To Offer/To Exchange

Abstract

Since 1970 artist Charles Simonds has created miniature clay Dwellings for an invented civilization of ‘little people’. Sited in the margins of urban public space, they appear as playful and generous interventions in decaying and chaotic city landscapes. Passers-by stumbling upon these structures often linger to observe Simonds’ slow and measured work and sometimes take it upon themselves to watch over the Dwellings, caring for ‘theirs’ as a cherished part of a neighbourhood. Beginning amidst an artistic climate of experimenting with alternative exhibition models and an ethos of democratic circulation - as in conceptual art’s various ‘dematerialized’ practices and in earthworks - the Dwellings take on the issue of dissemination by proposing that they be encountered as ‘a gift, free and clear’. Setting Simonds’ practice apart is his priority that the work exists as a public good. That intent is reinforced by the Dwelling’s very materiality, for the inevitable crumble or erosion of clay renders them so fragile that moving them would destroy them, ensuring that they can never be privately owned, but can also never be preserved, ‘whether motivated by a heartfelt, helpful desire to protect them, by greed or personal gain, or simply by the innocent desire to have one for himself’. That is not to say that the Dwellings leave nothing to be possessed - what can be kept simply does not resemble familiar objects of property. Instead, the works are carried forward as memory or embodied archive by those who have experienced them. These aspects of the work demand, in perpetuity, a wholly different notion of exchange that is more akin to an offering, and, indeed, to a gift, in all valences of the term. These observations are the springboard for a series of conversations between Simonds and van Haaften-Schick in 2016 and 2018.

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Erratum

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Simonds and van Haaften-Schick dedicate this text to the memory of Irving Sandler (1925-2018), whose insights into Simonds’s work and the complexities of its preservation inspired much of this conversation.

Thanks to the editors and to Anthony Graves for their thoughtful comments, and to Charles Simonds for his friendship.

Notes

1 Charles Simonds, Dwelling Places for Little People, 1974, Artpark, Lewiston, New York.

2 See for example: Joseph Kosuth, I. Existence (Art as Idea as Idea), 1968, published in the classified sections of The New York Times (5 January 5 1969), Museum News (1 January 1969), Artforum (January 1969) and The Nation (23 December 1968); Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, Village Voice Ads, 1973–5, series of seventeen newspaper advertisements in New York’s Village Voice.

3 ‘January 5–31, 1969’ was a seminal ‘catalogue- exhibition’ organized by Seth Siegelaub that was accompanied by a physical exhibition at 44 East 52nd Street, New York, NY (Siegelaub 1969). The artists included were Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner.

4 Simonds became a member of the Board of the Lower East Side Coalition for Human Housing and was involved with other housing activist groups.

5 Hans Haacke’s 1971 solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was cancelled over controversy from three sociologically engaged works, two of which mapped the real estate holdings and speculation of New York slumlords.

6 Siegelaub, Seth, and Robert Projansky (1971) The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, New York: School of Visual Arts. ‘The Artist’s Contract’, as it is commonly known, is a boilerplate agreement for artists to use when selling their work, and includes controversial terms for an artist’s resale royalty and exhibition veto rights.

7 The theory of ‘property and personhood’ has been articulated by Margaret Jane Radin (1982).

8 Reflections by the children Simonds worked with were documented in a subsequent publication (Simonds and Münchner Jugendliche 2017).