In a witty and often disturbing installation of sculptural objects, Gary Simmons explored the ideological structures that link the conformist values of bourgeois educational systems with the art institution. Simmons’ basic strategy is to make a trope of that Marxist staple, “class,” by blurring semantic and contextual distinctions between classroom, art-world classification, and the roles perpetuated by the dominant class structure. These relationships were established from the moment the viewer entered the gallery lobby. The first thing to come into view was Eraser Chair (all works, 1989), a Beuysian schoolroom chair composed entirely of blackboard erasers. Its isolation and vacancy raised the question, Where is the student? The answer was immediate: in the far corner stood a tall white dunce cap resting on a wooden stool (Big Dunce). The object, which acted as a stand-in for the pupil’s errancy, suggested an equation between educational misfits (bad boys) and artistic nonconformists (bad Beuys). However, such notions of deviancy were short-lived, circumscribed by the commercial and reifying context of the gallery itself. Just as Beuys has become an icon of the European leftist art conscience, so the artist as brat (e.g. Jeff Koons) has become yet another cog in art’s profit-making machinery.
Although Simmons seems to indict such coopting hypocrisy, he is also aware of his own role in perpetuating it. His work thus takes the ideologically uncomfortable position of resting its case on its own conformist shortcomings. This was underlined by the deliberate, ersatz-conceptualist, clinical regimentation of the exhibit itself. In Private Schoolroom, Simmons presented nine child-size desks (each accompanied by a microphone) neatly arranged in three rows of three. This Orwellian evocation of simulated freedom of speech masking educational mind control was reinforced by Disinformation Paragraph, in which eight horizontal rows of chalkboards of varying lengths were arranged in the form of an abstracted wall text. Their esthetic associations with Minimalist sculpture and conceptualism (one thinks of Joseph Kosuth’s black-barred Freudian texts) also drew clear parallels between stifling art-historical pigeonholing and rigid educational hierarchies.
Although much of Simmons’ work is obvious and clichéd (the fetishism of Golden Rule, for example, in which a 12-inch ruler covered in gold leaf is simultaneously presented as trophy, art treasure, and royal icon), his didacticism is transcended and redeemed by Six-X, a stainless-steel cloakroom rack bearing six child-size Ku Klux Klan uniforms on hangers, each with an accompanying hood staring vacantly at the viewer. By associating racist iconography with school uniforms and off-the-rack, ready-to-wear consumables, Simmons draws attention to the systematized support structure that underscores all conformity. Significantly, Simmons’ strength and weakness as an artist lies in his refusal to define his own role in this structure. Is he insider or outsider, perpetrator or victim? That Simmons is able to “rescue” an intellectually thin argument through the provocative trope of one work suggests that he, too, is treading a thin line between the extremes of banality and insight.
—Colin Gardner
