When the Museum of Contemporary Art moves to its new Chicago Avenue digs this June, two works in its permanent collection won’t be making the trip–Max Neuhaus’s Sound Installation, 1979 and Charles Simonds’s Dwellings. Both artworks are site specific, so their ultimate fate, according to MCA curator of collections Lucinda Barnes, rests with the future owners of the Ontario Street building, though she says Neuhaus and Simonds have been invited to create permanent pieces for the new museum. “We value their presence in our collection,” Barnes says.
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Dwellings, the miniature Anasazi-like structures built into the basement’s east wall in 1981 for the inauguration of the Site Cafe, can’t be dismantled and moved either: it’s carefully constructed of hundreds of tiny handmade clay bricks, and any attempt at excavation would destroy it–which would perhaps be a fitting end for it, since on one level it’s about urban and architectural impermanence and the passing of civilizations.
Simonds (pronounced “Simmons”) made Dwellings for a show at the MCA in 1981–his first retrospective in America. Prior to that, he’d built as many as 300 of these tiny clay structures on the streets of New York and in other cities, including Chicago. None of the outdoor works exists anymore, which was part of the idea: they were meant to comment on the transience of peoples and cultures. Rejecting the idea of ownership, Simonds made the dwellings for the pleasure and edification of the surrounding community; but as soon as someone inevitably tried to possess them–by playing with them or attempting to take them home–they crumbled.
Simonds returned to Chicago six years later for the MCA show; among other works it contained a series of earthen buildings that traced the evolution of his imaginary civilization. He constructed Dwellings in one of the MCA’s oldest walls–dating back to when the building housed a bakery. Simonds didn’t use existing holes in the rough brick wall; instead, he carved out cavities in which to place the dwellings.
While the miniature dwellings of another imaginary civilization may yet inhabit the MCA’s new home this summer, Simonds’s piece in the current museum still stands as a visible reminder of architectural change, of time passing. All things–even museums, those supposedly permanent repositories–must pass: Vita brevis, ars too.
