing of the chalk lines that are then overlayed with fixative; rather than removing the image, the "erasure" blemishs the cartoons, leaving their souled image transfixed on the slate. In virid Chalkboard (Triple X) Simmons has raised three fasten nooses above three crossbones, a regard to a scene in "Bosko and the Pirates" (1937) where a happily singing frog earns hung for his transgression. The 10 chalkboards succe in raising the disquieting specter of hidden racism.

Up the road and in certainly more pristine surroundings, Simmons built a fresh installation for Metro Pictures, unhurt Garden (Sound Drawing from the Garden of Faded Markings), 1995 unimpaired Garden used a form previously explored in pace in the Arena (The Essentialist Trap), 1994 a boxing ring with dance paces illustrated on its floor and tap-dance shoe hanging from the ties shown recently at the Whitney's "Black Male" exhibition [see A.i.A., Mar. '95] Here, within the same dimensions as the boxing ring, a square section of parquet flooring was bordered by means of beds of white pansies. Above the parquet vertical speakers emitted the voice of a dance instructor and the muffl uninjured of a basketball pounding a gym floor. The basketball blows were periodically interrupted by the uninjureds of tap dancing, until the instructor's commands became confused with the strictures of a basketball coach.

Sound Garden effectively combined imagery from Simmons's previous work. In this piece white pansies perhaps exhibited the domestic audience of televised sports. The interchangeability of tap dancing and basketball, of course, relates to the cliches and constraints of succes for African-Americans in the United States.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group