Ray's reality hybrids

Art in America, Nov, 1998 by Virginia Rutledge

Transparency operates to other metaphorical ends in several of Ray's sculptures based on the table. Like the cube or box, the table seems to represent a kind of nodal visual idea for Ray, a form that serves as the underlying structure for a number of variant works. Table (1990) is a sculpture composed of a thick layer of clear plastic supported by metal legs. A collection of containers also made of clear plastic sits on its surface. Most are open vessels--a pitcher, a glass--but there is also one lidded canister. Perversely, however, each container is bottomless, and, furthermore, each is positioned above a hole in the table's surface cut precisely to the dimensions of the missing element. This curious relationship of objects to their support renders the vessels useless, but, at the same time, they and the table have become topologically unitary, a single continuous surface to which there can be no inside or outside. Ray seems to have created a psyche-scape in which the contrast and interplay of transparency and void model psychic differentiation and separation as both affording and precluding certain kinds of connections. The notion of interconnection is explicit in Viral (1986), a nearly identical table bearing an assortment of glass vessels. These are joined to each other by a system of glass tubing that runs underneath the table, an arrangement that suggests a fairly straightforward metaphor for nonconscious processes, perhaps on the scale of social structures. Here the artist makes use of yet another rule of natural science, as a dense black liquid rises to the same level in every vessel within this system. Cued by the title, many viewers see this work in relation to the spread of HIV, which would make it one of the very few of Ray's pieces to address a particular topical issue. In a larger sense, however, mortality is a constant in Ray's work, the shadow twin of his obsession with time. (Ray's 1978 performance Clock Man made this connection pointedly and poetically:, for the better part of a working day, the artist inhabited a false clock case installed high on the wall of a public lobby and moved the clock hands in accord with his own perception of passing time.)

Certainly, in addition to evoking a human presence, the "Table" sculptures tend to call up the long-standing Western art motif of the still life as memento mori. Much has been and could yet be said about the peculiarities of this type of still life, in which inanimate objects become characters in a morality play, acting out the ineluctable passage of time. Regrettably, this association pushes Tabletop (1988) uncomfortably close to the anthropomorphic, Fantasia-style. In this work, a soup plate, bowl, potted artificial begonia and a few other objects rotate at a barely perceptible speed, calling the very term "still life" into question.

Conspicuously absent from the retrospective is documentation of any work at all from 1977 to 1985, a bizarre and unexplained omission. These were not the most productive years for Ray, but he did expend considerable energy during this period on a group of performed sculptures which gained him the most press he had received up to that point. (They are represented in the exhibition catalogue, at least.) These curious works incorporated Ray's body, held immobile and often in uncomfortable positions for set periods of time--sometimes an hour or more. In Memory of Sadat (1981-85) was a steel sarcophagus that held and concealed the artist's body except for a hairy leg and arm that protruded through holes cut in the top so that they lay on the box's surface like severed limbs. In Shelf (1981), Ray's gray-painted head "sat" on a shelf containing three objects also painted gray (a solvent can, a tool box, a terra-cotta pot), below which Ray's naked, unpainted body could be seen patiently supporting the head. By the mid-'80s Ray had tired of the physical demands of these sculptures, which he did not feel could be suitably performed by someone else. But these pieces are important for their exploration of themes of disintegration and detachment that remain current in the artist's work, as well as for the way they incorporate the human figure. If one were inclined to a psychoanalytic reading (and Ray says this is not something he endorses), object relations would be the theory of choice. Duration or continuity, understood as the ground of one's experience of self, seems to interest Ray more than the various literary brands of psychoanalysis. In my view Ray's project is only superficially akin to recent work that draws on surrealism, such as that by Robert Gober or Katharina Fritsch, whose names are often mentioned in connection with his.