Charles Simonds at Joseph Helman - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by Vincent Katz

Although he has a long history of exhibitions both here and abroad, Charles Simonds has also worked outside the gallery context. In the 1970s his ritualistic acts, sometimes documented on film, included coating his body with clay to express the bond between man and earth. Later he built tiny clay-brick villages that seemed to belong to ancient cultures. (One is permanently installed in a stairwell at the Whitney Museum.) He often situated them on the sides of crumbling tenements, linking the fates of indigenous cultures to our own time. He left them to decay or be destroyed.

In his first New York show in five years, Simonds addressed similar concerns. Awareness of the skill required to make the pieces does not impede one's ability to enter into their space. There is a momentary shift as one adjusts to the miniature scale. A pleasing variety of presentations--on walls, pedestals, the floor, even extending from the wall--was echoed by variations in the red and gray tones of the clay.

Most works dated from 1997 to '99, with one from 1983 and one from 1993. In the recent work, Simonds makes analogies between man-made structures and plant and animal forms. His main tactic is to give soft contours to things that should (because they are brick) appear rigid. But Kill (22 by 11 by 9 1/2 inches) droops from rods projecting from the wall, and the elements themselves are not perfectly rectilinear, as they are handmade. The floor pieces Houseplant I, II and III form a series of towers that sometimes writhe against one another--in a struggle for preeminence or perhaps in some erotic ritual. The most fascinating piece was the most recent, Wall Dwelling (30 by 34 by 42 inches), which projected precariously into space. Here, as in some early works, an entire world is seen, complete with a steep mountain pass, a wooden stairway and a plank bridge over a rocky stream on an ascent to a tiny fortresslike village. Simonds's implied inhabitant is tiny, and when we shift back from his world to our own, it is with greater self-awareness.