Christopher Lyon
Charles Simonds’s Birth, 1970, a ritual enacted by the artist at a claypit in New Jersey, is documented both by a series of ten color photographs, resembling a film-still sequence, and by a brief film. The photos offer a closer view, but the film, made on an overcast day, is more dramatic: one sees Simonds’s body emerging as if from the birth canal at the terminus of what might appear as an immense vaginal opening. As his body becomes visible and he begins to push against the earth to rise up, the sun miraculously appears, bathing the scene in golden light.
Two subsequent rituals, performed by Simonds, Landscape<-->Body<-->Dwelling, 1970, and Body<-->Earth, 1971, were reprised, and recorded by Rudy Burckhardt as 16mm color films, in 1973 and 1974, respectively.
Though they were photographically documented, these were not performances, but experiences created by the artist for himself. His aim, he has explained, was to "give me the experience of what I’m believing or thinking […]. It’s like an enactment of what I feel […] that gives it back to me in a very visceral way."1
This existential dimension of the work is given resonance by powerful psychological associations. He is both declaring independence from family ties and also embracing a status as "homeless"; the emotional drive underlying his work from this point on will be, as he puts it, "making home"—for the Little People but also himself. Thus the existential and the psychological converge on a singe point: "home," given form as "dwellings."
Viewers of the films are engaged not only by the intimate experiential aspect of the works but by deeply rooted archetypal associations; the "soft, wet, pink, sticky clay," as Simonds describes it, is the malleable material from which God or the gods made man in Sumerian, Jewish, Greek, and Muslim mythology, and from which Rabbi Lowe made the Golem.
As the titles of these works, with their arrows pointing both forward and back, might suggest, Simonds’s art is cyclical and reflexive. Having undergone a ritual rebirth, the artist in turn becomes the earth upon which the Little People’s dwellings begin to appear. In the brief Body<-->Earth, 1974, we are shown a primeval landscape, whose scale we cannot easily comprehend, followed by close-ups where clay-covered body and viscous earth are scarcely distinguishable. But it is Burckhardt’s 16-minute Landscape<-->Body<-->Dwelling, 1973, that most effectively dramatizes the artist as god, creating a world both from himself and outside himself, as the Kabbalists so radically supposed God Himself to have done.
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Oral history interview with Charles Simonds by Christopher Lyon, 2012 July 31, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. ↩︎
Citation recommendation:
Christopher Lyon (2016), Rituals. Article in the Exhibition Catalogue GOLEM.
URL: www.jmberlin.de/en/node/4692
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Chapter 3 - Transformation: Selected Texts (6)

The Golem in Berlin
by Peter Schäfer
Introduction

The Golem Lives On
With Texts by Martina Lüdicke, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Louisa Hall and Caspar Battegay
Chapter 1

Jewish Mysticism
With Texts by Emily D. Bilski and Martina Lüdicke
Chapter 2

Transformation
With Texts by Emily D. Bilski, Christopher Lyon, Rita Kersting, Jorge Gil and David Musgrave
Chapter 3

Legendary Prag
With Texts by Martina Lüdicke, Peter Schäfer, and Harold Gabriel Weisz Carrington
Chapter 4

Horror and Magic
With Texts by Martina Lüdicke, Karin Harrasser, Cathy S. Gelbin, Helene Wecker and Anna Augustin
Chapter 5

Out of Control
With Texts by Emily D. Bilski, Arno Pařík, Marc Estrin and Charlotta Kotik
Chapter 6

Doppelgänger
With Texts by Joshua Cohen, Tracy Bartley, Cosima Wagner
Chapter 7

Golem Catalog Online
Selected texts from our catalog
Online Publication

Golem Catalog – Print Version
The full version of our catalog is available in German.
Publication
2016
Museum Publications
Exhibition catalogs, the JMB Journal, book series, and more
All About ...

GOLEM
Trailer, views of the exhibition, and more
Exhibition
23 Sep 2016 to 29 Jan 2017