Read Catalog - Charles Simonds

Introduction
Reunited for this exhibition, the 12 works that comprise the sequence Circles
and Towers Growing were conceived in 1978, completed the following year,
and shown soon after at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and the
Nationalgalerie, Berlin.! Subsequently, only parts of the whole were exhibited.2
This is the first showing of this extraordinary cycle in the United States,
and, with the addition of a new cycle of three pieces constructed for this exhibition,
the most extensive opportunity yet to see the work of Charles Simonds.
That this is so is because only some aspects of the artist's work are intended
for viewing in museums. Although Simonds has acquired an art world following
over the last decade, much of his time and energy has been devoted to
ten1porary "Dwellings," tiny structures of unfired clay bricks inconspicuously
inserted with tweezers into crumbling walls, onto ledges and window sills in
neighborhoods where the concerns of both museums and the art market are
worlds away. Over 300 Dwellings and ritual structures for his imaginary race
of migrating "Little People" have been built all over the world since the winter
of 1971: from the Lower East Side of New York (over 200 alone), to California,
the British Isles and Western Europe, to Australia and China. A few
have survived, but most have succumbed to the elements, children's games,
or efforts to take them home. Consequently, there is no large body of portable
works from which to assemble an exhibition. There has been little opportunity
to view the work except for one or two pieces or a single installation
at a time. The result has been to create a quasi-legendary aura about the work,
so that Simonds's Dwellings survive primarily as an oral tradition, as memory.
This situation the artist willingly accepts as a consequence of the way he has
chosen to work.
Simonds's biography is likewise by choice limited to an outline of events. He
was born November 14, 1945 in New York, the younger son of two Viennatrained
psychoanalysts, and raised on the Upper West Side. His grandparents
had immigrated to the United States from Russia. He attended the New
Lincoln School in Manhattan, then the University of California at Berkeley
where he majored in art, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967. He
married in 1968 and attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New
Jersey, earning his Master of Fine Arts in 1969. From 1969 to 1971 he taught at
Newark State College, having moved back to New York where he shared a
building at 131 Chrystie Street with artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Harriet
Korman. He began in 1970 his ritual Mythologies in the Sayreville, New
Jersey claypits and other more impromptu street activities with Matta-Clark
around New York and the vicinity. At this time the first Dwellings were
made outdoors. From 1971 to 1972 Sin1onds lived in a building on 28th Street
owned by his brother, who managed rock bands which occupied the other
floors. First in Jeffrey Lew's loft at I 12 Greene Street and later at 98 Greene
Street, Simonds joined friends in informal, experimental art activities and
performances. In 1971 he met art historian and critic Lucy Lippard with whom
he has lived on Prince Street since 1972. In that year he came to know Robert
Smithson. During the 1970s, as his work became known beyond a small group
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