![]() ![]() 7 Undeterred, Tucker asked again for the ’75 Biennial, and this time Simonds agreed to participate-at a distance. 6 “To put the wellings in a gallery would be to destroy them,” he said. He was unconcerned with establishment legitimization and felt that his sculptures were most effective when encountered by surprise. When curator Marcia Tucker invited Simonds to participate in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, he refused. I was so busy and happy doing my thing that there didn’t seem much that it could offer me.” 5 The art world embraced him nonetheless-or tried to. “I was not against the art world, but it seemed so pointless. 4Īs he became more involved with the people he met on the Lower East Side, participating in local activism and “sweat equity” projects, Simonds’s interest in the art scene from which he had emerged diminished. 3 He recalls that people sometimes reported seeing Dwellings where none had been built, proving that the fantasy of the Little People grew larger than their material presence. Simonds sees each one as “part of the story of the Little People, a different time and place in their history” collectively, the installations represent the archaeological remains of a vast culture. Few lasted longer than a few days.ĭespite their brief life spans, the miniature sites often look as if they have endured for thousands of years. Other Dwellings were ruined by viewers’ attempts to take them home-their delicate virtuosity often provoked a desire to protect, touch, possess. And while architecture is sometimes defined as protection against the elements, the unfired bricks returned to mud when exposed to rain. Some were destroyed almost immediately by playful or mischievous children or by weather. Simonds spent no more than a day constructing each Dwelling, after which it was left to its fate. ![]() No ornament was applied save for sand and bits of twig, but his materials provided a surprising range of rich, earthy hues: grays, brilliant reds, oranges, browns, tawny beiges and yellows. He constructed the Dwelling atop this surface, dipping each gray brick into a mixture of water and craft glue and placing it with tweezers. When he found a suitable spot, he transformed the space into a miniature landscape by smearing it with red clay. Simonds used a delivery bicycle to cart around clay and bricks he made at home. In photographs, the miniature architectural structures seem to emerge organically from gutters, broken walls, and empty lots-wherever the city’s crumbling infrastructure afforded a place for their putative inhabitants, the nomadic Little People. 2 There, Simonds built hundreds of Dwellings within a few years, finding neighborhood kids and their adult relatives to be a more engaged audience than his artist peers. Before long, Simonds had conceived an evolving series of such structures, the traces of an itinerant civilization of invisible beings-Little People, he called them-who migrated from SoHo and wandered throughout the Lower East Side. Though he initially made these “places” in his apartment, the sounds of children playing lured him onto the streets, where the Dwellings took root. One day in 1969, he sprinkled sand on a small quantity of clay and “had the feeling that I was looking upon a place.” 1 Clay and sand became landscape when Simonds began to make bricks, these materials became architecture as well. Simonds began constructing his best-known works, the Dwellings, on the streets of New York following an epiphany in his loft. The story begins downtown, miles from the genteel realm of the Breuer building. Embedding his fragile, fantasy-driven sculptures in Breuer’s structure-currently the temporary home of the Frick Collection, and before that an outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art-allowed the artist to slyly undermine the museum’s architectural philosophy and to challenge its institutional authority. Moreover, telling the story of the Whitney’s Dwellings is a chance to revisit the origins of a building that is about to transition from a temple of art to a marketplace for it: In 2024, it will become the global headquarters of Sotheby’s. The modest installation not only testifies to what Simonds accomplished in the 1970s and ’80s, but also represents an alternative chapter in the history of institutional critique, casting new light on the work of his better-known peers. The artist made this work at the high point of a successful career that has been all but forgotten today. ![]() Yet its misfit quality is precisely what gives Simonds’s installation its power. © Charles Simonds/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Charles Simonds’s 1972 Dwelling and passersby, East Houston Street, New York, 1972. ![]()
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