Galerie Enrico Navarra

eferential microsystems were in wide-spread evidencein the conceptual art of the day. Taken together, theybelong to a post-duchampian rationalism for whichDuchamp 's own Three Stoppages-etalon may haveprovided the model. Random shapes accompaniedby a measuring stick which serves to conserve andestablish a reference for these isolated products ofchance, rescued from contingency.From the abundance of visual records of Simonds'work, let me extract only two by way of characterization.First, there is a still from the three-minute film,Birth, which takes us back to the early years of hiscareer.with the fertility of the earth, with Ceres, or with rivergods of antiquity. In some of them, the artist even sowedseeds, which sprouted to form a symbolic source ofhuman nutrition.Simonds' erotization of forms and gestures, his libidinousappropriation of the environment, indeed conveya clear message. They are more than spontaneousexpressions, because they are overlain with a culturalgesture. There can be no doubt that the abrupt, openbody-language recorded in Birth conveys more thana mere wish to identify with a maternal paradise. Thestatement addresses the issue of Action Painting, orAbstract Expressionism. Its intuitive gestures are meantto the Freudian method, of course, is found in archaeology,its fascination by relics and ruins, its restorationwork aimed at bringing the strata of buried memoriesback to light.The clay from which Simonds emerges in the filmwas subsequently to become the sole prima materiaof his art. This is corroborated by many of the artist'sown statements: "In my own personal mythology I wasborn from the earth, and many of the things I do areaimed at refreshing and articulating that awarenessfor myself and others. LandscapeBodyDwellingis a process of transformation of land into body, bodyinto land ... " The finely articulated clay Dwellings accor-Simonds made the short film in 1970, with a fixed camera dingly allude to human forms, especially to breasts andset up in a New Jersey clay-pit. The strange liturgy capturedin Birth can be seen to form a basis for all of the body-landscape. As Diane Waldman has pointed out,vagina. They have the character of refuges in a femaleartist's work to come. Not just another variation of body "Simonds' sculptures are also organic in nature andart or the process of self-discovery so rampant at the erotic in form and content. In his respect his worktime, the film establishes the raison d'etre of the reuvre. recalls that of Claes Oldenburg, whose concept ofIt demonstrates the artist's initial, tentative attempts erotizing the environment was considered highlyto penetrate physically into the realm of his imagination. innovative in the 1960s."We are present at a rite of spring, an evocation of rebirth With Simonds, this panerotic sculptural approach camefrom the chthonic, primeval slime. This gesticulating ritual to the fore in a number of pieces such as Number 9has a great deal to do with wish-fulfilment, an uninhibitedimmersion of the body in the universal abundance. the material appears to be in the process of ingestion.(Ritual Garden), Ground Bud, or Stone Sprout, in whichIn another ceremonial work, BodyEarth, an extendedTo explain the work, it is important to note that Freudian body presses itself into the earth. This theme waspsychology and its terms played key, and threatening, developed in a series of further works. In Landscapepart in Simonds' boyhood and youth. In his conversa- BodyDwelling, Simonds covered his body with claytion with Abadie, he recalled that: "The Little People and projected an image of his miniature world ontohave their origin in my attempts as a child to escape my this living, breathing surface primed with the naturalparents, my education-that of a son of a psychoanalyst material-a Creator mundi toying with the universeof the Vienna school." And one of the closest analogies on his own body. Other works called up associationsto show the artist in a state, or to induce a state in him,in which he sheds historical constrictions to become amedium for universal metaphysical forces. Similarly, theimpulsive gestures of Action Painting were considered ameans of liberation from societal and historical preconditions.Looking at Simonds' dancing movementsin the film Birth, the way in which the choreographygradually draws him out of the mud, one is inadvertentlyreminded of the prototype of such pathos-filledself-representations, Jackson Pollock. In Hans Namuth 'sfamous films we see Pollock's strange gesticulations,the spasmic trance in which he ultimately lost himselfin the picture he was working on. The presence of thecamera apparently goaded him to ever more freneticrhythms and movements. Simonds' Birth can be tracedback through Pollock to the ecriture automatique ofthe Surrealists, and even to the initiation rites of theRomantic Era.The second eloquent photograph I have singled out15