Charles Ray
While the attention-grabbing qualities of these works are consistent with an art world bent on turning heads, Ray’s work is successful because it pays attention to craft and balance–everything here is elegantly made and pleasing to the eye. More important, Ray imbues his work with a restless self-questioning, a desire to look beneath the surface, to investigate what makes things tick. His great achievement is melding the sometimes superficial aspects of postmodernism–such as the direct appropriation of forms–with a modernist interest in articulating the nature of materials that goes beyond mere self-referentiality. Ultimately Ray’s art causes the viewer to question how the world, or some part of it, functions.
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Thus, How a Table Works (1986) offers an arrangement of mundane objects–a flowerpot, a thermos–in what might be a banal still life, except there is no tabletop; each object is supported by one or two metal arms. The effect is like looking at an architectural plan, or an explanatory diagram of the presumed lines of force within a table that resist gravity and support the objects. The unmasking of these forces also hints at a potential for disaster–they alone prevent the objects from falling. Ray returns to this subject in Table (1990), a glass-topped table supporting six glass objects, including a bowl and a pitcher. Here he’s cut the bottoms away from each of these vessels and cut corresponding holes in the table underneath them. Liquid poured into the pitcher will fall to the floor. By making these vessels and tables so startlingly dysfunctional, Ray actually heightens our awareness of their traditional functions.
One piece, Ink Box (1986), reflects on the differences and similarities between liquid and solid forms of matter. A black cube, its sides are solid but its top is a surface of black ink, revealing that the whole is a container filled with ink; flush with the top, glossy and reflective, the ink presents a glassy perfection just as smooth as the solid sides and marred only by the occasional dust speck. But there is also a danger–one could be deceived and fall in. There are some apocryphal stories about the exhibition of this piece, including one in which an elegantly dressed woman’s pearls slipped in as she leaned over to look. Such stories notwithstanding, this black version of Narcissus’s pool threatens to make a real mess should one breach its surface.
In Male Mannequin (1990), Ray used an actual store mannequin, but grafted onto the crotch is a realistically painted casting of his own genitals. The disparity here is startling, and the detailing of the genitalia heightens one’s awareness of the flat, bland, sanitized flesh of the mannequin–and, by proxy, of mass culture in general. But as Schimmel points out, using his own figure also opened Ray to the charge of narcissism, a charge the show hardly refutes–we see quite a few versions of the artist here. But he also seems to be conscious of this issue, taking it as his explicit subject in the show’s only scandalous work, Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley… (1992).
