Art Criticism and Writing | MFA Program

During the late nineteenth century, many American and European Impressionist painters glamorized fashionable clothing and the standard of living that came with it. They painted parties in opulent interiors, luncheons in lush summer landscapes, and the exquisite liveliness of going out for an evening, attending a ball or visiting the theater. These artists articulated an image of their world through a personal lens of formal style, as in the bright strokes and atmospheric perspective of Monet, the brushy, delicate figuration of Renior, or the painted dots of Seurat.

“Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in cooperation with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The exhibition is evidence of the Metropolitan’s rich collection of images and objects from the twenty-year period between 1860 and 1880: it presents over eighty paintings and sixteen period dresses and costumes with matching hats and shoes. In addition to an array of accessories such as fans, parasols, and walking sticks, there are also display cases of fashion illustrations, photographs, and publications from the era. The show provides the context of a Parisian bourgeoisie during the time of Impressionism, displaying an interaction between fashion and art.

The material is presented within eight galleries that are navigated linearly, one after another. In the first room is a grouping of large, full-length portraits, each demonstrating a different modern ideal of beauty. Images of women, in paintings such as Monet’s Camille (1866) and Manet’s Young Lady (1866), are shown with concurrent fashion trends, and the favored facial features of the time are represented by models in popular fashion illustrations and journals, some more provocative than others. They present the women in repose, relaxing in their beautiful attire or gently pulling off a glove or shoe.

Paintings in the second gallery explore the ambient qualities of sunlight with leisurely scenes of men, women, and children wearing their best summer clothes. The feathery white cottons and silks kept people cool, and the painters depicted them waving in the wind while they shimmered in the light. It is the perfect subject for the Impressionist eye, tuned to atmospheric phenomena and the dreamlike potential of painting.

The show continues with two counterpart gallery spaces, one focusing on the white dress and the other on the black dress. The comparison addresses the stylistic differences between wearing the two colors. White day dresses were usually made of thin, airy materials and were meant to be worn in the flowing wind. A couple of white dresses featuring light chiffon and frilly lace are shown in large glass showcases. Monet’s romantic paintings of daytime parties in the French countryside are hung adjacent to the dresses. Conversely, the black dress represented refinement and the elegance that came with rigid corseting and elaborate ornamentation, as seen in the paintings of Renoir and Manet.

Albert Bartholomé’s In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé), 1881, is positioned in the center of the fifth gallery as a tour-de-force example of the dialogue between fashion and art. In this comparison of dress and painting, Bartholomé’s representation of his wife wearing a white and dark blue dress is paired with the dress itself. The outfit is a conglomeration of details, including fringe, buttons and drapery; polka dotted and striped, it has a tight waist and a large bustle at the back. Viewing the dress alongside the painting, which shows the artist’s wife standing in a garden entrance to a greenhouse, is a back and forth process. One walks around the dress as if witnessing a memory.

The sixth and seventh rooms examine the role of men in art and fashion during the twenty-year period. As seen in Degas’s Portraits at the Stock Exchange (1878), men wore vested suits and top hats with canes, which seem simple and stiff compared to the lavish garments of women at this time. In the seventh space is an organization of paintings and objects that show the avid consumerism of this era, and the relationship it established between husband and wife. Advertisements, packaging, and magazines associated with selling clothes—and an image of beauty—are shown alongside paintings such as Tissot’s The Shop Girl (1883), a scene in a Parisian boutique in which a woman subtly smiles at the viewer as a man peers with confusion through the window.

The last gallery features paintings of city life, the changing weather and movement of people: snapshots of Paris with its dazzling streets and venues. In Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877), residents of the city are shown on the misty sidewalk of a cobblestone street wet with rain. They wear overcoats and clutch umbrellas, their facial expressions relating to the somber energy of the scene. Every element of the painting serves to render an emotional impression.

“Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” offers several ways of entering the world of fashion and of considering its meaning during the late 19th century. Aside from a couple of galleries toward the end, much of the exhibition explores the role of women and their representation during that time. A few feminist currents run through the curatorial choices. The paintings objectify women and relegate them to idealized pictorial settings, but they are also an account of their dominance, demonstrating the power of a wife in marriage and the importance of women as muses. The show also includes the work of female impressionist painters such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, without their usual labeling as a token female other, honoring their contributions without highlighting their gender. Instead of getting derailed in a critique of the system, the show generously explores styles of painting and bourgeoisie Parisian society, and the ways in which they informed each other.

