Words Lisa Zeiger Photography Guzman

Published in No 6

Famous for meticulous photographic scenarios using miniature furniture, dolls, and other inanimate props, artist Laurie Simmons’ conversation is shot through with allusions to the more fluid world of cinema; to great Hollywood movies, whose imagery and lines she quotes like a ventriloquist.

 Lisa Zeiger  I was pleased to discover a movie focusing on a woman of our age.

Laurie Simmons I tracked the movies about people around my age [68], which all seem to be about characters facing the end of life. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a charming example. First of all, I don’t know people our age who feel they are facing the end of life. Second, My Art is about someone who is moving forward with her aspirations. To me, the character didn’t seem super-focused on her age except when she went out with a jerky guy, who remarked on it.

LZ  60 or 65 or 68 can be very sexy and sought-after, too.

LS  The way I wrote it, none of the guys had crushes on her.

LZ  But it came out that way.

LS  Yes, it came out that way. When my director of photography focused on the fact that all three men liked her, I was really surprised.

LZ  That becomes a strand of the movie. She’s finally made an unmediated connection with Frank, the gardener…

LS As inspired by Lady Chatterley’s Lover, “It had to be!”

LZ  I found it sad that she has to turn away from him because of this newly interested art world, which seizes her attention and time.

LS  I think she just wasn’t into him. People have so many expectations of a happy ending: Boy meets girl and off they go together…

LZ  Your work appears, at first, to imitate and satirize, yet ends up containing and honoring the sources it is quoting — On The Waterfront, The Misfits, Picnic, and Streetcar — while forging a new overlay of meaning.

LS Yes, the film is without irony or critical distance. It’s a very tender look at those movies. I’ve always felt a really tender connection to the cinematic sources.

LZ If you were a writer, which would you be, a critic or a novelist?

LS A novelist, for sure. In my photographic work I’m determined not to tell a story, it’s not about a beginning or end, but rather a single frozen moment. I’ve never thought of myself as making narrative work. But I did say novelist right away. That’s what I really feel. It turns out I love telling a story and writing dialogue.

 LZ  I can’t write dialogue. My Art has the nuanced layers of plot, emotion and visual detail one finds in 19th century novels. Yet the media about you paints you more as a critic.

LS I think that had to do with my generation of women artists. We were considered the first generation to be absolutely raised on television. We got television dropped on us. We became very involved in borrowing images from the media and deconstructing them, which kind of distances the artist from the material, and made us seem like cultural critics. But I also feel separate from my generation in that more of my observations are about memory rather than cultural critique.

LZ  I might add empathy to that.

LS It was hard to be that. Sincerity was not high on anyone’s list of characteristics in the late ‘70s. But I was proud to be part of a generation that fluidly moved in and out of high art.

LZ  My Art invites us to think about props, souvenirs, tools, and collections; all the instrumental purposes attributable to material things. Do you have a favorite possession?

LS  I have so many favorite possessions. It’s like asking what’s your favorite color or song, which should be an easy question. I have an Art Deco mirror I particularly love that was in my father’s dental office. I have a tiny pair of cream-colored high heels that belonged to my very petite mother. My life is about looking around, looking at objects, and they change all the time. I don’t like to have a lot of stuff around. You just asked me the hardest question.

LZ  In the 2012 New Yorker interview by Calvin Tomkins, you said, “I’ve always subscribed to the theory that the detritus around us is ultimately very random because of all the stuff that moves in and out of our lives.” Do you still feel it’s random?

 LS  Yes. We move a lot. Objects are in and objects are out. I feel even when I make something that there are a hundred ways it could be; a number of ways things can look. Many of the ways will work.

LZ  Yet there was nothing random about the setting and props in the film.

LS The fascinating thing about a film is that you have to make thousands of decisions. That’s what I really loved about making a film. To stay interested as an artist, you have to keep raising the bar, challenging yourself. Most people who make films will tell you they feel they’re going to die doing it. You feel it’s the most important thing going on the universe. It is about complete, utter, total concentration and absorption. You become 100 percent immersed, absorbed, contained and isolated in your movie world. That’s super stimulating. Even when you go to sleep you know that you’re just catching a few hours and you will wake to make a hundred more decisions.

LZ  Which art form makes things most real to you, cinema, photography or objects?

LS I feel it’s all part of what I do. In making work, there are polarities I bounce between. I’ll work with real people in still photography, then get really exhausted and return to inanimate objects where I’m in total control, then I go full circle and want to turn things on their head again. The two films I’ve made have completely turned my world upside down in a way I think is ultimately positive. When I am making a film I feel I can never go back to still photography, but I find using a still camera to be a relief after something as intense as a film and appreciate the contemplative return to inanimate things. Each can exhaust you and then the opposite will replenish. It’s so clear to me when I am finished with something, but I never really know what the next thing will be. My mind is unconsciously trolling for it yet I never really know in advance. After a movie, I want to turn off the intensity and my desire is to find something really quiet.

