Gary Simmons and the phantoms of racial and cultural history at his MCA retrospective ‘Public Enemy’

The fourth floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, through Oct. 1, will be a haunted house, a liminal space, a gateway to a past not settled. That’s one way to describe “Public Enemy,” a sweeping new survey of four decades of absorbing work by Gary Simmons, whose name alone, first heard in the late 1980s, conjures the ghosts of the art world’s past. Indeed, the show itself, with its light touch belying histories of trauma, takes the shape of a ghost. Simmons traffics in ghosts. He paints, sketches, fabricates, smudges, erases, mutes, conceptualizes. But his true medium is ghosts, phantoms of a racial and cultural history that, however faint they may become, never entirely vanish.

Ancient Looney Tunes stereotypes smear across canvases, yet remain.

Actual haunted houses — the Long Island home you know better as the Amityville Horror, the house in “Psycho” — look dim in one drawing, then barely perceptible a few pieces later. Wood salvaged from the wrath of Hurricane Katrina becomes the walls of new audio speakers. The tension between persistence and impermanence always looms.

Since the waning months of the Reagan administration, Simmons’ ghosts have been, ironically, indelible. Even heavy-handedly so. (When I entered the show, there was Simmons on a video reminding us: “Sometimes art has to punch you in the face.”) One installation in “Public Enemy” recalls, via old video and photographs, a 1996 work he organized in the skies of downtown Chicago, using a skywriting plane to leave stars that, like actual shooting stars, ask you to make a wish, and not dawdle; it’s almost gone. Another installation is a row of high-top basketball shoes with no one in them, the sneakers gold and arranged against a wall resembling the backdrop of a police lineup.

In that piece alone you feel the specters of professional sports, incarceration, celebrity ...

So much cultural legacy gets referenced in the art of Gary Simmons, I called him at his Los Angeles studio to pick through a few frequent influences and recurring images.

1970s American Cinema

If you are of a certain age — Gen X, ah hem — you remember when movies looked cheap on the surface then occupied your head (and squatted on VHS rentals for years). Simmons, born in New York City in 1964, straddles that generational line between movie theaters and home video, when metaphors for a changing society looked thinly veiled in mainstream movies. Simmons’ “Here, Piggy Piggy” (2001) is a set of huge porcelain-white bobbleheads of hillbillies from “Deliverance.” “Double Cinder” (2007) is one of a series of images of Los Angeles real estate (including the “Hollywood” sign) seemingly burning; what binds them is that they were locations in the fourth “Planet of the Apes” movie, “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,” which, offensive as it may be, was made partly about the Watts riots of 1965 and argued implicitly in favor of a violent confrontation with white authority figures. Other Simmons works (not in the MCA show) find inspiration in “The Shining” and the 1977 adaptation of “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

“With ‘Deliverance,’ I was always fascinated with how the idea of otherness gets actualized, namely through a straight male fear of being overwhelmed — sexually, and otherwise — by a whole other society,” Simmons said. “I was obsessed with movies where some aspect of nature overtakes society. At an early age I was interested in how science fiction talks race and class, and with ‘Conquest,’ you could say arguably it’s about fears of the Black Panthers in 1972. I love the scene at the end where destruction is happening everywhere and (the ape leader) has a kind of communication with the main female character and says, OK, we must down our hatred, and so society is restarted.”

Horror

Though the swirling, careening chandeliers in his installation “Marnie’s Nightmare” (2006) is a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller “Marnie,” against blood-red walls and nearly skeletal in its jittery white lines, it looks ready for a haunted house. Spectral, evaporating images weave throughout Simmons’ art — most obviously in a series of extremely faded drawings of buildings associated with horror films such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Birds.” The way he blurs the images themselves, however, at least to this Gen X kid, looks reminiscent of another fear: a nuclear strike.

Simmons said he sees that vibrating, unstable quality as reminiscent of frames of old celluloid Super 8 his father would shoot on vacations. “The way it could get stuck between images — one minute you’re in a car, the next the Baseball Hall of Fame — and even burn, you were reminded that if you lost it, you might have lost a memory,” he said. “As for the ghosts, when we talk hauntings, we use multiple definitions, particularly how a space was occupied before. Racial trauma is constantly rising through the way history rhymes. We’re haunted by Emmett Till, and he rears his head again in Trayvon Martin.”

Public Enemy

“Whenever I do titles for shows or works,” Simmons said, “I usually think about multiple definitions or meanings. Sometimes it’s just what I’m listening to when I finish a work. But ‘Public Enemy,’ that contains a lot: The old James Cagney film, the hip hop group. There’s a real pushback you can feel in that movie, and the group, they changed the landscape, you know. ‘The CNN of the Streets,’ you’d hear. I’m also thinking of Boogie Down Productions and Eric B. & Rakim, these late ‘80s rap groups that were about empowering youth. Public Enemy, just the name of the group, tapped into a certain street intelligentsia, and they were menacing and unapologetic. But also the Black male is often a public enemy. There’s both a sense of pride and real defiance behind that.”

Pop music

From song titles (“How Soon Is Now?”), rap samples (“Hold up, wait a minute”), lyrics, album covers, club handbills, even the names of recording studios, Simmons name-checks decades of rap and rock in his art. One installation features a set of Katrina-born speakers surrounded by a patchwork of posters for 7 Seconds and Government Issue shows. But there’s also an understanding of the collective joy of rallying around a song, the sense that the act of bringing together an audience is enough — we are all we need.

One entire room at the MCA is dedicated to banners he hung in Harlem in 1993, backdrops referencing Public Enemy, Dr. Dre, Kool G Rap & DJ Polo and others. There are also the photos that resulted. “Once people heard I was taking portraits in front of (the banners) and giving them away, you couldn’t control it — we ran out of film. I’d take one for them to keep, one for my archive. It was about portraits and how a photographer shapes it; my subjects controlled how they wanted to look. Today, those pictures would go on Instagram and you would get two or three different poses. We saw more variety.”

In the lobby is “Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark.” The title plays off Black Ark Studios in Jamaica, created by dub reggae pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry (and later burned to the ground). The work consists of a stage and speakers, built from wood that Simmons found in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Where the piece is erected, Simmons invites local musicians to use it. “I am first-generation West Indian and deep into West Indian culture and music is embedded. Perry made a stripped-down agitprop of localized materials — DIY. It’s all about economy.”

Childhood

Among several chilling installations in “Public Enemy” is a simple arrangement of KKK robes and pointy hoods, in kids’ sizes. And a classroom flag made of nooses, and a row of desks in front of blackboards too narrow for writing anything of substance. Throughout the show are blurred sketches of racist caricatures that once regularly danced in Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons — the sort Simmons watched after school.

“School was frustrating for me,” Simmons said. “I went to public school and it has faults but there was a lot of me trying to figure out me. What set off the (classroom) pieces was I would visit cousins from the West Indies and England and we’d talk and they would speak multiple languages and know all sorts of world history, not just U.S. history. I felt stupid and stunted, so how we learn became a big interest. Those robes — kids don’t come out racist, they get taught it somewhere. Like other kids of working-class parents, I would be plopped in front of a TV, and say it was showing ‘Dumbo.’ Parents are thinking a very sweet elephant with huge ears, and I’m seeing these crows, Stepin Fetchit crows, with like scratchy Scatman Crothers voices. I remember that so well from when I was little. It was the crows who had to help the elephant to overcome. Talk to Black folk about ‘Dumbo’ and they remember those crows. That memory never goes.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com