Charles Ray
Charles Ray American, b. 1953 Exhibitions Let’s Entertain (2000; catalogue, tour), The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (2003; catalogue, tour) Holdings 1 sculpture
Los Angeles–based sculptor Charles Ray came to prominence in the 1980s as he embarked on a quest to find alternative routes to investigate abstract form. In overtly “abstract” works such as Ink Box (1986), a deceptively minimalist-looking hollow cube filled to the top with printer’s ink, or in “figurative” works such as Fall ’91 (1992), a female mannequin donning high-fashion garb that has been enlarged to an Amazonian scale, Ray enacted an aesthetic program that at its core would navigate the anxious space between sculpture’s formal plane of existence and its more psychological, or what he has called its hallucinatory, level. It is precisely at this uncomfortable juncture between form and content, where abstraction and figuration collide, that we can locate his Unpainted Sculpture (1997). Nearly two years in the making, this work is a lifesize fiberglass cast of a 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that had been totaled in a deadly accident. Like many of Ray’s works, Unpainted Sculpture was in part the result of a chance occurrence. During a dinner conversation with a student whose car had been repeatedly involved in accidents, Ray suggested that he simply reconstruct the car’s bumper, cast it in fiberglass, and reattach it. When another student pointed out that this would be a good idea for one of Ray’s sculptures, an idea was born. The artist then spent more than two months searching insurance lots, looking for wrecks in which fatalities had occurred. He hoped to locate a vehicle that would transcend the specificities of any particular accident and would therefore attain the level of “a kind of Platonic version of a wrecked car—one that was perfect.” 1 Purchasing the wreck from an auction, Ray painstakingly took the car apart, individually casting each piece in fiberglass, and then reassembling the cast elements piece by piece as if it were a model hobby kit. The entire work was then uniformly covered with two coats of gray primer paint, producing a unified, monochromatically flattened surface that tends to partially neutralize the object’s referential connection to reality. We are left with an object that is on the one hand Baroque in both the dynamism of its formal structure and in its ability to spatially fold together the inside and the outside, and on the other hand disturbingly hallucinatory in its rendering of the world at large. Ray’s sculptural resurrection of this automobile transforms the original object into a kind of spectral phantom of its former self, a transformation that moved it, in the artist’s mind, into the formal register of abstraction. As Ray suggests, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I wondered that if there were ghosts, would the ghost inhabit the actual physical molecules of the structure, or would it be more interested in inhabiting the topology or geometry of the structure? You know, if you were
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to duplicate the geometry, would the ghost follow?” 2 This is the crucial question posed by Unpainted Sculpture. Did the ghost move into this fiberglass object? Does it reference the real, much like Andy Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of car wrecks, or is it an object that has been drained of all reference to the tragic event that created its crumpled form? Is this work a late twentieth-century version of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa that acts as a cautionary marker of the perils of American consumer culture, or is it a study in the relationship of the aleatory to abstract sculptural form? In the end, like the best Baroque sculpture, Unpainted Sculpture moves with us as we move around it. Unlike the Baroque, however, this is a movement that is both physical and conceptual, making the work resonate between the poles of figuration and abstraction. This is the contradiction at the heart of this doppelgänger, the anxiety that glides across the surface of its gray paint forcing our perceptions to vacillate between the familiar and the uncanny. As the artist himself notes, “In contemporary art, surface is an expression of anxiety, and no one is as anxious about surface as I am.” 3 D.F. Notes 1. Quoted in Robert Storr, “Anxious Spaces,” Art in America 86, no. 11 (November 1998): 106. 2. Quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Charles Ray,” Index Magazine 2, no. 6 (January/February 1998): 38–46. 3. Quoted in Storr, “Anxious Spaces,” 106.
Charles Ray Unpainted Sculpture 1997 fiberglass, paint 60 x 78 x 171 in. (152.4 x 198.1 x 434.3 cm) Gift of Bruce and Martha Atwater, Ann and Barrie Birks, Dolly Fiterman, Erwin and Miriam Kelen, Larry Perlman and Linda Peterson Perlman, Harriet and Edson Spencer with additional funds from the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1998 1998.74
CHARLES RAY 483
Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections is published on the occasion of the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center, April 2005. Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, The Wallace Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and Dance and the Doris Duke Performing Arts Endowment Fund, The Bush Foundation, Target, General Mills Foundation, Best Buy Co., Inc., The McKnight Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program, The Regis Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, 3M, Star Tribune Foundation, U.S. Bank, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker Art Center Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole : Walker Art Center collections.-- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-935640-78-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Walker Art Center--Catalogs. 2. Arts--Minnesota--Minneapolis--Catalogs. 3. Walker Art Center--History. I. Title: Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole. II. Title: Walker Art Center collections. III. Title. N583.A53 2005 709’.04’0074776579--dc22 2004031088
First Edition © 2005 Walker Art Center All rights reserved under pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means—electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system—without permission in writing from the Walker Art Center. Inquiries should be addressed to: Publications Manager, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403. Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013
WALKER ART CENTER COLLECTIONS
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Wayne Koestenbaum, “Jackie and Repetition,” from Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), © by permission of the author. Publications Manager Lisa Middag Editors Pamela Johnson, Kathleen McLean Designers Andrew Blauvelt, Chad Kloepfer Production Specialist Greg Beckel Printed and bound in Belgium by Die Keure. Cover art Lawrence Weiner