Reclaimed doors, shutters still bearing drill holes and nail punctures, metal bolts, wooden beams grainy and dull with patches of old paint: these were some of the architectural components set in frames and displayed in Liu Wei’s recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin. These wall pieces were interspaced with paintings of lines, on some canvases taking the form of horizontal bands of color reminiscent of dawn or dusk. In other paintings, the lines transform into brilliant grids or monochromatic graphs that suggest floor maps or skylines. The tall column-like structures placed in the center of the room, however, were the most arresting works shown. These pillars, which appeared to be made out of a multitude of frames within frames of reclaimed wood and metal painted in muted blues, greens, browns and grays, seemed to mimic the infinity-through-repetition often seen in Greek, Roman or Islamic architecture, though in Wei’s case, the repetition is within the construction of a pillar rather than in its multiplication. Created out of salvaged demolition debris, Wei’s large-scale installations looked like they were part of a construction site, while his wall-hung works acted like the site’s floor plans and sections.

Born in Beijing, China, in 1972, Wei has been working with multi-media for the past 15 years. The exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, which represents a continuation of his 2009 Merely a Mistake series, was his first solo exhibition in the United States. Time and space play a huge part in Wei’s work, which is mostly an exploration of urban settings and the workings of an ever-changing, unstable society. Time, space and form are certainly also definitive elements of the works by the German artists Dieter Roth (1930-98) and his son Bjorn that were also recently on display, at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea. During the exhibition, two columns (Self Tower and Sugar Tower) were under construction, assembled from casts made at an on-site kitchen. Elsewhere in the spacious gallery, a floor was suspended to create a wall (The Floor I , 1973-1992). The installation Large Table Ruin (1978-1998)—a glorious confusion of wood planks, paints, brushes, tools, decomposing matter, antediluvian technology, ladders, shelves holding rows of glass bottles, cardboard boxes, sheets of paper, light bulbs, wire, a round table and chairs—told a similar story of use and decay. A thin, gray, tangible film of dust sat on top of everything, impartial in its adoption of ashtray, glue, paper, wood, tools, paint, and any and all else that stretched out under its undisputed reign. These works were a testament to the artists’ beliefs that everything about life is inherently bound to art, and that the material surrounding a man’s existence is subservient to the emotional and sensual meaning attached to it. This belief is also captured in the 128 components of Solo Scenes, a video diary created by Dieter Roth between 1997 and 1998 in which the artist “traced his own trajectory through days and places by setting up cameras in his studios in Germany, Switzerland and Iceland.”

The Roths’ art is as bound to time and space as William Cordova’s; in Cordova’s second solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., time was cited through the use of reclaimed wood, structural drawings, sculptures and paintings. In smoke signals (the trans-physics we knew about), 2011-12, a riot of multi-colored lines explode out of a cube-shaped form at the bottom right of the image. These multitudes of color are perhaps a reference to the transcultural complexity that is so prevalent a theme in Cordova’s work. The background is created out of sheets of gold leaf made to replicate the texture of a brick wall; the same background is repeated in extended improvisations in time (a.b.), 2011-2012, in which the drawing of a structure bearing graffiti is shown suspended mid-air, almost as if it had been lifted off the ground and was in a state of conflict regarding its true place of belonging. According to an essay by artist Ernesto Oroza, Cordova’s work acts as a radio that receives signals simultaneously from across cultures and extracts meaning from them. “The drawings and sculptures seem to behave like a pragmatic repertoire of insurgent structures, a catalogue of ingenious articulations, a systematic revision of the formal and useful value of materials.”

Born in 1971 in Lima, Peru, William Cordova has been interested in transcultural dialogue for most his artistic career. He is not alone in his commitment to reframing history. Liu Wei, and Dieter and Bjorn Roth, also seek to transform the trajectory of time and space by creating ruptures that allow the viewer to reread history through art.

Doug Aitken, Tam Van Tran and Miroslaw Balka recently had solo shows at 303 Gallery, Ameringer|McEnery|Yohe and Gladstone, respectively. At the outset, they seemed completely distinct, but as I wandered into each of these galleries I was almost forcibly reminded of the other two.

