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Charles Simonds creates miniaturized environments which seem at
the outset to be endowed with archeological and anthropological
significance. In fact, these "sites" are actually fanciful
habitats for an imaginary race Simonds refers to as the "Little
People." Much of Simonds' career has been spent creating these
sites, whether they are museum installations such as Ritual Place,
or temporary public works, as in the small dwelling places Simonds
has built on the streets of New York's Lower East Side, Venice,
Berlin, Dublin, and Shanghai. Simonds has also created large public
installations at various sites, including Lewiston's Artpark.
Simonds' environments are built out of clay bricks and "mortar"
made from Elmer's Glue and water. The clay is sprinkled with sand
to give it a patina of age and tweezers are used to fit the mass-produced
bricks in place. The imaginary "Little People" who never
actually appear in their environments but are always implied, belong
to three different types, a straight line people, a circular people,
and the people of the spiral. The different races can be discerned
by the way the environment is arranged.
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Pil Patton, ARTnews2/83
"The earth in these pieces seems animate, the forms that develop
from it vaguely sexual and biological as well as archeological...Simonds
began building small dwellings in the street for his imaginary race
of "Little People" in 1971. He has since constructed several
hundred of these impermanent works. (Thanks to weather, children
and pedestrian depredation they rarely last more than a day or two.)
Most of them were built on New York's Lower East Side, others in
Berlin, Paris, Dublin and Venice, some as far away as Shanghai and
Guilin, China. Simonds' miniature settlements--both the temporary
and the permanent ones--are the best known aspect of his work...and
the life size pieces created at Artpark in Lewiston, New York near
Niagara Falls, using the remains of an old railroad tunnel and stones
piled in cairns...All of Simonds' work, however, relates to a central
theme: 'How people live in time and space in relation to their architecture
and, beneath that, to a larger concern with the relations of all
creatures to their bodies, their shells, their dwellings, their
environments. In the house of Simonds' art, there are many mansions,
but within this art is a pattern as clear as that of the nautilus'
multichambered shell. Simonds has always been interested in reaching
beyond the art world to a wider audience...Simonds' 'mortar' is
a thin white liquid composed of Elmers Glue thinned with water,
into which he dips each brick. Working quickly and surely, and using
a pair of tweezers angles at the neck, Simonds lays the bricks,
which he mass-produces with a rolling cutter...The 'Little People,'
the imaginary race for which Simonds constructs his pieces, are
a kind of generalized early culture, with what he calls 'a fictional
ethnography.'...They have a history, which his work explores, but
not a continuous one. ..'They live wherever the architecture of
the city seems to offer them home--in gutters, on windowledges,
in niches in walls, under loading platforms, in vacant lots and
so on...'...'You can accept the idea of there being a race of "Little
People," Simonds says, 'as you accept so many other fait accomplis
of city life.'...The basic material for all of Simonds' work is
clay, which he sprinkles with sand to give a patina of age, an almost
velvety texture...'The red has a thousand moments. It's extraordinary
for its fleshiness...For me, its association with the body is inescapable.'..Simonds
collects clays--and sands as well--from different parts of the world...(Simonds
says he is not a good draftsman and resorts to sketches only when
he is not in a position to execute a project immediately.)...Although
his pieces have the feel of archeological sites--the sense of real
places, where real people lived, inviting our latter day interpretations--Simonds
does not base them on actual peoples or on archeological research.
His dwellings and other structures are offered as something like
prototypes of primitive dwellings....There is a strong sense of
narrative, of legend and history, about his work [straight line
people, circular people, people of the spiral]...But the fact that
he is more interested in science than philosophy hints at the real
nature of Simonds' art: Its success lies in its avoidance of portentiousness,
its keeping a sense of place as well as playfulness in the foreground...the
shell of the adult around the imagination of the child."
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