American artist Charles Simonds (born 1945) is known for his diminutive "Dwellings," tiny architectural ruins embedded in the crumbling infrastructure of 1970s downtown New York. This volume reconsiders his legacy through a series of texts by curator Jules Pelta Feldman.
Originally published by Walther Konig in 1978, in German, Cracking is an artist’s book about a woman archaeologist who is drawn into the imaginary world of Charles Simonds’ Little People, as created in his sculptures. This is the first edition with the original English text—the only fiction Lucy R. Lippard has written with an artist.
For the past 45 years Charles Simonds (born 1945) has built dwelling places for an imaginary civilization of “Little People” in the streets of neighborhoods throughout the world. In Dwelling he recounts his adventures in Paris, Berlin, Shanghai and the Lower East Side of New York, along with his own personal musings about the “Little People” and the world’s reactions to them.