Ray's reality hybrids

Art in America, Nov, 1998 by Virginia Rutledge

Even in its strangely truncated form this survey demonstrates how often Ray employs essentially the same visual prompts in both figurative and abstract contexts, and the remarkable degree to which his art is concerned with cross- and self-referencing. Take Rotating Circle (1988), apparently a small circle inscribed on the wall, but actually a 9-inch disk of gatorboard set flush into the wall itself, roughly at head height, and spinning so rapidly that its movement is barely discernible. Like Tabletop, this sculpture has a tinge of anthropomorphism and, like Ink Box, a rather disturbing presence. If the size and placement of the disk suggest someone's head, then the whir of its concealed motor might be an unvoiced thought, possibly violent, that won't go away. And in the related work Ink Line (1987), slated for exhibition in L.A., the thick line stretched between ceiling and floor is actually an unsupported stream of ink that is constantly recirculated, a continuous flow of gazillions of particles only briefly visible in the near-miraculous interval between the hidden pumps and siphons. Likewise, the ideas of relationship schematized in the table sculptures are given an ostensibly more narrative presentation in two of Ray's most elaborate figurative works to date, Family Romance (1993), a deeply weird depiction of the nuclear family perfected, in which Dad, Mom, Brother and Baby Sister are scaled up and down to the same unnatural height, joined like a string of cut-out paper dolls, and Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley... (1992), a sculpture of eight facsimiles of Ray having sex with one another in a kind of meta-masturbation.

Which leads me to this: while it is entertaining to catalogue Ray's play with other art, and engaging to suss out the formal decision-making that brings the work into physical being, all this work is finally about Ray himself. His shows are the three-dimensionalized contents of his head. If this kind of all-inclusive self-regard taps into something larger, a contemporary state of mind prone to self-absorption, say, then it does so in part to point out the futility of such comprehensiveness. This is work that continually reminds us not to take it too seriously. Ray is serious, but he's also wry. Male Mannequin (1990), a sculpture of an unclothed (generic) mannequin sporting realistic-looking genitals, can be read as either a send-up of machismo in any form, art included, or a creepy instance of exhibitionism.

Interestingly, it's difficult to locate any theoretical or political position in this work, even though some of Ray's accolades have come from critics strongly identified with one such position or another. Certainly there's a lot of coolly ambiguous psychosexual material in evidence. (Future generations will probably be able to date this work as handily as we recognize the tropes of Baroque ecstasy or Neo-Classical homoeroticism.) But the work has less to do with identity in the sociopolitical sense than one might expect, given Ray's exploitation of the mannequin figure, a readymade representation of the self as culturally manufactured. In fact, some of these works look more and more equivocal to me, the artist's intentions less and less clear. Three works from 1992, all titled Fall '91, consist of over-life-size female mannequins in power suits. At the time of their making, this trio of giantesses seemed to be an acerbic comment on a particular transhistorical view of Woman, offering a glimpse (in triplicate) of the artist's own psychic relationship to that figure. But in 1998, toward the end of the decade that saw the birth of post-feminism, I wonder how long a work like this will remain legible. One thing is very clear: Ray's art depends heavily on context.