There’s a clay thumbprint on the title page of my copy of Dwelling, the newly published memoir by Charles Simonds. It is an appropriate signature, in that Simonds, a sculptor now in his 70s, has been making works out of mud and clay—often deploying his own body—for more than half a century. This 84-page book, handsomely designed by Leslie Miller of Grenfell Press and containing an afterword by Christopher Lyon, has been published by Walther König, Cologne. The title is apt as well, in that for decades Simonds has been making miniature encampments, out of clay, for a fantasized tribe of what he calls “little people.” Along the way, he is making a sort of home for himself.

Born in Manhattan in 1945, educated at Berkley in the 1960s and then at art school at Rutgers, Simonds has been, by his own admission, rather obsessed with constructing habitats of the mind and the body—early on, he buried himself, naked, in an abandoned clay pit. In those days Simonds was part of the SoHo art scene—he was very close to Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, and knew Philip Glass and Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. But despite the backing of a collector Harry Torczyner, and support from Holly Solomon, who commissioned one of his first works for her home in SoHo, and even though he was living with art critic Lucy Lippard, Simonds and the scene didn’t fully mesh. With minimalism beginning to flourish, Simonds took another path. A community activist since his Berkley days, he extended his political work with communities into doing art in the streets of the impoverished Lower East Side. Those were where Simonds built his first dwellings, miniature housing complexes, huts and stairways made out of small cubes of unfired clay, shaped by hand in broad daylight, with local kids and workmen curiously looking on–by his own account (confirmed in a film by Rudy Burckhardt), with recognition. In a dialogue recorded on East 2nd Street for another film from that period, an awe-struck street kid, watching Simonds at work, says, “I’ve never seen this before, you know. For the first time in my life I’ve seen this, you know.” Simonds’s fantasies about these havens for an imaginary people enacted a social transaction with real people who themselves might be fantasizing a different world.

The people of the street became witnesses for the migration of the people of the artist’s mind, and he seemed only secondarily interested in a transaction with an art audience. His little people (who are never visible, never material) move, in his understanding, from dwelling to dwelling. There are those who live on the window-ledge dwellings he makes high up (“the Cliff-Dwellers”) and those who live in encampments on the street and gutter (“the “Shepherds”). As soon as he started making these structures, in 1969, Simonds writes, “It was the safest place I’d ever been.” He went on to make them, as his memoir documents in vivid prose, in Paris, East Berlin (in the shadow of the Berlin Wall), Shanghai, Antwerp, Genoa, and many other locales. Although each story told in Dwelling involves community engagement , and the community’s wonderment and at times disapproval of what this soft-spoken, enchanted American is up to, this memoir is more than an artist’s installation notes. Interspersed throughout are candid reflections, including “Riffs and Rants,” that deal with family, friends, and art world acquaintances. For example, he “silently suffers” the presence of a poseur colleague “with his Karl Marx beard and French worker’s jumpsuit” and other “macho artists who couldn’t even drive a car and had to be chauffeured about.” Lucy Lippard (to whom the book is dedicated) is unstinting in her support, but Simonds ran afoul of some “crassly feminist artists” who objected to his eroticized, Adamic works in flesh and mud.

Simonds is the child of two psychoanalysts, and evident in both his practice and his choice of material is a very primal exploration of origins. Samuel Beckett once remarked about his own work, “I take away all the incidentals because I want to come to the bedrock of essentials.” Beckett only found mud, all the way down, which Simonds could have told him! But in mud and soil Simonds finds at least a measure of security. The very first chapter of Dwelling can be read as a reenactment of his first dwelling, the womb, in Birth, arguably the artist’s originary work. Buried in the soft, clinging, wet clay of New Jersey, Simonds at first enjoys his “warm, silent sanctuary.” Then panic sets in, as the “longed-for, imagined womb” becomes a tomb. Simonds stands upright and is “reborn,” he writes. Ever since, “I build ruins, I give birth, create places of absence, abandonment, and death.”

The ephemeral nature of Simonds’s dwellings—they would inevitably be destroyed by weather, by vandals, or indifference—added to his social critique of gentrification, first in SoHo and then the Lower East Side, and underscored his sincerity as an artist trying to build community rather than real estate (or art). As it happens, sympathies for the displaced within their own habitats—the urban poor, predominantly a local issue in the 20th Century—is now among the most critical global issues of our time. People looking for safe havens, for dwelling places, in the face of war and climate upheaval, have never been more numerous. Finding a place for them might well begin with imagining one.

