Charles Simonds and the Seventies

Where is Charles Simonds? Throughout the 1970s, hisdiminutive Dwellings, tiny architectural ruins of an imaginary civilization, could be found throughout the crumblinginfrastructure of downtown New York. Preoccupied withthe relationship between the grown and the built, thearchaeological and the urban, Simonds shared friendshipand ideas with Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson. Like Lucy Lippard, with whom he lived during that decade, Simonds believed in combining art and activism, alwayspreferring what he called the "real world" to the art world. Yet despite taking part in many of the seminal exhibitionsand art events of 1970s New York, Simonds has left fewtraces on art history. In order to explain Simonds's absencewhile simultaneously arguing for his central place within it, Jules Pelta Feldman reconsiders the decade's self-conception, finding that Simonds exemplifies much of what hasbeen ignored in 1970s art and much of what establishesit as a unique period of experimentation and possibility.