LZ  You said you move a lot.

LS  We have lived lots of different places in the city. I’ve had to move for financial reasons; I’m not afraid of downsizing or the opposite. My parents remained in the house that I grew up in till I was in my forties — my work is all about that. They then moved into an apartment.  I wondered whom I loved more, the house or my parents! I dream about that house. I wonder what it would be like to paint every room white, to make it minimal, and to live in that same house but live like an artist. We’ve lived in lots of neighborhoods in New York, SoHo in really early days. I arrived there at 22 and was there for almost 28 years. I got married in that place and my kids were born there, and in the summer we’d rent houses in lots of places. We have lived in SoHo, Brooklyn, Tribeca, and now Brooklyn again, and we’re about to move once more. We wander a bit.

LZ I think of making tangible things as requiring a fixed space.

LS  We have a lot of baggage. I’ve always loved this idea: it seemed like Picasso would just move to a house, fill it up with paintings, then shut the door and move to another house. Not that I can do that, I’m really inspired by where I live. What I see out the window really influences me.

LZ  Which is more important to you, a house or its contents?

LS I would say the house is more important. I move things around a house as if it were a dollhouse. I usually name every room but no room ever retains its designation, except the kitchen and bathroom. Living in a house is so much like making my work… pushing furniture around.

LZ  In the film, when Ellie arrives, she sets about setting up her studio in the barn as if she wanted to blank out some of the environment.

LS  It seemed to me that it was easier for her to set up her studio than to decide what her work would be. She had no doubts. She vampirized other people for new inspiration and content. She not only borrowed the clothes and props in the house, but also the people. Frank, the gardener, becomes her creation and her muse. Thus she suddenly becomes attracted to a man she’s dressed in drag!

LZ Why did you decide to play Ellie? Were you the only person who could play her?

LS  I was pretty torn up deciding. I really love Catherine Keener but she’s too young. People suggested Cher! We were all over the place with ideas. The reasons I decided to play her were about the quieter moments where she was making work, holding her camera, walking through a museum, across a lawn. Those are things I knew I could do. The Whitney shoot at the beginning was my most comfortable scene because this is what I’ve been doing all my life. I know the rhythm of walking in a museum; it’s something I’ve done more than anything else my whole adult life. In the movie there really are a lot of quiet moments we call the process moments, where Ellie was just making her work. Those are the moments you don’t see in a movie about an artist. It’s often mythologized, dramatized, really silly.

LZ Looking at art, as central to an artist’s practice, is underestimated.

LS  Looking at art is nourishment. There’s not an artist I know of, of any genre, who doesn’t go to a museum and look at art. It’s what we do.

LZ Going in and inhabiting someone’s life is fascinating.

LS I’ve had that experience: staying at the homes of people who were way more successful than me, and that idea of wandering around, in their absence, and dealing with the combination of envy and appreciation for being there.

LZ I think it’s a wonderful trope that you played Ellie.

LS Ellie’s name is Ellie Schein, a take on the initials LS, and her real name is Stella, which is borrowed from A Streetcar Named Desire. The owner of the house is called Logan Sheeler, another LS. I feel like Logan and Ellie are two sides of me.

LZ  What do you find in Ellie that corresponds to something you haven’t lived?

LS  You’re talking about regret and regret is about the past. What would it have been like if we’d chosen a different path? I think Ellie is very… part of me is Ellie. She seems more centered than I am in real life. The main thing about Ellie, I discovered this after shooting the movie, is that she’s really okay with herself, really comfortable with her life. Her aspirations and desire to move forward are full of confidence. She was the one who called her friend and asked if she could show her her new work. In the scene where she’s offered a show by a dealer, she hesitates. Sometimes, the only power an artist really has is the power to say no. Wondering if she was ready for a major show, doing things in her own time frame; trusting in the pace of her own process: this is Ellie’s MO.

LZ  If your work constitutes a forensic inquiry of the commercial and decorative world, what is the crime?

LS The crime is the perfection foisted on us by the post-WWII suburban sensibility. The G.I. Bill probably financed my whole childhood. My parents were first generation American. There was this idea of superficial betterment that was the United States of America, with so few true observations about the darker underside of all that chilling perfection. That’s the edge I’m consciously working: the superficial beauty versus what you cannot see.

My Art is available for streaming on Amazon.

Laurie Simmons is represented by Salon 94.

Lisa Zeiger, former Decorative Arts Editor of Nest Magazine, is a freelance art historian and editor of bookandroom.com