Charles Simonds, Dwelling, with an afterword by Christopher Lyon. (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2016). 84pp, 48 color images, ISBN 978-386335-8204, $29.95

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Nov. 3, 2011 to January 14, 2012 (now by appointment only)
19 East 70 Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, (212) 794-0550

The elusive Little People who notionally build the tiny dwellings and inhabit the miniature landscapes made by Charles Simonds have had to endure everything from heedless vehicles to curious children demolishing their abodes in broken curbs and abandoned buildings in the forty-some years since the artist began to “follow” their migration through SoHo and the Lower East Side. Recently they faced a new challenge uptown, in the sudden collapse of the 165-year-old Knoedler & Company, where Simonds’s most recent work was shown, just a month after the show opened.

The exhibition was organized mainly in two galleries. In the smaller one were two porcelain sculptures, technical tours de force made nearly twenty years apart at the Manufacture Nationale de Céramique, Sèvres, that are striking departures for Simonds. Tumbleweed (1993) is a realistic, impossibly intricate rendering of the plant that detaches itself from its root when it is mature and dry, rendered ghostlike here in the porcelain’s pure white unreflective finish. Unlike Tumbleweed, stubbornly turned in on itself, ready at any moment to roll away to parts unknown, Life, with Thorns, completed in 2011, reaches outward threateningly with its spiked stems, commanding the space around it. The earlier work, emblematic of rootlessness and desolation, and the later one, recalling traditional depictions of the Crown of Thorns, are like a two-sided portrait of the artist as existential prophet: rootless, peripatetic, and yet in the end defiantly messianic and even darkly judgmental.

Despite the fantasy and miniature scale of Simonds’s work, the messages they convey are far from comforting or child-friendly, as shown by two new tabletop pieces in this gallery, which recall his earliest work. Ruined Blossoms (2011) displays three plantlike miniature brick structures, seemingly in successive stages of growth. The smaller “juvenile” brick plants seem to have been aborted in some way—dead of thirst perhaps or crushed by an outside force. A third “mature” brick plant apparently has survived: two tower-stalks remain erect, though the remaining ones wilt or are prone on the desert-like surface of the piece. Growing morphs into building—a basic paradigm of Simonds’s work—in Grown Walls (2011), which relates as well to the cycle of life in depicting an androgynous male-female form in the middle of a landscape that grows outward in successive rings, initially circular but becoming rectilinear as they approach the limits of their compact clay realm.

The larger rear gallery was devoted to flying, twisting landscapes, hanging from the ceiling or projecting from walls, that embody the twin themes of building and growing—male and female principles, respectively, that in some works can be teased apart, but in others are folded or collapsed onto each other. In addition there were a pair of wall-mounted “smears,” excretory swipes of hardened clay that speak to “body function issues,” as Simonds delicately put it. Each is a captured primal gesture in his primary medium, clay. More than a medium, clay has, as Arthur Danto points out in a thoughtful catalogue essay for this show, a “primordial nature,” and one has long noticed a Golem-like aspect to Simonds’s work, a conjuring of larger-than-life beings out of base clay. The question becomes, as Simonds put it in an email message that informed the venerable philosopher’s essay, “Where do ‘will’ and imagination meet material (material reality, meant physically and ‘philosophically’)?”

As if in response, an expressionistically rendered hanging sculpture, Mental Earth (2002), captures the collision of psychic experience and actuality at the core of the art and, one imagines, the psyche of this son of a couple who were Vienna-trained doctors and psychoanalysts. The ambitious, “post-analytic,” tortured figure, a “smear” more than ten feet across, looks to this viewer like an inside-out rendering of the self, flayed and monumentalized. A serpentlike “head” at one end (or so one imagines it) and a coiling tail with shit-brown coloring at its other end—and less extravagant extrusions also projecting from the core of twisty rock supporting the work—appear to represent a kind of roiling id, whose miniature brick structures twist and curl in sync with the spiraling, seething rock to which they cling.

Four works flanked Mental Earth like courtiers, providing the best viewpoints of the large piece. Moving around them, one felt like a visitor in a virtual helicopter, cruising past impossibly lofty and inaccessible mountain fastnesses. Two Streams (2011) is a wall-mounted piece mostly made from squared-up granitic forms on which are perched seemingly abandoned miniature dwellings, reminiscent of ancient ruins like those in the American Southwest. The streams of the title are tongue-like forms snaking across and beyond the site, implying an extensive unseen landscape.

