The Art Beast

This blog is dedicated to showcasing works of art throughout history. Questions, comments, and requests are welcome!

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Like Mother Like Daughter: Laurie Simmons Passes Reality-Bending Legacy to Girls Star

Laurie Simmons’ daughter, Lena Dunham, has recently been thrown into the spotlight with the success of her new HBO series, Girls, but Simmons herself has been a well-known New York photographer for over 30 years. Both women seem to enjoy blurring fact and fiction, with viewers of Simmons’ work wondering if what they’re seeing is real or simulated, and viewers of Girls questioning how much of the show is from Dunham’s own biography.

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I thought, ‘If I’m going to pick up this camera, even though I won’t call myself specifically a photographer, I’m going to learn the history. I’m going to read every book I can. I’m going to go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at their collection. I’m going to go to galleries and ask them to pull out works for me to see.’ I did that so that I could be conversant in the history and then start to play around with the camera in a way that was maybe a little bit less expected.
Laurie Simmons (via cavetocanvas)

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cavetocanvas: William Merritt Chase, North River Shad, c. 1910 From the Art Institute of Chicago: William Merritt Chase’s North River Shad is a striking departure from his better-known Impressionist renderings of city parks and scenes in Shinnecock, New York. Here he was primarily interested in depicting surface texture; the fish displays the artist’s virtuosity with pigment and brushwork. Brilliant white brushstrokes form its iridescent scales, accentuating the weight and density of the voluminous creature. Chase painted numerous versions of fish still lifes, many of which were quickly purchased by museums across the country. Because of the popularity of these works, Chase worried that he would be remembered only “as a painter of fish.”

cavetocanvas:

William Merritt Chase, North River Shad, c. 1910

From the Art Institute of Chicago:

William Merritt Chase’s North River Shad is a striking departure from his better-known Impressionist renderings of city parks and scenes in Shinnecock, New York. Here he was primarily interested in depicting surface texture; the fish displays the artist’s virtuosity with pigment and brushwork. Brilliant white brushstrokes form its iridescent scales, accentuating the weight and density of the voluminous creature. Chase painted numerous versions of fish still lifes, many of which were quickly purchased by museums across the country. Because of the popularity of these works, Chase worried that he would be remembered only “as a painter of fish.”

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cavetocanvas: Laurie Simmons, Walking Gun, 1991 From the Metropolitan Museum of Art: In the early 1990s, Simmons created wickedly funny large-format photographs showing spotlit doll legs topped with various toy-objects: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. By aping the scale and impact of billboards and movie screens, Simmons turns the “directorial” mode of slick staging and lighting against itself, to reveal the spectacle of “woman-as-object” in contemporary culture. Sending up the old-movie trope of representing the man creeping in shadow carrying a gun, the artist offers instead the death-dealing seductress of film noir in miniature, a doll capable of killing its master at a moment’s notice.

cavetocanvas:

Laurie Simmons, Walking Gun, 1991

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

In the early 1990s, Simmons created wickedly funny large-format photographs showing spotlit doll legs topped with various toy-objects: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. By aping the scale and impact of billboards and movie screens, Simmons turns the “directorial” mode of slick staging and lighting against itself, to reveal the spectacle of “woman-as-object” in contemporary culture. Sending up the old-movie trope of representing the man creeping in shadow carrying a gun, the artist offers instead the death-dealing seductress of film noir in miniature, a doll capable of killing its master at a moment’s notice.

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cavetocanvas:

Laurie Simmons, New Kitchen/Aerial View/Seated (top), First Bathroom/Woman Standing (middle), Woman Watching TV (bottom), 1978-79

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

In 1972 Simmons came across a dollhouse of the kind that she had played with while growing up in the Ozzie-and-Harriet world of the 1950s. The early 1970s were the heyday of the feminist movement, however, and such toys for girls were viewed suspiciously as agents of persuasive indoctrination. Simmons nevertheless also understood their more complex allure. Located at the intersection between personal and collective memory, these dollhouses represented for an entire generation a set of untenable illusions that, while fading, nonetheless stubbornly clung to the unconscious.

The artist’s first images of her miniature dream home were produced using a do-it-yourself, mail-order “Cibachrome Discovery Kit” that yielded fittingly small prints. Their blatant artifice and brash coloring represented a significant shift in photographic practice away from the reigning standards of traditional art photography and the documentary style. Like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills of the same moment, these deceptively simple works not only revealed how gender identity is constructed through the codes and signs of representation but also paved the way for the fervent experimentalism that would characterize photography in the following decades.