A gaping circular crater the size of a small car ruptured the gray cement floor of 303 Gallery. It was filled with murky water, turned milky with limestone deposits. Called Sonic Fountain, this work was a visual and aural treat. From five rods suspended above the crater trickled droplets of the milky water, “plop…plop…plop”; ripples spread out from five epicenters. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The plops echoed in the big space. The pace quickened and my ears detected a rhythm. “Aitken created a 15-minute composition where he programmed the pipes to drip in specific time intervals. If you listen carefully you’ll be able to hear the pattern,” the bespectacled gallery assistant told me. The pool emitted a faint glow even in broad daylight on a particularly sunny afternoon. I felt I was listening to a clock tick. A pile of rubble sat in the far corner of the space, perhaps made of bits of floor that were torn up to create the milky pond. It lay discarded, unwanted and messy. Although evocative of a post-apocalyptic, rubble-strewn landscape, the sonic experience was therapeutic.

Time is irreversible, relentless and in short supply. Among the other work shown, Fountain (Earth Fountain) is noteworthy for its expression of time’s inexorable flow. The show’s theme of a dystopian state of collapse was intensified through this arresting work, with its sense of deteriorating hope. The letters “A R T” stood in a rectangular dish filled with a muddy liquid substance in which dark brown foam collected around darker brown, porous rock formations. Looking like melted milk chocolate, the brown sludge oozed at a steady pace from the head of each three-dimensional letter, its repetitive recycling inviting and hypnotic. The apparently melting letters were suggestive of something discarded and dwindling. It looked like the artwork was sighing, contrite and broken.

Constant cacophonous movement is ironically peaceful. Miroslaw Balka’s The Order of Things was a lot to take in, visually and aurally. The installation was entered through a small white door that did nothing to prepare me for its impact. A huge rust-colored vat in the shape of an upside down trapezoid greeted my open-mouthed stare. A loud rush, like that of a waterfall, filled the room, and I could barely hear myself think. But the noise was interruptive in a way that was oddly welcome. I felt calm, as if this noise had wiped my mind clean of thought. The trapezoidal metal vat was halved and its pieces were placed neatly about five inches apart. An inky liquid gushed into them from two pipes positioned directly above. In the sunlight streaming into the space, the liquid took on a deep magenta hue, like wine. A few feet away from the vats sat a block of wood about 13 inches high. Sitting on it and staring up at the work from this angle was unsettling, because the angled form of the vat made it appear as if it were teetering dangerously, threatening to flatten me. My encounter with the work was multilayered—visual, aural and even tactile. Although I didn’t touch it, I could vividly imagine the vat’s rough metallic surface beneath my fingers. I could feel the inky liquid slosh around and be sucked into the pipes leading out and up, only to gush back into the vat in one systematic cycle of movement. But if watching it was therapeutic, as with Aitken’s Sonic Fountain, Balka’s behemoth also humbled me with its size and the ferocity of its sound. I imagine that the oil-like substance pouring into the vat represents the human urge for evil, part of a constant circle in which trauma is endured and contained. As the exhibition’s title suggests, this circle helps maintain “the order of things”—a reference to Michel Foucault’s book excavating historical patterns of human thought.

Tam Van Tran’s show, “Leaves of Ore,” was a beautiful sight from the street, his copper works shimmering invitingly to passerby. I wrestled with an urge to run my hands through the delicate, leafy, metallic protrusions with which Tran covered his canvases. The wafer-thin leaves of copper make the surfaces, which vary in size but are compositionally similar, look like they’ve been through a particularly unforgiving shredder. Stuck flat onto the canvas in some places and crumpled and torn up in others, the copper leaves fluttered in a light draft whose source I couldn’t identify. They responded to my movement, swishing lightly. It was like autumn, come early. The slight movement was, once again, extremely soothing. This is ironic, given that the works are reminiscent of ruined landscapes, the aftermaths of bloody battle. The effect is heightened by a lock or two of a dark straw-like material placed on each canvas, which looks disconcertingly like human hair, thrusting the work into a violent and deathly context. In this light, the constant swish of the leaves becomes more sinister—as if it were the only sign of movement on a battlefield. The theme of destruction continued with a work composed of a set of 12 cans in washes of military colours—forest green, muddy brown and an oddly cheerful yellow—each lined with rows of porcelain shrapnel, which formed sets of ferocious looking teeth. Broken and cratered ceramic works hang on the walls, their shattered surfaces made up of pieces of green, blue and brown ceramic that reminded me of an aerial view of the Earth.

It’s odd how watching something in a state of unrest can keep your mind at peace. Tran’s show however, when compared to Aitken and Balka’s, was decidedly more violent in theme, and its association to destruction and suffering more pronounced and poignant. This feeling lingered unsettlingly, and was not like the thoughtful repose that I was lulled into by Aitken’s and Balka’s exhibitions. Our history bears the scars of thousands of self-inflicted wounds, which Tran’s work seemed to trace.