Arabesque and Twist, both 2011, are more fantastic pieces, both projecting from the wall in alternating clays of gray and orange (roughly the color of burnt sienna pigment), which are Simonds’s basic palette. Arabesque terminates in a set of towers, torquing wildly, as if seen through a distorting lens. In Twist, the most overtly phallic of the wall-mounted pieces, an erect projection grows from a cracked, clifflike “parent,” smooth orange forms developing brick-textured “skin,” maturing into gray, and terminating in a wizened but still vital tip.

The projecting and hanging rock formations, partly body, partly landscape, bring to mind venerable traditions of Chinese art: landscape painting, certainly, with rocky heights floating among clouds, seemingly disconnected from the earth, but more specifically the miniature rock formations that became popular during the T’ang Dynasty.

“Orphanness” is the term Simonds himself has used to describe his existential stance, while “finding his way home” is the impulse that drives him and, presumably, the restless, elusive Little People. A tale has survived of a Taoist at court in the ninth century who longed to go home but the Emperor would not allow it. In the palace there was a miniature landscape, representing the three mountains on the sea. “Unless one is immortal, one could never enter that region,” said the Emperor, pointing.

“The mountains are only a foot high,” laughed the Taoist. “I am weak but I will try to inspect it for Your Majesty.” * At that, he leaped into the air, became smaller and smaller, and disappeared into the little world, never to be seen again.

* Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980 p. 85)

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June 10 – September 2, 2010
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

New York City endured a near-death experience during the 1960s, and the steep decline of lower Manhattan precipitated the rise of a vibrant underground culture. The City began to acknowledge the pioneering efforts of artists to create live-work spaces or lofts within this wasteland of residential and commercial buildings in the 1970s by rezoning them as “mixed use”, albeit in piecemeal fashion and with much rancor. Within a decade, the empty lots and ruined real estate property that had incubated a wealth of sinewy conceptual art were transmuted into Soho gold.

If “mixed use” as a real estate term inspires this show’s outward theme, it implicitly applies to “artistic practices and strategies” in transition over a four decade period, as well. Curators Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp present a considerable array of films, photographs, texts, and sound installations by 40 artists spanning several generations. The city as performance space or experiential sphere of creativity becomes the unifying frame around projects of wildly differing intention, and the show often suggests links between specific works by artists who might otherwise appear to have little in common.

For example, several of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills from 1978 (#25, #60, #83, #63), hang near Barbara Probst’s Exposure #9, New York City, Grand Central Station, 12.18.01, 1:21 pm from 2001. Probst’s six-part work features a female model, photographed simultaneously from six distinct points of view. Clearly, Sherman’s and Probst’s concerns, conveyed through distinct conceptual and technical approaches to picture-taking and picture-making, are strikingly different and decades apart. Yet the juxtaposition of these selected works highlights a common interest in the instability of photographic verity, set right in the midst of some of New York’s most familiar public spaces.

By contrast, photography as a straightforward accomplice to performance pertains in Babette Mangolte’s Woman Walking Down a Ladder from 1973. The ladder in question is that of a rooftop water tower. Contact sheets reveal a figure descending perpendicular to the ladder with no visible sign of a harness or guide wire. At close range, we see that she wears a nondescript blouse and skirt, while her face is obscured by her hair. At medium distance in profile, her descent appears even more precarious against the void of sky; and she is a mere speck when the photographer pulls back to reveal the full height and might of the building on which the water tower is delicately perched.

New York City’s rooftop water towers are also featured in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s 15-part array of fine black and white photographs from 1988. Echoing a 19th century trend to assemble photographic archives of like things for civic records, the Bechers adopted a similar methodology in the 1960s to make comparative studies of decaying industrial architecture in Europe and the US. Their systematic approach dovetailed with strategies of conceptual art being forged in that era, and the Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and other industrial relics have been highly influential.

Typologies abound in Mixed Use, Manhattan. From John Miller’s enigmantic series Clubs for America (1993) to Moyra Davey’s Newstands (1994), the streets of New York are teeming with similar things made unique by happenstance and style as much as wear and tear. The windows of urban buildings are the common denominator for Jennifer Bolande’s Globe series, which features blue metallic orbs with maps that are forever out of date. In a different key, Gordon Matta-Clark’s deadpan, black and white Window Blow-Out from 1973 depicts an abandoned building whose grid of broken windows is animated by a lone dog’s vigil.

The line between typology and series is porous. They synchronize neatly in William Gedney’s 1960s views from his apartment window. Entertaining a play between the static camera and everyday movement in the world beyond, his window is the theme for a set of variations. James Welling employs much the same strategy in Eastern Window #1-24 (1997-2000) except #8, 11, 12, 23. A chair on the neighboring rooftop changes position; light alters the buildings’ forms; the moon changes phase and disappears. Welling’s introduction of occasional color in this black and white world of ideas is mildly startling.

