The Brooklyn Rail

When I think of the artist Charles Simonds, I think of Cosimo (Piovasco di Rondò), the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s enchanting novel The Baron in the Trees, a book that reminds us how, as children, we flirted with longings to be freed from the stifling rules and obligatory strictures set forth by social conventions. Those of us who’ve followed Simonds’s art are impressed by the way he has stayed true to the youthful vision that set him on a unique path paved by his visit, as a six-year-old, to several Pueblo Indian cultural sites with his family in the Southwest. It was there that he was exposed to the ancient clay brick, walls, terraces, kivas, and other Pueblo ritual spaces that led to an epiphany that would continue to guide his vision.

Just as we remember how young Cosimo, after a dispute with his father, decided to climb up a tree and never set foot on earth again, Simonds’s entire life’s work has been consistent with the early memory that shaped his worldview, as—in Charles Baudelaire’s words— “…childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” In the 1970s, Simonds—having committed himself from the beginning of his career to resisting the prevailing officialdom of the art world—began roaming the dilapidated streets of SoHo and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, finding ideal sites for his diminutive “Dwellings” (1970– ). As a perpetual reconstitution of his own imaginary civilization of “Little People,” Simonds has created hundreds, which invoke their own versions of adaptation in situ of the physical aura and the spirit of the distinct architectures of the ancient Pueblos.

Many of us first encountered one of Simonds’s legendary commissioned “Dwellings” when we came upon it nestled on a stairwell-landing windowsill in the Breuer building (former home of the Whitney Museum). And visible from that same window was another commissioned “Dwelling,” perched on the window ledge of a bank building right across the street from the museum. We soon learned of Simonds’s radical commitment to making works not as expensive productions of timeless, precious objects, but rather as enduring ideas that can be activated as concrete experiences by all sorts of viewers. Some are indoor commissions from museums, in which case they’re seen as quasi-permanent and autonomous works of art; others are outdoor interventions in the streets, which are subjected to both deterioration and random, unpredictable occurrences. Whether in a museum or in the street, each is meticulously and patiently made, and Simonds thinks of them on equal terms. On the one hand, they are a special kind of artistic artifact; on the other hand, they’re ephemeral spaces of memory, capable of evoking multiple conditions of time.

In About Time, a remarkable new publication on Simonds’s work, the lead essay by Herbert Molderings, titled “The Plurality of Times,” brilliantly explores the specific qualities and historical significance of Simonds’s art. Molderings very appositely refers to Simonds’s art in relation to Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”:

It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. … For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical…

As this book reveals, what essentially makes Simonds’s “Dwellings” so compelling as dialectical images is precisely because they evoke essential historical-theoretical considerations. For example, by invoking reminiscences of the culture and civilization of the Ancestral Pueblo people in various site-specific interventions in SoHo, and especially on the Lower East Side—the populations of which were largely Puerto Rican and African American—Simonds creates his own plurality of time, from which made images of the past are contextually posited as architectonic morphologies against the backdrop of New York City’s contemporary urban settings. Simonds’s vision of art, in other words, repudiates modernism’s one-dimensional, linear-based model of progress.

For several decades Simonds has been able to maintain his unique artistic, social, and political activism of on-the-spot made “Dwellings” in countless dilapidated districts of New York, Paris, Berlin, and Genoa, among others. Each required communal participation, and in some cases were confronted with insurmountable bureaucratic challenges. In response, in 1978, the artist reinvented a new kind of form and matter, namely his “Floating Cities” (1978– ), which offer fluid permutations of temporal metamorphosis of nomadic life on water. One half of “The Plurality of Times” offers Molderings’s insightful elucidation on Simonds’s art, with illustrations taken from historical sources and the artist’s archives. The other half is comprised of significant elements of Simonds’s work, including his classic text “Three Peoples” (1975), and exquisite photographs taken from his intricately built models, with excerpts from his novel-in-progress about an imagined floating city. The two parts of the book are meant to be read from front to back, and from back to front, as one mirrors the other.

Simonds’s “Floating Cities” are an ideal continuum—changeable constellations from which each configuration has its own rumination on memory, time, and place. While the different clay brick “Dwellings” are tangible entities that exist in real space, Simonds’s maritime communities are made with endless flexibilities, from which water movements are conditioned to the constant transitory interaction between all the constituent parts: water, sky, clouds, islands, inhabitants. Simonds’s vision of alternative structures of living can be seen as a fable that reads like a travelogue taking us from place to place within places that do not exist. These works are full of shifts in movement, some obvious, others barely perceptible. Within them, the whole living organism—from clusters of cloud-filled sky that rise above small buildings, and above all kinds of ships (container ships, cruise ships, fishing boats, tankers, barges)—is interconnected: patches of farmland, movable ports, floating islands, all transformed as they morph into new configurations.

Here, I should acknowledge that the presence of Simonds’s dialectical images rests not only upon the poetic nature of how his homespun sculptural apparatus is deployed in the form of performance, but by the way he gives them a second embodiment in the form of photography. In either case, we can admire how Charles Simonds, the mature artist, has unfailingly stayed truthful to the other Charles Simonds, the six-year-old boy who had the initial vision that the grown man has been able to materialize in countless everlasting dialectical images with such a highly personalized sense of scale—images that are at once delightful, whimsical, and intensely melancholic.