Laurie Simmons: Avatar Artist For Our Age

From two concurrent exhibitions:
Clothes Make The Man: Works from 1990-1994, at Mary Boone Gallery
2017: The Mess and Some New, at Salon 94, NYC
Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban

We live in the age of the avatar, and over the course of several decades, Laurie Simmons has proven herself to be the ultimate avatar artist for our age. (Think of her shocking 2015 “The Love Doll” series: sophisticated Japanese sex toys beautifully chronicled in suburban household settings, like Dare Star’s classic 1950s character “The Lonely Doll.”)

Laurie Simmons, at Mary Boone Gallery

Long before the Internet was all-pervasive, with its selfies, Instagrams and ubiquitous gaming, Simmons honed her art of using inanimate surrogates as stand-ins for human subjects. Back in the late 1970s, when Cindy Sherman was creating her iconic Untitled Film Stills, Simmons was on a parallel track, staging scenes of miniature plastic housewives in dollhouses.

Simmons played with larger dolls in the 1990s, cleverly dressing wide-eyed male resin models of actual Howdy-Doodyish ventriloquist dummies in vintage boys’ clothing and taking photographs of them in simulated situations. What did such boy-men fantasize about? Menage a trois? masculine muscles and derrieres? barbecued chicken?

Laurie Simmons, at Mary Boone Gallery

Simmons imagined the scenes for them, depicted in comic-strip air balloons above the dummies’ heads. For her current show of this work, Clothes Make the Man, 1990-1994, at Mary Boone, the actual dummies, seated on miniature chairs and hung on the wall at eye level, are coupled with the series of photographs, entitled “Café of the Inner Mind,” creepily bringing to life the dummies’ erotic dreams.

Laurie Simmons, at Mary Boone Gallery

Not for nothing are they called ‘dummies,’ and Simmons’ almost clinical dissection of their banal fantasies cruelly cuts them down to size. At the same time the show is presciently in lock-step with the “Me Too” movement culminating in the recent indictments of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein for sex crimes. (The dummies were also actors in Simmons’ somewhat obscure 2006 film, “The Music of Regret,” which weirdly matched Meryl Streep, a friend of the artist, with the pint-sized characters, here depicted as potential philanderers and malefactors.) In the backroom of the gallery, a second series of photographs, “Walking & Lying Objects” (1991) gives legs to an anthropomorphized hotdog, tomato, and doughnut, among other foodstuffs, and prefigures similar images in the film, which features such inanimate objects as a clock and a dollhouse dancing on limber legs.

Laurie Simmons, at Mary Boone Gallery

In a double-exhibit whammy, Simmons’ simultaneous show at Salon 94, The Mess and Some New, the artist gets up close and pseudo-personal. The  series of portraits of women in both real and body-painted clothes includes remarkable images of her two daughters, Lena and Grace Dunham, as well as a wall-length mural of a color-coordinated sea of plastic detritus–much of it, ironically, of cleaning products–fittingly entitled, The Mess, 2017.

Laurie Simmons, at Salon 94

The “Some New” portion of the show features Lena (Pink) dressed as Audrey Hepburn curled in a chair as she chats on the phone, and Grace (Orange) in jacket and sideburns as Rudolph Valentino. Other models include a transgender beauty in blue, Hannah (Aqua) two subjects sporting ornate painted-on jewelry, Andrianna (Red), and Shirin (Yellow), and a lovey blonde, Hayden Dunham (White), in a beige turtleneck simulated sweater that clearly reveals her nipples. Payton for Harper’s Bazaar (Pink) is a hybrid of a model and amime clothed in painted-on couture, created for a series in the June/July 2018 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

Laurie Simmons, at Salon 94

In its use of painted imagery on live models, (done according to Simmon’s specifications by a body of makeup artists) the show continues where Simmons’ last series, the 2014 “How We See/Look,” left off.  That featured fashion models with hyper-realistic but simulated eyes painted on their closed eyelids. Animes? Avatars? Laurie Simmons’ unique and disturbing photographic art eerily plays with the hyper-reality of our present day and near future, in which gender fluidity, virtual reality and the penchant for personal avatars push the Pygmalion myth into brand new territory. 

Laurie Simmons, at Mary Boone Gallery

Phoebe Hoban has written about culture and the arts for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, ARTnews, and The New York Observer, among others. She is the author of three artist biographies: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, (1998), published as an e-book in May, 2016; Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty, (2010) and Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open, (2014).