Charles Simonds

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Charles Simonds (* 1945 in New York City ) is an American sculptor who works small clay dwellings for an imaginary migrant population, the little people , into crumbling walls and corners.

Career

Charles Simonds was born in 1945 to two psychoanalysts . His mother is Anita Bell. From 1963 to 1967 Simonds studied at the University of California, Berkeley . He married Joanne Maude Oakes and was part of the Free Speech Movement . He studied with the ceramist Jim Melchert and Harold Paris, got to know Stanley Fish and obtained his bachelor's degree in 1967 . He received his Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University and then taught sculpture and art history at Newark State College for two years .

With Gordon Matta-Clark and Harriet Korman, he renovated his loft on Christie Street between 1969 and 1972 , which he later sold to live on 28th Street. He met Christo , Holly Solomon , Jeffrey Lew, George Trakas , Suzanne Harris, Keith Sonnier , and Philip Glass . Simonds divorced Joanne Maude Oakes and met Lucy Lippard , with whom he lived on Prince Street from 1972. Charles Simonds befriended Sol LeWitt , Nancy Holt, and Robert Smithson , and wrote Three Peoples , a fictional ethnography .

In 1977 Simonds took part in documenta 6 in Kassel, where he met his future father-in-law Franz Meyer, and went to Berlin for a year on a DAAD scholarship. He worked on the Circles and Towers Growing series and participated in the Whitney Biennial . Floating cities and other architectures were exhibited at the Westphalian Art Association , Münster . Herbert Molderings was the curator . With the support of Jürgen Schweinbraden , exhibitions followed in East Berlin and in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam . "Cracking" a fiction by Lucy Lippard was published by the Walther König bookstore and made available as a catalog for the exhibition in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and in the National Gallery (Berlin) .

Harry Torczyner, a lawyer and art critic, rented (as a sort of surrealist action) an advertising space in Times Square in 1978 that read Charles Simonds endorses Harry Torczyner for congress . Charles Simonds was not informed of this, nor did he give his consent during the planning phase.

In 1980 Simonds moved to a loft on 22nd Street, New York. He was invited by Hans Haacke to teach sculpture at Cooper Union , New York. In 1981 Simonds exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) . In 1982 he met Bella Meyer, a granddaughter of Marc Chagall , whom he married in 1985 and with whom he had two children. In 1983, Simonds often met Meyer Schapiro and his wife Lillian for tea. In 1986 Simonds was a scholar at the American Academy in Rome .

Simonds made numerous trips to Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Tunisia, Leningrad, Scotland, Shanghai and Guillin, Jerusalem, the Caribbean and with John Beardsley to India.

plant

For Charles Simonds, his work is his personal mythology. His clay objects are buildings for little people , he says when someone asks him. At first he worked on the streets of Soho , and from 1972 also on the Lower East Side . Around 200 dwellings will be built there over a period of three years on window sills, in wall niches , crumbling walls, under wall projections, in vacant lots. Some last for a day, some for a long time. On his travels, Simonds also settled other cities, other streets with miniature buildings for the little ones .

The objects made of different colored, unfired clay, sand and wood are buildings that are reminiscent of the pueblos of the Indians. They are to be understood as a narrative. The little people keep moving and leave a dwelling as a reference to a scene in their life . So they endure as a fantasy in the city. An invented group of people who come from the past and settle in new places in the present. The land on which they live is no man's land and can be settled without any bureaucratic effort, a small world, its own system beyond the gallery world. This gives Simond's work a political component.

Later, the dwellings become more conceptual and are no longer directly fitted into the existing architecture. The spaces around the buildings show a deeper layer of this visionary history of the earth and mankind. They are reminiscent of places for ceremonies , rituals , whose round hill shapes, crevices and steep rock formations allude to female and male sexual organs. Simonds speaks of the convoluted sexual evolution of the earth and mankind . Simonds has also made films.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Art in America, Nancy Princenthal: Charles Simonds accessed on August 16, 2014 (English)
  2. ↑ Artnet Charles Simonds accessed on August 16, 2014 (English)
  3. ^ Whitney Kids Charles Simonds, Dwellings 1981 , accessed August 16, 2014.
  4. ↑ Answers Charles Simonds accessed on August 16, 2014
  5. ↑ Urban Ghosts: Charles Simonds: Ruined Clay Homes for 'the Little People' accessed on August 16, 2014 (English)
  6. ^ Documenta 6, exhibition catalog Volume 1, 1977, ISBN 3-920453-00-X , p. 272.
  7. ↑ MOMA: An evening with Charles Simonds accessed on August 16, 2014 (English)
personal data
SURNAME Simonds, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Simonds-Lippard, Charles; Simonds, Charles Frederick
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City