A couple kinds of irony are at work in Hauser & Wirth’s presentation of Gary Simmons’s paintings for Thin Ice. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s paintings of the character Bosko, a blatantly racist cartoon created in 1928 by animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising that was known for expressing his pleasure about various things by saying “Mmmm! Dat sho’ is fine!” (Respect to H&W for using the term “racist” instead of the more anodyne “racialized” in describing this caricature of a Black person.)
The six black and white oil paintings that feature Bosko on ice skates almost look like drawn studies for later works, given Simmons’s signature blurring and partial erasure of the figure. But in this series, the smearing of the figure uncharacteristically doesn’t make it read as ghostly. In his retrospective Public Enemy at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the ghostliness was a dominant motif that I addressed in the essay I wrote for that show’s catalogue. Yet in this case, what I get is washy representations of phases of the skater’s movement mid-pirouette, with bits of glacier blue peeking out of the background, reminding us that the field of play is the primordial substance of ice.
I apprehend one kind of irony through noticing the placement of Bosko’s arms. In most of the six “Going Through Progressions” paintings, especially #1 and #6, the arms float elegantly at head level, trailing the forward motion of the skater like a flag swept backward by the velocity of the churning body. Figure skaters use their arm position to maintain balance and control the speed of turns and spins, but ultimately these motions depicted by Simmons point to more than self-mastery. They indicate a dilemma at the heart of the popular culture of the United States.
Professional ice skaters mimic the port de bras motions of ballet. “Port de bras” refers to the postures and positions the arms are expected to take to gracefully complement the movement of the legs in the dance tradition that originated in France. This image is a consummately American amalgam: a body that is Black by suggestion — apparent through the exaggerated facial features and use of the Black vernacular language in other contexts — which nevertheless contorts itself into the idealized lines of a European convention it will only ever intermittently achieve.
Our culture both celebrates and denies the human body — sometimes in the same breath. We desire the funk, the deep, grounded sensuality that is sometimes mistakenly associated only with Blackness (though other cultures have their own styles of funk) but then seek to transform the performing body into an idealized linear form. We want both: the sensual delights and the promise of transcendence, which we manage through the speculation that we are bits of eternal flame ensconced in blood and bone. And we dance that repetitious dance with our romantic partners yearning for that moment of ecstasy when it feels like we might just leave our bodies behind.
The second aspect of irony comes into play considering that Bosko’s movements are termed “progressions.” This character was invented in 1928, almost 100 years ago, at a moment like our current one, when anti-immigrant sentiment is being whipped into a fever pitch. A century ago, this attitude resulted in a wave of anti-immigration legislation. According to the National Park Service:
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 established the nation’s first numerical limits on the number of immigrants who could enter the United States. The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, made the quotas stricter and permanent.
The current President-elect just won a presidential campaign fueled in part by rhetoric that describes non-European immigrants as ravenous, dangerous savages who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
Simmons’s Bosko cycles through stages of a pirouette, to arrive again at the beginning of the motion, and we cycle through our fear of and desire for bodies that might show us what our own are capable of. In this moment it feels like this culture only rarely makes progress. More often, what we do is make elaborate circles over and over again on the ice until the music stops.
Gary Simmons: Thin Ice continues at Hauser & Wirth (134 Wooster Street, Soho, Manhattan) through January 11. The exhibition was organized by the gallery and the artist.
