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Cop Head 69, 2006, acrylic ERASERHEAD:
and silk-screen ink on GARY SIMMONS
canvas, 193 x 152 cm.
Courtesy Peres Projects,
Los Angeles and Berlin For his forthcoming show at
Simon Lee, London, titled The
House of Pain, the New York-
based artist Gary Simmons
has referenced the idea of
Darwinism gone mad explored in
H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr
Moreau (1896), and the long-
defunct, debunked practice of
phrenology. But you mightn’t
know it to look at his work:
against bright single-colour
painted panels of yellow
or blue, smudgy white chalk
drawings are rendered like
high-velocity phantoms, part
visible, part rubbed out. On
closer inspection these are
skull drawings, whose shapes
are confused by Simmons’s
signature acts of erasure and
obfuscation. These erasures
allude to the way ideas become
redundant and how history
fades, but also to how certain
negative cultural prejudices
can never be truly removed.
Since the late 1980s the artist
has used images taken from
, 2006–7, collage, 35 x 28 cm. white American culture, from
Disney cartoon characters to
1940s comic books and the movie
Deliverance (1972), mining both
buried and deliberate political DEATH HEAD:
agendas to sophisticated, DASH SNOW
ethereal effect. Skye Sherwin
Three or four years ago I GARY SIMMONS:
was leaving a club in New THE HOUSE OF PAIN
York’s East Village (alright, Not Yet Titled (‘Good Knot’) Photo: Jochen Littkemann. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin 4 MAY – 9 JUNE
I’ll admit it, it was Lit) ejaculate over human skulls), SIMON LEE, LONDON
at about 4 am. Walking down and that night of yesteryear he WWW.SIMONLEEGALLERY.COM
Second Avenue on my way home was photographing some howling
I saw some guy kicking in the angel-headed hipster raging
glass door of the Provenzano- against the dying of the light.
Lanza Funeral Home. ‘Wow’,
I thought, ‘he must be really In a new show at Contemporary
grieving, really drunk or just Fine Arts in Berlin, Snow is
really depraved.’ showing some of his works
on paper, which are just as
A year later Dash Snow petulant in spirit as his
explodes onto the art scene: photos. ‘Works on paper’,
a young descendant of the though, is a very dignified
De Menils, one of America’s label for collages that include
great art-collecting the phrase ‘Cemetery = the land
families, he takes decisively of the free’ spelled out with
imperfect-moment Polaroids cigarette butts and a New York
of a narcissistic über-cool Post with Saddam Hussein on the
‘underworld’. That very scene cover splattered with glitter-
outside the funeral home is coated semen. James Westcott
captured in one of Snow’s
hormone-charged photos. I had DASH SNOW: THE END OF
been the unwitting witness LIVING… THE BEGINNING OF
to… art history in the making. SURVIVAL, TO 23 JUNE AT CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS,
Snow is obsessed with death BERLIN, WWW.CFA-BERLIN.COM
(for a new piece, he plans to
Skullduggery, 2007, oil and pigment on canvas, 213 x 213 cm.
Courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London, and Metro Pictures, New York
ARTREVIEW three.linfour.lin
p 31-40 Dispatches AR May07.indd34 34 30/3/07 01:06:48
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