Simmons has been making "erasure" drawings with chalk on prepared panels that mimic chalkboards since the early 1990s, when he had a studio in a former school. For boom, a site-specific piece that was later executed permanently on a specially prepared panel, Simmons drew a cartoon sketch of an apocalyptic cloud emanating from an unknown explosion. Then, in his trademark process, he rubbed, smudged, and partially erased the unfixed drawing with his hands and body, rendering the image ghostlike.
Though the audience only views the results, this performance—the physical act of drawing and erasing—is integral to the realization of Simmons's work. The act of erasing, he has said, "becomes a psychological mark–making as well as a literal 'unmark'–making."
Simmons is not interested in objectivity. Rather, his work evokes the indeterminate nostalgia of personal experience. "Your memory is triggered by certain images and then it gets blurred from there," Simmons has said. Alterations and absence in his work emphasize the inherent tension in nature between what is seen, what is remembered, and what is alluded to. Viewers of boom are left contemplating a frenzied abstract force without knowing what actually occurred.
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights since 1980, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 156.
Gallery label from Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making , 2007.
Simmons expends as much energy erasing his drawings as he does constructing them. After meticulously drafting his pictures he attacks the sketch with his hands clad in thin golf gloves, which allow him to feel the surface and vary the amount of pressure needed to wipe out a drawing without completely destroying it. This wall drawing depicts a cloudburst that carries disquieting associations with war imagery while also re-creating the classic cartoon scenario in which two fighting figures clash and then disappear into an explosion. The blast "is a comedic trope for violence," says Simmons. "Cartoons are the first and earliest form of getting pleasure from a violent act."
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