Ray's reality hybrids

Art in America, Nov, 1998 by Virginia Rutledge

Overall, Ray's work exhibits a high degree of formal and thematic coherence. Much of it involves odd discrepancies in resolution, a visual mismatch among the parts of a work, or a discomfiting slip between the work and the thing we thought was its model. (A particularly perturbing instance of the latter is No, 1992, Ray's commercially produced photographic portrait of a highly persuasive fiberglass replica of himself.) Other works make powerful use of shifts in scale, destabilizing our customary relationships to the objects they represent. Twinned themes of containment and integration, isolation and self-sufficiency emerge as among the artist's concerns. Ink Box and Self-Portrait, for instance, make an ideal compare-and-contrast pair, illustrating how two very different visual vocabularies in fact serve the same ends in Ray's overall project. Ink Box is the tour-de-force of the perceptually oriented thought puzzles to which Ray devoted his attention in the late '80s. It is a beautifully finished, gleaming black 3-foot cube, at first glance another iconic instance of Minimalism's formal power. Yet something is slightly off; the work emits an aura of agitation that belies the authority of the Object. Closer examination reveals that the sculpture is actually an open box, filled just past the brim with printer's ink held from spilling over by its own surface tension. Through this means, so punchy in effect that it strikes some viewers as a one-liner, Ray's sculpture enacts those qualities of Minimalism that famously disturbed critic Michael Fried, literally producing the condition of theater. (With all that ink something seems bound to happen.) Many consider this to be the high point to date of Ray's abstract formal explorations. What is most striking about the work, however, is its almost animate and somewhat threatening presence (described by the artist as "neurotic").

Similarly, Self-Portrait presents itself as a thoroughly plausible department-store-type mannequin, until one notices that it bears a disconcertingly specific and non-idealized set of features. These turn out to be a genericized version of Ray's own, while the dummy models what has come to be the artist's trademark Everygeek ensemble: jeans, button-front shirt, windbreaker, comfortable shoes. But it doesn't really matter if the viewer is aware of these autobiographical elements, or believes the work's title. What's chiefly interesting here is the tension generated by the portraitlike quality of the mannequin's head and the generalized human form to which it is appended. Seen by itself, this "portrait" head would look quite blunted and ill-defined. In figuring himself as an average white male, Ray produces a portrait of a psyche estranged from its social positioning.

Understanding the right look of things in order to render them so precisely wrong is Ray's forte. A pleasure awaiting audiences mainly familiar with his work through reproduction is its immaculate craftsmanship, a product of the artist's formalist training under sculptor Roland Brener, himself a student of modernist British sculptor Anthony Caro, one of Ray's somewhat unexpected art heroes. (The 19th-century American realist painter Thomas Eakins is another.) Significantly, Caro was already considered old school when Ray began his studies; here was an early instance of the younger artist's tendency to hybridize sources without calculating their hipness quotient. From Caro's example he seems to have learned a notion of complex but lucid formal structure that serves to underpin work that now incorporates elements of Minimalism, process art and Pop, as well as various postmodernisms concerned with cultural construction and "the Body." In this regard, the cover of the exhibition's catalogue is essentially a visual essay on the artist and his work. (Schimmel and Lisa Phillips of the Whitney Museum wrote the catalogue texts.) The cover image features a reproduction of Early One Morning (1962), probably Caro's best-known sculpture, with a slightly frowning, rumpled Ray shown framed by its projecting members, standing behind it in a space that to my eye is plainly fictive, an illusion achieved through digital compositing. Ray has literally inserted himself (or his image) into Caro's abstract space, thus making the sculpture's metaphorical landscape visible, and announcing his own occupation of that territory.(3)