Where is Charles Simonds? Throughout the 1970s, his



diminutive



Dwellings

, tiny architectural ruins of an imaginary civilization, could be found throughout the crumbling



infrastructure of downtown New York. Preoccupied with

the relationship between the grown and the built, the

archaeological and the urban, Simonds shared friendship

and 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, always

preferring what he called the real world to the art world.

Yet despite taking part in many of the seminal exhibitions

and art events of 1970s New York, Simonds has left few

traces on art history. In order to explain Simondss absence

while simultaneously arguing for his central place within it,



Jules Pelta Feldman reconsiders the decades self-conception, finding that Simonds exemplifies much of what has



been ignored in 1970s artand much of what establishes

it as a unique period of experimentation and possibility.