Ray's reality hybrids

Art in America, Nov, 1998 by Virginia Rutledge

Working in a variety of modes both figurative and abstract, sculptor Charles Ray uses perceptual discrepancies to examine the way we construct the real. A retrospective of his work, now at LA. MOCA, highlights his wry explorations of consciousness and the self.

Sometimes an artist is his own best critic. Charles Ray says that literalness is a strength and weakness of all his work,(1) and his much-anticipated midcareer survey, on view this past summer at the Whitney Museum and opening this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, confirms the acuity of his insight. At its strongest, Ray's work deploys the literal as a stand-in for what we take to be reality, so that his tweaking of our expectations becomes a metaphor for the gap between what we like to think we know and everything else. And when his work falters, it is usually because the artist has relied on a sight gag, a tactic that fails precisely because it delivers an "aha," however transitory. But perhaps the flat-footedness of those works of Ray's that depend on perceptual trickery should also be taken metaphorically. Ray doesn't seem to have a lot of confidence in our ability to sustain connections to the real. Ultimately his art compels because it represents consciousness as uncertain and fugitive, something we are continually grasping at. To a culture that supports a thriving psychotherapy industry, his vision is persuasive, if dystopian--or persuasive because it is dystopian. You might want to see this show with a friend, because if reality is a consensual hallucination after all, you may as well stack your deck.

This exhibition also confirms Ray's status as a leading practitioner of conceptual realism, a term that has probably already been used to refer to some completely other species of art, but which nevertheless seems to capture the strategic orientation and inescapable reflexiveness of the resurgent realist figuration we've seen in this post-postmodern era. Although it took some time for critics and curators to recognize and then appreciate the hybridity that characterizes his work, there are good reasons Ray's name has appeared on the hot lists for almost a decade now. No doubt the relative unavailability of his work actually factors positively in at least one of the equations that can result in art-world success. Ray can be extremely slow in making new pieces; these days the work enters important collections as soon as it leaves the studio. And, of course, the LA. phenomenon--an art scene perpetually "about to reach critical mass"--must be taken into account, too, but frankly, does anyone really know what to make of it? (The exhibition press release credits Ray with "defining LA. art internationally," but you'll search the catalogue in vain for any explication of this claim.)

Yet, despite his relatively low output, Ray has been a major presence in many of the notable exhibitions of the 19908, including "Post Human, .... Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 19908," "Young Americans" and "Radical Scavengers: The Conceptual Vernacular in Recent American Art," as well as Documenta IX and the Whitney Biennials of 1989, 1993, 1995 and 1997. Under the auspices of the Rooseum, Center for Contemporary Art, in Malm6, Sweden, his first retrospective toured Europe in 1994; this early exposure helps explain why Ray's work seems better known abroad than it is in the U.S.--outside of Los Angeles, at any rate. Given his critical currency, it is somewhat surprising that the present show, organized by LA. MOCA, is the first exhibition of his work that will tour domestically. After its run in LA., where Ray has lived and worked since arriving to teach at UCLA in 1981, the survey travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where Ray's family once ran a successful commercial-art school and where the artist spent his childhood, putting in a more or less miserable adolescence in a Catholic military high school a couple of hours away.

Roughly half of Ray's entire body of work is included in this survey, some 30 pieces from 1973 to the present. (The checklist varies slightly at each venue.) In the sense of editing, then, there was not much curating to be done. However, MOCA's Paul Schimmel is to be credited for his early support of Ray's work, which he included in "Helter Skelter," his influential 1992 exhibition that established the reputation of several other L.A. artists. Prior to that, in 1990, Schimmel put together a solo show of Ray's work for the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, Calif. (now the Orange County Museum of Art). That exhibition introduced Ray's first sculpture based on a mannequin, a dramatic and, Schimmel initially thought, perplexing shift from the primarily abstract manner for which the artist was just beginning to receive international recognition.

Schimmel had instigated Newport Harbor's earlier purchase of Ink Box (1986), one of Ray's abstract sculptures, and shortly after the solo show the museum also acquired the mannequin piece, Self-Portrait (1990).(2) From today's vantage, these acquisitions look like the grail for which any permanent-collection curator is always searching: perfect exemplars of an artist's work at a key phase. Both works display the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in Ray's art. Nevertheless, it would be easy to believe that they were made by different people. The disparity of these two works has nothing to do with issues of authenticity or stylistic consistency; rather it situates Ray's project along an axis that has defined much modern art in general, the indeterminate line between abstraction and figuration. Like Gerhard Richter, Ray works in both--and at his best, between--these two supposedly polar modes, sometimes using art-historical precedents to establish a particular valence. But unlike so many artists who matured in the late '80s, he does not focus strictly on "low" or media-based material. The hierarchies of culture, or the role of representation in shaping us to cultural molds, is not his primary subject. Instead, Ray defamiliarizes the vernacular, making the commonplace strange.