Anyone who has ever passed through a painter’s studio knows that the space surrounding “the work” can be as enticing as whatever may be on the easel (or monitor, or notebook, or workbench). When I was packing up my last studio I took pictures of the stacks of works on paper that I had amassed there over two years. “Is this it?” I wondered as I scanned the contents of my nascent archive. I was freelancing during the day, bartending at night and painting when I got home until three or four in the morning.

Well-worn story aside, I began to worry that these activities created stark imbalances in my focus and time. Painting was the first to suffer: without my sustained immersion, it began to seem thin and haphazard. When I read Raphael Rubenstein’s treatise “Provisional Painting” (Art in America, May 2009) and its echo in Sharon Butler’s essay “The New Casualists” (The Brooklyn Rail, June 2011), I felt a narcotic sense of ease that the one-offs I was making finally, maybe, could be identified as a viable “new” form of art, a kind of series of experiments or abandoned starts that could pass as “finished” work. Moreover, a critical net was being cast out for the next new thing.

While doing research I came upon Dieter Roelstraete’s essay “The Business: On The Unbearable Lightness of Art” (e-flux journal, February 2013) and it, too, offered up a new(ish) take on the thinness, airiness and “lightnessness” embodied in much contemporary art. But his text seems to be an indictment of both Rubinstein’s “Provisional” painting and Butler’s  “self-amused but not unserious painters.” Roelstraete writes,

The origins of our current art-world-wide infatuation with the twinned rhetoric of effortlessness and weightlessness—with fleeting gestures and passing glances, minimalist elegance (sold to us as the acme of restraint) and understated subtlety, with the ephemeral and the ethereal, the nimble artifice of a tasteful, pseudo-aristocratic nonchalance—may have a much cruder economic cast…these artful celebrations of effortlessness may well be the result of (or worse still, merely covering up) a simple lack of time, focus and energy for making “work.”

Roelstraete not only criticizes a pervasive aesthetic but also points to the potential causes and conditions under which this type of tentative and harried work has come to be embraced.  Midpoint in his essay the author breaks voice and shouts “attention!:you are working already,” as he relates the myriad activities (reading essays, for one) required of the “arts professional,” who must perform them in tandem with whatever is at the center of his or her career (writing, curating, studio-assisting, etc.).

Roelstraete uses the term “Post-Fordist” to describe the information culture in which we live. In e-flux parlance the term is used as an opaque modifier for “today,” as though to simply say “today” were too subjective, too humanistic. Individual experience becomes subsumed by Post-Fordist theory, which purports to comprehensively describe the sociological conditions under which “we” live and work. Though our activities differ, they are nevertheless played-out under this diagnosis. This irksome bit of International Art English aside, Roelstraete brings us into the problem of work—that it encompasses our every waking moment, so that creative or nurturing endeavors are supplanted by managerial and administrative duties, which reduce not only time for painting but also desire for substance in it. The “artist” becomes a “practitioner.”

As I write this essay I am looking at a painting that I made around the time “Provisional Painting” was published. The tenets of slapdash, spontaneous and indifferent approach are unmistakably celebrated in this strange composition of acrylic on a broken pane of glass set in a painted frame. Whether or not this painting was made in response to an essay, it remains a sort of backdrop against which I write. (I’ve hung the painting above my desk and I see it every time I sit down at my computer.) It might be nothing more than a visual spasm by an overworked, frustrated painter, but it serves as a piece of connective tissue between art making and essay writing. While Rubenstein and Butler celebrate the provisionality of some current painting, Roelstraete urges us to look at how our myriad activities affect our individual efforts. In his conclusion, Roelstraete speaks to engagement and action. Perhaps our current situation quite simply is not conducive to sustained investment in a singular goal, but that does not negate the possibility that in spite of our divided attention we can all make new, carefully considered and rewarding work.

As one would expect of a Francis Alÿs’ project, “Reel-Unreel” came about as a result of a cooperative effort. This time, he joined forces with Afghani architect Ajmal Maiwandi and French film-maker Julien Delvaux. The exhibition’s titular work is a video that depicts two youths engaged in a simple, ludic action. Both boys run rather swiftly; the first unreels 35-mm film from a red spool that he steers with a stick, while the second rewinds the film left on the dusty streets back to his blue spool. They are pursued by an enthusiastic band of companions, filing along the streets of Kabul, past traffic, commerce, indifferent adults, goats, and curious young girls. The video achieves a lively expression of Kabul’s idiosyncratic texture. It starts and culminates with an overview of the cityscape from a drumlin. At its climax there is a dramatic loss, on the one hand, of the continuity of celluloid to an odd fire, and, on the other, of the first spool, which leaps over the cliff.

