At PAMM, Gary Simmons Addresses What America Can't Erase

Empty shoes, chalk-smeared blackboards, a boxing ring with steps but no fighters — when looking at artwork by Gary Simmons, it's best to think about what isn't there. "Public Enemy," the New York native's new show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, is full of displays where something seems missing, forcing the viewer to ask what should be there and why it isn't.

According to Franklin Sirmans, director of the PAMM, a throughline of Simmons' work is America's tendency to erase things — people, places, ideas — that aren't desirable. "I think back to just a simple idea, that conceptual idea of erasure, and him looking at our history and thinking about when [Robert] Rauschenberg erases de Kooning," Sirmans explains. In 1953, Rauschenberg literally rubbed out a drawing by Willem de Kooning in order to make a new work of art. It was a symbolic gesture, a rejection of de Kooning's generation, which prioritized action painting.

"Rauschenberg is trying to get rid of something; he's trying to get past a threshold," he continues. "It's not about your gesture; it's not about your expression. This mark-making that we like to heroicize — it's really a much different kind of thing. And we're here for the thoughts that are embedded in the material, not just the beauty of the material. And that's what, I think, Gary discovered and has pushed in ways that no other artists possibly could, this idea that you can erase something, but the trace remains."

It's by the action of erasure that Simmons created his most famous series, the chalkboard drawings he used to excavate American culture. Cartoon characters, silhouettes of buildings, words, and names — all are smeared and distorted, and the ways in which Simmons has altered the outlines also matter. Two paintings trace the work of Philip Johnson, the famous modernist architect whose work was once synonymous with progress. In the Blink of an Eye shows Johnson's Glass House. The chalk smears are horizontal; the house appears to fly past us at the speed of progress. In Reflection of a Future Past, the erasure marks trace the circular form of Johnson and Richard Foster's pavilion for the 1964 New York World's Fair, again spinning us into the future.
Johnson was a Nazi sympathizer. Robert Moses, the urban planner who organized the fair and built Flushing-Corona Park, displaced vast amounts of Black and brown people and redlined and destroyed entire neighborhoods to build New York's highways in the name of "urban renewal." Double Cinder places the dark side of progress in starker relief, depicting a pair of housing project tower blocs, the chalk smears reaching up like flames. An obvious reference to the burning of the Bronx aside, what is being erased in this picture? Many of the most infamous failed public housing projects of the 20th Century — Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis — were, in a sense, doomed from the start, thanks to neglect and poor policy decisions made by racists like Moses. They were demolished, and so was the World's Fair pavilion. The buildings may have vanished, Simmons says, but the ideas and attitudes behind them remain, influencing our lives in untold ways.

Like Double Cinder, in Hollywood, the same firey streaks consume the famous sign — "Burn Hollywood Burn," as declared Public Enemy, the group that gives this show its name. America's entertainment industry is another domain where racist ideas have existed since its inception. The smears resemble motion lines in Simmons' drawings of Bosko and the crows from Disney's Dumbo, examples of early cartoons thinly disguising virulent racist stereotypes which were later sanitized, memory holed, or presented with disclaimers.

The body — or lack thereof –—is the focus of Simmons' installations. Step Into the Arena (The Essentialist Trap) features a boxing ring, empty but for the gloves hanging on the ropes and the chalkmarked dance steps diagramed on the mat. The athletes who put their bodies on the line for our amusement are gone, the only remnant being how they moved. Other installations feature boxing memorabilia — the pair of robes in Us & Them, the monogrammed pair of gloves in Everforward — but no one to wear them.
"It's about the figure, but the figure is always invisible or not there," Sirmans adds, "which is something that, in terms of Black consciousness, we often talk about, the greatest example being Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. You have the boxing ring with no figures in it, but the dance steps are. You have the robes in Us & Them where there are no figures, but clearly, these are robes for bodies. You might have signifiers of Blackness in Lineup, especially considering when it was created in 1993, but in Us & Them, we're talking about universal ideas of us and them that we all can relate to."

Absence is felt most sharply in Lineup. Eight pairs of gold-plated sneakers are placed in front of a police lineup chart. The men that might have filled them are nowhere to be found — dead? Disappeared into the hell of the prison system? Created in 1993 as sneaker culture began its rise, the piece also considers the strangeness of a world where human life is cheaper than a consumer good like a pair of Jordans.

"At that moment in the early '90s, it was relatively new, this idea that sneakers were this valuable thing that people would steal off people's feet," Sirmans says. "So then Gary, taking those kinds of shoes and bronzing them, like we used to do with little kids when they have their first shoes, it's this way of kind of memorializing it, this way of kind of giving it some patina of longevity, because otherwise we just buy new shoes and throw them away. But in this case, it's also then positioned into this lineup space, which is a kind of commentary on the lack of an actual body that's attached to these shoes. So, are we actually considering a person? No, we're putting the commodity, this shoe, above the person, and then we use the lineup as the backdrop. And so it's also playing into the idea of crime — how did someone get these, and why is it something that somebody would actually commit a crime for?"
All these artworks have a ghostly quality — the spectral quality of the chalk smears, the empty garments in Lineup, and the rack of Ku Klux Klan robes that make up Six-X. Simmons himself alludes to this in a discussion in the show's catalogue. "A ghost is a presence you feel but cannot see. It's the hidden element in the room, the mental traces that are always with us: personal experiences, fantasies, perceptions, or world events. My work, in general, comes from the memories of events and images that I, and I imagine others, are haunted by."

The car-driven infrastructure built by racist planners haunts us. Memories of denigration and dehumanization haunt us. But not every ghost in "Public Enemy" is unfriendly. Reconstructing Memories of the Black Ark, a tribute to Lee "Scratch" Perry, the legendary reggae producer, is also included in the show. Taking the form of a hodgepodge stack of speakers meant to evoke a classic reggae sound system, the PAMM plans to activate the installation with musical performances several times throughout the run of the show, creating something akin to the collaborative process in Perry's Black Ark studios, or perhaps the Bronx street parties that gave rise to hip-hop. Music, community, joyful moments — these are things that can linger longer than trauma.

"Gary Simmons: Public Enemy." Tuesday, December 5, through April 28, 2024, at Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; 305-375-3000; pamm.org. Tickets cost $12 to $16; free for members and children under 6.