Read Catalog - Charles Simonds

Mythologies
The Mythologies embody the basic ingredients and relationships
of all Charles Simonds's work. They set up his fundamental
orderings of man as first born from the earth, body as man's
first home, and then in turn, man's imprinting of the earth with
his physical form and from this, shaping his dwellings. Implicit
in the Mythologies is the intertwining of two of Simonds's
essential creative forces: growth and construction, the natural
and the built.
Birth, Body - Earth, and Landscape - Body -
Dweliing are films of rituals enacted by the artist. In Birth
Simonds, buried in the earth, symbolically is reborn from it,
thus establishing earth as mother and also implying a sexual
relationship to clay and earth as material. In Body -- Earth
the artist, as first man, uses the movements of his body to contour
the earth, creating a small-scale landscape within the larger
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one, giving back to the earth the shape and scale of himself. In
Landscape - Body -- Dwelling Simonds transforms
himself into a landscape with clay, then goes on to construct
a fantasy dwelling on his body, on the earth. With the contours
and substance of his own body as landscape, Simonds establishes
a unity of body I earth and house/home.
Crucial to an understanding of the Mythologies is the fact that
in addition to their existence as films, they are rituals enacted
by the artist for his imaginary civilizations. They have been
enacted more than once. As the only existing "Little Person,"
Charles Simonds has done these rituals not only to create works
of art, but as a kind of personal experience central to his art.
The actual experience of the unities he generates in Mythologies
is spiritually refreshing.