Also on view were three videos from the series Children’s Games, which Alÿs started to shoot in various cities in 2008. Among those shown was one featuring kids kite-running. Children, like animals—another constant feature of Alÿs’ work—fall outside of the rational urban context. Allowed to operate on the very boundaries of sanitary organizational functionality, the child, in her pre-linguistic jouissance and rambunctiously regressive ludic rituals, broadens the dominant symbolic order.

Accompanied by preparatory materials on a table, the videos are one half of the exhibition, the second being paintings, dozens of which were executed in Mexico, where Alÿs had retreated between trips to Afghanistan. Familiar features, such as small-scale renderings, are complemented with a new iconographic element that unites most paintings: color-bar combinations, like those that you might see on TV during technical adjustment or in the very late hours. These impersonal color bars, not unlike abstract technology, are laid over Afghan city scenes, barring figurative access to the represented historical reality.

However, mediation by means of representation is not what haunts these canvases, for if the viewer is attentive enough to the allure of the riddle offered, she cannot avoid drawing the swift conclusion suggested by an ominous clue left on the table. The clue is a photograph printed on standard letter paper, found among some dreary news reports. It shows an officer seated in front of numerous monitors, some showing similar color bars, others topographical renderings of the battlefield. One might think he manipulates unmanned aerial vehicles, and then the “image of Afghanistan conveyed by the media in the West” assumes almost the role of the target.

Why do we hunt for the organic amid the artificial, or the tangible inside the illusion? What is not a copy of its predecessor? Diana Cooper’s recent solo exhibition, “My Eye Travels,” fosters an optical deception of sorts, a falsity alongside the real. As the title proposes, the eye travels beyond the conventional viewing contours of the gallery and creates a mutating formation that spans the entire space. Architecture as a living organism breeds in hallucinogenic installations that include collaged photographs of traffic cones, mall escalators, construction machinery, shopping carts, synthetic ‘turf’ and discarded utilitarian objects. These elements combust and erode into interrelated organic constellations. Employing the gallery’s interior as her muse, Cooper interrupts the spatial order of things and disorients the viewer, challenging us to search for originals amid their replicas.

The viewer’s judgment is questioned at entry. What appear to be ventilation outlets located in the top right corner of the gallery’s largest room are actually black and white photographs mirroring an adjacent vent. Amid this kind of optical play, the viewer becomes actively engaged in decoding Cooper’s language. An evident clue is the frequent use of flight imagery, which alludes to a metaphysical oscillation between the reality-grounded and the fictive. Take, for example, the small mixed media collage Jetway 1 (2012-13), in which the viewer is led up a row of escalators though construction obstacles barricade the access point. The much larger Bale (2012-13) directly positions the viewer inside an airplane, within a chaotic web of photographs of shopping baskets and bales of shredded paper interwoven with graffiti and Cooper’s own hand-drawn marks. Again, the interplay with the gaze is critical; an airplane window opens new points of departure. In another large collage, Audience (2012-13), undulating rows of stadium seating are transfigured into structured geometries and metrical patterns. Cooper has arrived at formal symmetry by finding artificial color harmonies among the objects she juxtaposes. Variations of black and white have been utilized as nexus points, establishing order or deconstructing it.

The exhibition is regularly interrupted by images of surveillance cameras, directing their eyes towards the observer. The relationships among the viewer, the camera lens and the object are pertinent. Peepholes and reflections are another catalyst in Cooper’s new work, where we are provoked to read things we perhaps would normally avoid. Cooper questions what is fictitious in a world constructed by multiple realities. A timely exhibition, “My Eye Travels” is a nomadic simulation that reflects a moment of disillusion, experimentation and chaos.

When El Anatsui’s large textile pieces, which he refers to as sheets, travel around the world –from Nigerian museums to New York galleries to the famed Venice Biennial and so on— they arrive at their destination in small, even diminutive, crates. Inside, each is delicately folded as if it were a piece of cloth. For those who are familiar with Anatsui’s work, this method of transportation may come as a shock: the artist’s sheets are immensely expansive accumulations of discarded liquor bottle tops sewn together, forming intricate patterns, spanning entire museum and gallery walls.

