Sculptor Charles Ray is having a moment, with a major show at the Met, two shows in Paris and one at
At 69, the sculptor Charles Ray is having a moment. His tangy, toothsome, yet overstudied works occupy two airy galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pandemic-related rescheduling means that the Met show now overlaps with two Ray solo shows in Paris, at the Centre Pompidou and the nearby Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection. Meanwhile, back on this side of the Atlantic, there is a new iteration of Ray’s pieces at Glenstone Museum, where a large gallery is devoted to a rotating display of his work.
Ray, who is based in Los Angeles, is one of the most acclaimed sculptors alive. His roots in performance art, minimalism and photography powered a midcareer shift into the crowd-pleasing, hyper-realistic, conceptually teasing sculptures for which he is best known.
The sculptures toy with an aesthetic that seems textureless and bleached of human affect. They look as if they were designed by machine-learning software and extruded through the nozzle of a 3D printer. At the same time, they shimmer and wobble before your eyes, as if in a heat haze generated by the extravagant amounts of human labor and brainy sophistication that went into them. They can be absolutely riveting. But to me they smell calculated — as if created by an algorithm.
It is as if Ray has rerouted all the buzziest themes, tendencies and conceptual tributaries of contemporary art into the glacial flow of his perfectionist oeuvre. He has taken a bit from minimalism (Donald Judd) and a bit from the related strain of waxwork literalism (Ron Mueck, Duane Hanson). He has thrown in a bias toward high-end fabrication, then added a touch of sexual provocation and dark humor (Jeff Koons, the Chapman Brothers, Maurizio Cattelan).
He also checks the boxes of performance art, appropriation, identity politics and public monuments. And to this heady mix he has added a cold blast of banality, flaunting apprehensions of existential meaninglessness (Marcel Duchamp, Gerhard Richter).
Organized by curators Kelly Baum and Brinda Kumar, the Met show, “Charles Ray: Figure Ground,” is a thoughtful, pared-back, poetically arranged overview featuring work from every decade of the artist’s career. Solo shows often start with a self-portrait, which serves to introduce the artist and affirm the authenticity of what follows. This show is no exception. But Ray’s is a dissenting self-portrait called, curiously, “No.”
When he made “No,” Ray was thinking “about the impossibility of expression,” he said in an interview with academic Hal Foster printed in the exhibition catalogue. So he made a hyper-real sculpture of his own, expressionless face, took it to a photo studio that specialized in weddings and headshots, and told them to make a standard portrait of it. “I look like an employee of the month,” he quipped. At the same time, he added (more enigmatically), “looking at ‘No’ is exactly what it feels like to be me.”
The show also includes photographs of Ray’s early performance pieces. In one, he was tied to a tree branch. Another documents his jackknifed body pinned high against a wall by a diagonal wooden plank. Such works obviously alluded to sculpture: They were figures in space. Ray subsequently turned to more conventional forms of sculpture, but they were “conventional” in the same way “No” is a conventional self-portrait. They were continually outsmarting themselves.
A few things about his sculptures strike you immediately. They tend to be conscientiously faithful to the subjects depicted — including the parts that are invisible but that the viewer “knows” to be there (the hatchling inside the egg, the engine parts beneath the tractor cab). But they often leave out key details. They play with scale, and expectations of scale, often making things bigger than they actually are; this affects our relation to them and our sense of the space around them. They also rework cliches, draining them of inherited prestige and whatever aura of authenticity they possess. They simultaneously push idealized things back into ordinariness and ordinary, specific things toward a sort of gaze-deflecting abstraction.
For many years, Ray was obsessed with mannequins, precisely because they are generic, factory-produced representations of humans. Mannequins are inherently ideological. In America, they tend to be Caucasian, slender, ageless and unblemished and, as such, represent the tyranny of the majority. They’re like a crowdsourced decision or an Amazon algorithm. Ray had a lot of fun with them.
Later, he began to treat familiar “types” (Baum calls them “patterns”) from art history and literature almost as if they were mannequins. Ray transposed such classic tropes as the reclining female nude, the equestrian statue and the “spinario” (a much replicated Greco-Roman sculpture of a boy extracting a thorn from his foot) into a familiar, everyday idiom. But he made sure to do it at great expense, with arresting materials and immaculate finishes.
