Big Camera/Little Camera

Laurie Simmons, Brothers/Horizon, 1979. Cibachrome; 5 ¼ x 7 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, © Laurie Simmons.

In the original ending of the classic film noir Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), the femme fatale figure opens a box containing some unspecified nuclear material. The protagonists, played by Maxine Cooper and Ralph Meeker, stagger through surf and sand as the Malibu house behind them burns. Flashes of light irradiate the night in an uncanny scene that reads as a deliberate reference to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the impending threat of nuclear disaster. The meaning of the “cleansing, combustible element,” as critic Alain Silver put it, is drawn out in the film’s “appropriately hellish” lighting.[1] By the eighties, however, such earnest juxtapositions of war and American domesticity looked dated. In the wake of works like Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home series, the definitive exemplar of this strategy, artists tried to find new ways to represent the relationship between bourgeois America and manmade catastrophe.

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent comprehensive retrospective of photographer Laurie Simmons, Big Camera/Little Camera, presents an artist who has consistently returned to similar themes over the decades. Beginning with Simmons’s earliest small-scale photos and moving chronologically through her oeuvre, the show includes many of her most famous works, as well as judicious samples of her career’s major phases. It concludes with some recent projects, showing how she has developed, refined, and occasionally got bogged down in a handful of key themes. Long a sharp-eyed critic of fifties visual culture, she deals with big social issues through the visual language of the everyday (the language, that is, of a very historically particular, American middle-class “everyday”).

For example, Simmons yokes atomic disaster to everyday life in a telling print from her Tourism series that brings to mind the finale of Kiss Me Deadly. Tourism: Bikini Atoll (1984) shows four female figurines watching a nuclear test explosion. One leans back in surprise while her companions press eagerly forward, the leftmost figure tossing her ponytail with such eagerness that it’s difficult to read anything like horror or recoil. These are middle-class Americans enjoying the spectacle of imperial violence. But, especially when read in light of the works arrayed in the retrospective, they have none of Rosler’s polemical bite. For Simmons it’s not really a fundamental problem that Americans treat disasters in foreign places like Bikini Atoll or large-scale violence against foreign populations as spectacular tourist treats; the artist, mother of Lena Dunham, turns out to traffic in some of the same problematic white feminism as her daughter and to embody a theatrical, bourgeois politics. Her camera celebrates the gaze of white, middle-class women who suffered patriarchal repression and the scopophilic male gaze, to be sure, but who also dependably endorsed American exceptionalism and played up racial hierarchies ad nauseam.[2] If these issues show through most clearly in her portrayal of women from the immediate postwar period, they also crop up in her recent work where the few women of color inevitably appear as sexualized objects, props for a clumsy critique of the pornography industry.

Simmons is best known today for her pictures of animated objects. Beginning in the 1980s, she added legs and arms to houses, handbags, cameras, and guns, sometimes using elaborate costumes and props. The retrospective has a good sample of these works and, by placing them alongside her later works with dollhouses and ventriloquist dummies, the curators show how she developed strategies for exploring these odd human surrogates. Critics have read her interest in dolls and animated figures in light of the talking things that populated contemporary TV shows like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but Simmons also gave her work a political slant.[3] “Conceptually, I loved the notion of ventriloquism,” she says, “men speaking through surrogate selves and not having to take responsibility for their thoughts or actions.”[4] In one of her oddest and most compelling series, she commissioned a dummy of herself and photographed it surrounded by male dolls. Does the artist seize the masculine power to speak without consequences for herself? Can a female dummy exercise that power with all the force of a male one?

Other works focus more explicitly on the middle-class home. The Underneath series (1998) inserts domestic scenes between the legs of anonymous women, all made with the glossy Cibachrome process that renders colors boldly garish. House Underneath (Standing) shows a woman lifting a white dress to reveal a single-family house replete with garage and an idyllic surround of grass and trees. The house sits on a slightly warped mirror, giving the viewer a voyeuristic glimpse up between the subject’s thighs. The photographs, rendering women as colossi, reference the ways that domestic mothers were vilified as well as worshipped in the forties and fifties. Philip Wylie’s widely read Generation of Vipers (1942) warned against “the destroying mother” who, among other things, dominated and softened husbands and sons.[5] Simmons’s work is a tongue-in-cheek response to this pervasive image, ironizing it by literally staging the massive mother.

But if Simmons acutely identifies and pictures the complex gender relations that governed bourgeois domesticity in the postwar period, pointing out just how strangely sinister that world really was, she looks less acutely at other issues. Her recent works look at Japanese cosplay culture and sex-doll technology in ways that can only be described as Orientalizing. The Love Doll (2009–11) features an elaborately posed Japanese sex doll customized by Simmons herself. “She is a peculiarly Asian fantasy, exquisite and insanely well sculpted,” says the photographer, who recalls that she visited Japan desperate “to bring something back that would change my work.” Where she once trained a critical eye on her own childhood, she now turns to essentialist, exoticizing clichés, raiding other cultures for inspiration. “I was very aware of her Japaneseness when I first got her. She seemed to spring from that culture so completely.”[6] This shallow engagement shows through in the pictures; Simmons herself seems to restage the blasé attitude with which toy American women regard the rest of the world in Tourism: Bikini Atoll. Ultimately, this retrospective demonstrates how an artist’s perspicuity in one area doesn’t always translate well, mirroring the ways that white feminists precisely dissected their own conditions of oppression while turning a blind eye to the logics of race and empire that sustained bourgeois domesticity.

July 2019