Galerie Enrico Navarra

of adventures. The Little People were accepted sowarmly that they stayed there and multiplied. "Simonds studied the behavior of the environment thatbegan to involve itself with this sandbox creation: "Myrole gradually changed. At first, I was only a crazyfellow without identity for the people of the LowerEast Side. I was an attraction, an anonymous vagabondwho made chimerical things. "It very rapidly became apparent that work of this type,which combined aesthetic finesse with direct intervention,had nothing autistic about it. The formal richnessof Simonds' miniature structures was obvious, and itsuggested a multiplicity of interpretations. The effectof the Dwellings relied strongly on a contrast with thesetting in which they were shown. The tiny, abandoneddream settlements clashed with the overcrowded,vertical megalopolis, and astonishingly, their vulnerabilitycalled its massed dynamism in question. This characteristicfeature came out even more clearly in certainlater projects, like the compelling Basel piece in whichThree Trees pierced the glass box of the museum architecturefrom bottom to top. Another spectacular formulationwas found in Age, where Simonds placed a greatmountain in the middle of the Guggenheim Museumfoyer to oppose its shell-like convexity. A third case inpoint is the work installed in a railroad tunnel nearNiagara Gorge, in Lewiston Art Park, State of New York.·~, .. J, ;.;:.. i--'- ......As such examples illustrate, Simonds' art relates just asmuch to site construction as to do the approaches ofRichard Long, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, orMichael Heizer. His Dwellings function within a preciselydefined, specific context. And this context, rather thanbeing that of archaeological grave-excavation, Pompeiior Yucatan or the mesas, is that of the modern metropoliswith its acute sense of time, in which every notionof transience is obviated by the hectic business of living.Simonds' emergence from the private sphere to thepublic street may have spoken for spontaneity. Yet historically,his approach can be seen to partake of the artificialtime systems thanks to which the relic-gatherersand mythologists in recent art have been able to settheir parallel worlds in opposition to the pragmatismand belief in progress of contemporary age. Such auto-«Age", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 198313