All this almost sounds like an aesthetic program. And indeed, there’s a beguiling continuity to Ray’s superficially variegated career. But even as his sculptures become more popular and pleasing, his intentions get more complex and, to my eye, muddled — like an algorithm that has been tweaked too many times and lost sight of its purpose.
I do think he can be amazing. “Boy with Frog” — an oversize nude boy holding a frog by one of its legs with his outstretched arm — is a thought-stopping masterpiece. The piece, in stainless steel but painted white, halos both innocent vulnerability and an ominous will to power with a sense of the pure wonder and weirdness of being in the world. “Tractor,” in its dementedly literal-minded transposition of abandoned machinery into intense, aesthetic presence, is also marvelous.
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And Ray can be very funny. “Family Romance,” for instance, shows a generic, mannequin-like quartet of dad, mom, young son and younger daughter holding hands all in a row and all the same size. It’s one of those artworks-as-punchlines that combines a compelling proposition about the world with thoughts and feelings that beg not to be unpacked.
“Horse and Rider,” meanwhile, sucks heroic pomp from equestrian statuary with the force of an industrial vacuum cleaner. Made from solid stainless steel, the work is not in the Met show — it’s installed in the forecourt of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. But it is a witty riposte to a whole history of equating horsemanship with virile power, from Verrocchio’s statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice to those notorious images of a shirtless Vladimir Putin on horseback.
But it’s hard to escape the feeling with such works that Ray is aiming at fat targets and hitting them with ease. Other works miss the mark badly. Take the recently completed “Archangel,” a giant, fastidiously finished wooden carving, made in Osaka by woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices, of a shirtless young man with rolled-up jeans and a man bun.
There just seems no point to it. The original idea, we’re told, came when Ray, moved by the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris, imagined or dreamed about the appearance of Gabriel, the angel who features in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. His vision was filtered through a “tangled heap” (Ray’s words) of personal and cultural references before taking its final form.
What’s horribly unclear is why we should care — about the dream, the tangled heap of references or the thing itself. Finding no compelling answer turns the insane amount of labor that went into it (seven years) into an embarrassment rather than a source of wonder. “The ladies at the Met just go crazy over his feet,” Ray told the New York Times’s Jason Farago. And in the same interview: “He’s very elongated, very tall, very sexual. All my gay friends really, really like it a lot.”
Well, okay. But Ray’s elaborate meditations on Huck Finn and Jim, the main characters in Mark Twain’s classic novel, provoke the same nonplussed embarrassment. These two sculptures, one in each room, anchor the Met show. One, “Huck and Jim,” was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and planned as a fountain outside the museum’s entrance. That idea was eventually nixed. I can think of a dozen reasons why. But the thought of unpacking them is exhausting. In the end, the sculpture is just kitsch. It doesn’t even offer a Jeff Koons-style kick-in-the-teeth-of-good-taste. Its Twain-inspired companion piece, “Sarah Williams,” is no different.
All of Ray’s sculptures are exercises in as-long-as-takes perfectionism. But if their confounding, at times uncanny fastidiousness can dazzle, it may also leave you shrugging your shoulders, aching for something less cerebral and conceptually slippery. Something with more grip.
The art critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote that “a gulf yawns between speculating about what [Ray] thinks he’s doing and staring, blankly, at what he has done. The experience induces a buzzing, somehow salutary state of mind.” It was meant admiringly, and Schjeldahl is absolutely right: A disjunction between intentions and effects can produce aesthetic dynamite. But the element that’s missing, from Ray’s recent work especially, is some form of ignition.
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In 1965, Sol LeWitt said: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” This notion, which harked back to Johann Sebastian Bach even as it pointed forward to algorithmically generated art, was one of the most influential of its time, and you can see the mark it left on Ray’s work, which is as calculated and intentional as art gets.
For a long time, his ideas seemed compelling enough to power an oeuvre that played provocatively with inauthenticity and machine-fabrication. At this point, however, you cannot easily say what he is getting at without playing academic parlor games and resorting to cant words like “problematize” and “liminal.” The works themselves, in the meantime, for all their shininess, look as lifeless as ash.
Charles Ray: Figure Ground Through June 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. metmuseum.org.
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