The fact that his large-scale works are easily folded to a fraction of their size and shipped off, traveling around the globe—an unusual characteristic for monumental-size art—reflects the migratory nature of both internationally successful artists and corporate globalism. The portable, or nomadic, aspect of Anatsui’s sheets has become central to their meaning (and, perhaps, to their international appeal). He engineers them to be uniquely flexible, creating artworks that are dependent upon curators to hang and drape according to their will. In this sense, he involves the institution and exhibition structure in the artistic process, in what Anatsui describes as the ‘nomadic aesthetic’ of his works.  In a 2006 interview, he said, “The idea is not only about being able to move them, but also that each time they are moved, they have to be configured afresh, most of the time by other parties apart from the artist.

Upon entering “Pot of Wisdom,” El Anatsui’s third solo exhibition at Jack Shaiman Gallery, one is immediately confronted with a strong, cohesive body of the Ghanarian artist’s recent work, presented in his signature cloth-like style, composed of a vast array of bottle caps. All the pieces hang against the gallery walls with the exception of Uwa (2012), which is twisted and rolled into a spherical configuration that is either caught in the process of unraveling or in the midst of developing into a singular, globular whole. His work mirrors the postmodern processes of globalization with its fugitive, in-between, and mutable qualities.

In the back room of the gallery hangs Untitled (2012), a large sheet that resembles a satellite view of a large metropolis, like an image on GoogleMaps. In certain parts of the composition bottle caps are sewn together in abundant heaps, but these heavy accumulations seem to slowly disperse as one examines the bottle-top patterns on the collected pile. These areas, which contribute to the work’s compositional balance, resemble a bird’s eye view of sprawling suburban streets and rural roads. Images of vast lands punctuated by cities and towns, as well as the roads that connect them, come to mind in Anatsui’s works, suggesting points of contact in the journeys of the nomad.  For instance, his bottle-caps take on a deeper resonance with histories of colonial contact when one considers that liquor was a major commodity traded by Europeans for West African slaves.

Anatsui’s hangings gently alert viewers to the human histories and relationships behind the materials that surround us, interlacing object and metaphor like elements within a cloth. The “nomadic aesthetic” supports a fluidity of ideas and the transient, impermanent nature of form. Despite the permanence of metal, El Anatsui’s primary medium, his works are temporally and spatially ephemeral, developing a new life with each space they occupy.

A maniacally smiling cartoon character wearing a polka-dot bow hovers amid a succession of dangling nooses in Here’s . . . Honey (1992), a large-scale “chalkboard” wall drawing running the length of the entry gallery of Gary Simmons’s exhibition. In Bosko, a 1930s Warner Bros. animated TV-series, “Honey” (like “Bosko”) represents an African-American caricature. She is doubled in Simmons’s procession—appearing first behind the ropes, then in front—creating a frozen moving-image animated by the progression of the viewer’s body. Like a film reel stuck between frames, the image stutters between plot lines, suspended in a psychological and historical space.

Adjacent to Honey, two brick pillars topped with carved-stone figures of hooded Ku-Klux-Klansmen support a partially open black iron gate, which frames the entryway to the main gallery. Klan Gate (1992), through which the viewer must pass, forms a literal and symbolic threshold, causing awareness of implicit participation and invoking a racial subtext. The physical gesture, image, and idea of a state of absence is central to Simmons’s work, which investigates the politics of cultural memory and historical remembering.

In Bonham Theatre (2010), a ghostly, chalk-white image of a drive-in theater marquee disappears into a steel-gray background like a passing memory—or, as if seen through the window of a fast-moving car at night. Simmons’s rubbed-out, layered images and cross-referential visual strategies emerge through a fresh coat of tactical obsolescence. His work has a residue of the 1990s. It holds to a certain conceptual and contextual distancing and brushes over styles and modes of critique.

In the upstairs gallery, the absent artist is signified by a pair of bright white leather boxing gloves tacked to the wall next to his name typed in vinyl lettering. Everforward… (1993) appears here as a kind of a proxy for the artist. The words “NEVERBACK” and “EVERFORWARD” are stitched in gold thread on the cuffs of the gloves, replacing the ubiquitous Everlast brand logo. Alluding to a mantra of industriousness and perseverance, they suggest the notion of artist as tireless performer. (They also foreshadow Simmons’s subsequent boxing-ring installation, Step into the Arena [The Essentialist Trap], 1994, in the Whitney Museum’s collection.)  Simmons’ title, Everforward…, undermines the implication of the metaphorical “hanging up” of the gloves in an ironical championing of the spirit of progress.