If still photography lends itself easily to urban typologies, photography on the move offers other possibilities. Sound and physical movement predominate in David Hammons’s video Phat Free (1995), in which a hand-held camera follows a performer kicking a can down the street. In David Wojnarowicz’s well-known series, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), a figure wearing a crude paper mask of the poet’s face traverses Coney Island, Chinatown, and the deserted streets of the West Side, enacting the artist’s taste for romantic irony and despair. With less drama, the painter Christopher Wool would photograph streets at night while walking home from his studio, studying incidental marks.

Images of the bygone West Side Piers stir piquant nostalgia for many New Yorkers of a certain age. In all their decrepit glory, the Piers were a magnet for aesthetic prowess as well as sexual trysts. From 1975-1986, Alvin Baltrop photographed their interiors and exteriors, observing cruisers, lovers, and yawning empty space in exquisite detail. When Gordon Matta-Clark cut an enormous, half-moon aperture at the far end of one pier, Baltrop noted its impact on the huge space as sublime cathedral or camera obscura. Peter Hujar’s haunting nocturnes of the Canal St. Piers, from 1983, submerge their secrets in velvet hues of photographic black. What’s left of them in 2010 amounts to jagged rows of decaying piles, as shown in Emily Roysdon’s gray-hued photographs, The Piers, Untitled (#2-5).

In 1971, the Piers were the site of an ambitious series of conceptual art pieces by 27 artists (all male, as it happened). Curated by Willoughby Sharp, photographed by Harry Shrunk and Janos Kender, the consistent format and high quality of the small, gelatin silver photographs establishes a collaborative framework within which each artist had his own word-and-image solo. Because the works were installed in a long corridor of the museum, viewers walking past the sequential imagery might experience it like stills from short silent movies. Vito Acconci, for example, spars with a reputed stranger who threatens to push him off the pier. Besides Acconci, the list of illustrious participants included John Baldessari, Keith Sonnier, Michael Snow, Daniel Buren, George Trakas, and others.

In quite another register, Charles Simonds, Gabriel Orozco, and Bernard Guillot found in the city places for reverie and magical thinking. Simonds, a sculptor, made a 16mm film called Dwellings in 1972. With children as his witnesses in blighted neighborhoods on the Lower East Side, Simonds uses tweezers to move tiny clay bricks into wall crevices. He explains that he’s creating miniature cities for “Little People” who will be moving in soon. (Simonds’s ephemeral archaeology eventually found its way into permanent niches, such as the stairwell of the Whitney Museum). Orozco’s color photograph, Isla en la isla (1993), also plays with changes in the cityscape’s scale. Wooden planks and other debris lean against a traffic barrier in a parking lot beside the Hudson River, mimicking the World Trade Center buildings and piers along the skyline due south. Guillot, in a series of photographs titled Orpheus and Eurydice from 1977, reinvents a mythic tale of tragic love, death, and descent into the underworld as photographic views of forlorn territory on the West Side.

The richness and variety of these projects is daunting. They attest to the elasticity of photographic and cinematic media as co-conspirator to artistic vision, be it performance, conceptual art, architectural intervention, socio-aesthetic political commentary, memento mori, extreme ballet, found object, available view, topographic documentation, lyrical serial existentialist anarchy, rough play. Cumulatively, the show exudes an inviting sense of spontaneity and hard-won freedom. I was particularly moved by Glenn Ligon’s harrowing, 20 wall-panel narrative of his residences, from his youth in the Bronx through a series of legal and illegal sublets early in his career, to, more recently, a stable situation in a condominium. Ligon’s true story is a bracing reminder of the anarchic forces of city real estate and the crucial, double role of the home-studio environment in an artist’s life.

It should be remembered that many of the works in Mixed Use, Manhattan were not seen publicly at the time of their creation. Some of the work on view came to light only through the efforts of dedicated curators and/or the survivors of loved ones. With equanimity and to fascinating effect, the curators have conjoined informal, private, and underknown works with widely known icons. Despite the real estate theme, as I see it this exhibition primarily draws inspiration from artists of the 1960s and 1970s who intentionally kept their work out of mainstream systems, creating alternative avenues for reception and distribution. A long perspective on the sensibility they set in motion can be found here, in disparate works that embrace plurality and resist categorization, revealing quixotic and tantalizing whispers of desire.

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