- Aspen Art Museum is an artist-founded institution dedicated to supporting artists in the development of bold ideas to shape our museum and the field of art today.
Instead of “eracism,” think of Simmons’s update of action painting as an exercise without a winless like Jackson Pollock expressing himself on the barn floor than Vito Acconci boxing his own shadow. He works with tweaks, slips, inversions, but never knockout blows. In Everforward…, a sculpture from 1993, two white boxing gloves hang from their laces. Where it would read “Everlast” in the trademark font, one is embroidered in gold thread with “Everforward,” the other with “Neverback.” Enter the ring, then: Step into the Arena (The Essentialist Trap) from 1994 is a boxing ring, the mat of which is black with feet drawn in white chalk, as if replicating dance steps; pairs of black tap shoes drape over the ropes, like battered combat-ants or sneakers in the city.
In Simmons’s paintings, row houses burn and so does the Hollywood sign. They burn but don’t burn up. What would it look like if there were, so to speak, no final bell—if the class and the fight and the painting and the human race kept going? It might be more like a dance, hosted on a wooden stage in front of an oddball bank of speakers vibrating in the night. In 2014, for the Prospect.3 Biennial in New Orleans, Simmons made such a stage, Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark, from scrap wood from the Treme neighborhood. The city, and that low-lying area of town in particular, still remain ravaged by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina as much as by the uneven gentrification that followed. To design the work—a sort of arena, a conceptual platform—Simmons looked to Lee “Scratch” Perry and the ethos of dancehall, where a lack of high-end instruments and recording gear led to innovative sounds produced with metal gratings and other scraps.
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General operating support is provided by Colorado Creative Industries. CCI and its activities are made possible through an annual appropriation from the Colorado General Assembly and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
General operating support is provided by Colorado Creative Industries. CCI and its activities are made possible through an annual appropriation from the Colorado General Assembly and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.