The artist and photographer Laurie Simmons has recreated two scenes from Marilyn’s films in her first movie, My Art, as Wes Greene reports for Slant magazine.
“At one point in Laurie Simmons’s My Art, New York City art teacher Ellie (Simmons) and Frank (Robert Clohessy), a landscaper and sometime actor who Ellie has recruited for her latest project, are seen dressed as Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, respectively, and preparing to recreate scenes from John Huston’s The Misfits. After Frank asks what his motivation is for one scene, Ellie responds that, while it’s impossible for them to ever be Monroe or Gable, they should nonetheless impersonate the two screen legends simply to see what happens. Despite the sheer vagueness of this explanation, which essentially encapsulates the approach Ellie takes to the multimedia project she works on throughout My Art, it unintentionally explicates the feeling that, like Ellie, Simmons isn’t so much creating art as a means to explore cinema’s effect on identity as she is conducting an act of indulgence.”
