Ray's reality hybrids

Art in America, Nov, 1998 by Virginia Rutledge

Although some of Ray's works have attracted comment for their apparent outrageousness or self-revelatory candor--for example Oh! Charley (a very constrained orgy, after all) or Yes (1990), the photographic self-portrait of the artist stoned--they in fact divulge nothing of an autobiographical nature. Actually, Ray is remarkably private. In talking with him and to others about him, I've been struck by how the same anecdotes are repeated, the existence of this officially approved set of stories being as telling as the stories themselves, it seems to me. Accounts of the artist's love of sailing may be an exception, if only because they suggest a metaphor for the work itself. Sailing involves a lot of patient minor adjustments accompanied by enormous stretches of white noise, with occasional spurts of intense activity between leaving and returning to port. Ray's art does a lot of circling back on itself, continually elaborating a cross- and self-referencing that can enrich the work, if you like that sort of thing, but tends otherwise to undermine it, making it look thin, self-absorbed, short of subject matter.

The latest work in the survey seems the culmination of many of Ray's most important themes and stratagems. Unpainted Sculpture (1997) is a ghostly replica of a big American car, crunched and mangled from what looks to have been a major collision. Ray purchased the original at a police auction after searching some time for just the right wreck, in this case reportedly fatal. Over two years went into the making of the sculpture, produced by disassembling the car and casting each section in fiberglass. The cast parts were then joined into a new whole, which is in fact painted--title notwithstanding--all over in a flat primer gray. The result is an eerily beautiful object. Finally, however, not much separates Ray's estheticization of the detritus of car culture from John Chamberlain's ongoing exploration of similar material. Chamberlain creates objects of beauty by reordering his material in accord with a formal vocabulary, which happens to be abstract. Ray's process is essentially the same, but his vocabulary has been expanded to include realism. In the end, this reference to the shelf-life of visual languages may make Unpainted Sculpture Ray's most ambitious metaphor to date.

(1.) Charles Ray, Malm6, Sweden, Rooseum, Center for Contemporary Art, 1994, p. 59.

(2.) Schimmel graciously credits then Newport Harbor curator Lucinda Barnes with promoting the acquisition of this piece.

(3.) Characteristically, this image holds resonances in reserve. In this case Ray himself made the whole uniform by hand, from shoes to glasses, although you would have no way of knowing this without close study of the catalogue. The implication is that both man and artist are self-made. Note also how one curving bar of Caro's sculpture appears to slash through the lower half of Ray's body, suggesting a cancellation mark, while another cuts across at his knees. Remember Michael Fried's discussion of red in Eakins's paintings as a sign for classic castration anxiety?. The paranoia-inducing franghtness of Ray's work makes it seem perfectly possible that he set up every angle of this shot with the intention of evoking just such arcane and ridiculously far afield associations.