Gary Simmons, "Here's . . . Honey," 1992 (photo courtesy Metro Pictures)
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.
Gary Simmons, "Klan Gate," 1992 (photo courtesy Metro Pictures)
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.