Los Angeles–based sculptor Charles Ray came to prominence in the 1980s as he embarked on a quest to find alternative routes to investigate abstract form. In overtly “abstract” works such as Ink Box (1986), a deceptively minimalist-looking hollow cube filled to the top with printer’s ink, or in “figurative” works such as Fall ’91 (1992), a female mannequin donning high-fashion garb that has been enlarged to an Amazonian scale, Ray enacted an aesthetic program that at its core would navigate the anxious space between sculpture’s formal plane of existence and its more psychological, or what he has called its hallucinatory, level. It is precisely at this uncomfortable juncture between form and content, where abstraction and figuration collide, that we can locate his Unpainted Sculpture (1997). Nearly two years in the making, this work is a lifesize fiberglass cast of a 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that had been totaled in a deadly accident. Like many of Ray’s works, Unpainted Sculpture was in part the result of a chance occurrence. During a dinner conversation with a student whose car had been repeatedly involved in accidents, Ray suggested that he simply reconstruct the car’s bumper, cast it in fiberglass, and reattach it. When another student pointed out that this would be a good idea for one of Ray’s sculptures, an idea was born. The artist then spent more than two months searching insurance lots, looking for wrecks in which fatalities had occurred. He hoped to locate a vehicle that would transcend the specificities of any particular accident and would therefore attain the level of “a kind of Platonic version of a wrecked car—one that was perfect.” 1 Purchasing the wreck from an auction, Ray painstakingly took the car apart, individually casting each piece in fiberglass, and then reassembling the cast elements piece by piece as if it were a model hobby kit. The entire work was then uniformly covered with two coats of gray primer paint, producing a unified, monochromatically flattened surface that tends to partially neutralize the object’s referential connection to reality. We are left with an object that is on the one hand Baroque in both the dynamism of its formal structure and in its ability to spatially fold together the inside and the outside, and on the other hand disturbingly hallucinatory in its rendering of the world at large. Ray’s sculptural resurrection of this automobile transforms the original object into a kind of spectral phantom of its former self, a transformation that moved it, in the artist’s mind, into the formal register of abstraction. As Ray suggests, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I wondered that if there were ghosts, would the ghost inhabit the actual physical molecules of the structure, or would it be more interested in inhabiting the topology or geometry of the structure? You know, if you were
482 CHARLES RAY
to duplicate the geometry, would the ghost follow?” 2 This is the crucial question posed by Unpainted Sculpture. Did the ghost move into this fiberglass object? Does it reference the real, much like Andy Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of car wrecks, or is it an object that has been drained of all reference to the tragic event that created its crumpled form? Is this work a late twentieth-century version of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa that acts as a cautionary marker of the perils of American consumer culture, or is it a study in the relationship of the aleatory to abstract sculptural form? In the end, like the best Baroque sculpture, Unpainted Sculpture moves with us as we move around it. Unlike the Baroque, however, this is a movement that is both physical and conceptual, making the work resonate between the poles of figuration and abstraction. This is the contradiction at the heart of this doppelgänger, the anxiety that glides across the surface of its gray paint forcing our perceptions to vacillate between the familiar and the uncanny. As the artist himself notes, “In contemporary art, surface is an expression of anxiety, and no one is as anxious about surface as I am.” 3 D.F. Notes 1. Quoted in Robert Storr, “Anxious Spaces,” Art in America 86, no. 11 (November 1998): 106. 2. Quoted in Dennis Cooper, “Charles Ray,” Index Magazine 2, no. 6 (January/February 1998): 38–46. 3. Quoted in Storr, “Anxious Spaces,” 106.
Charles Ray Unpainted Sculpture 1997 fiberglass, paint 60 x 78 x 171 in. (152.4 x 198.1 x 434.3 cm) Gift of Bruce and Martha Atwater, Ann and Barrie Birks, Dolly Fiterman, Erwin and Miriam Kelen, Larry Perlman and Linda Peterson Perlman, Harriet and Edson Spencer with additional funds from the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1998 1998.74
CHARLES RAY 483
Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections Joan Rothfuss and Elizabeth Carpenter Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections is published on the occasion of the opening of the newly expanded Walker Art Center, April 2005. Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, The Wallace Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and Dance and the Doris Duke Performing Arts Endowment Fund, The Bush Foundation, Target, General Mills Foundation, Best Buy Co., Inc., The McKnight Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program, The Regis Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, 3M, Star Tribune Foundation, U.S. Bank, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the members of the Walker Art Center. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker Art Center Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole : Walker Art Center collections.-- 1st ed. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-935640-78-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Walker Art Center--Catalogs. 2. Arts--Minnesota--Minneapolis--Catalogs. 3. Walker Art Center--History. I. Title: Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole. II. Title: Walker Art Center collections. III. Title. N583.A53 2005 709’.04’0074776579--dc22 2004031088
First Edition © 2005 Walker Art Center All rights reserved under pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means—electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system—without permission in writing from the Walker Art Center. Inquiries should be addressed to: Publications Manager, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403. Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013
WALKER ART CENTER COLLECTIONS
Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Wayne Koestenbaum, “Jackie and Repetition,” from Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), © by permission of the author. Publications Manager Lisa Middag Editors Pamela Johnson, Kathleen McLean Designers Andrew Blauvelt, Chad Kloepfer Production Specialist Greg Beckel Printed and bound in Belgium by Die Keure. Cover art Lawrence Weiner
