Anxious spaces - artist Charles Ray - Interview - Cover Story

ROBERT STORR: Is it spooky having a retrospective?

CHARLES RAY' Ye on the contrary what spooks me out greatest in quantity is the condition of the work, and I can not ever convince everybody of how important that is. Paul Schimmel wanted to include just about everything--like all three of the big Fall '91 women Basically the three were done for economic reasons; it was cheaper to make three than to make single I never would think of those pieces as individual sculpture, or in the same exhibit together. But I'm much more worried about the work needing to be for a like reason well-preserved and pristine, and it already isn't. The pink lady had champagne stains all above the dress from an opening--something that won't advance out. And all the wigs exigencyed to be remade.

RS: What's the importance for you of their being pristine?

CR: I think that otherwise they degenerate really quickly into imagery--like Barbie dolls, sole bigger. And I see them more as creating a kind of hallucinatory space, to transport you, almost to stop time in a way. When they're pristine and completed it's like holding your breath. It's about single moment.

RS: The women are also about issues of scale. Could you say a little about in what manner your ideas of scale were formed?

CR: I started at the University of Iowa and was in a plastic art class my second year with a man named Roland Brener He had been a pupil of Caro's at St. Martin's, and he taught a kind of formal, abstract painted statuary It was really rigid, almost fascistic. You'd make progress in and slide stuff around, wait till it fasteninged esthetically. You were sort of indoctrinated with what a statuary was and what it wasn't. You greatest in quantity definitely didn't puke your intestines out--your emotive guts--when you were making work. It was a great deal of more serious. You didn't make a portrait of your boyfriend or your girlfriend, or an ashtray for your mother. Anything figurative was seen as really retro really uninformed. And being young and really impressionable, I bought it. That way of working really made faculty of perception to me. We had real strenuous and heavy critiques. I always preferr looking for a way to find on the outside what was wrong. What was not working in the piece was always more interesting than what was.

RS: You're talking about this in metes of Caro's formal language.

CR: Kind of on the other hand this was also the same time that Serra was working, and the truth-to-materials thing was happening. in like manner all that information came crashing down upon you. Back when I was a sophomore in body it was all just single and the same thing, and in a certain number of respect it still is, for me You gaze at Giacometti, you look at Judd or Caro, or Serra, and it's about plastic art rather than a question of whether it's modernist or postmodernist or premodern or whatever.

RS: Was there something in your background that made you especially receptive to this disciplined approach?

CR: Ye Like a fate of artists, I did true poorly in academics in grade academy And, then, oddly enough, I went to a military academy for high school. It was a really rigid, frigid tough place.

RS: How did you earn there?

CR: It was kind of complicated. There were six kids in our family and my sister was born a schizophrenic. Because of the situation in the house, my brother and I were sent away.

RS: Do you think your sister's schizophrenia had any specific bearing upon what you do?

CR: Ye a destiny really a lot. It was sort of like growing up with The Exorcist. It was actual bizarre and yet it was normal to us. There were five striplings and one girl, and the members of the family reacted in various ways to the whole thing. My older brother and I got institutionalized in military place of education when she was the single who was nuts. She was born hallucinating, and she was always doing something really crazy, always screaming. I remember one time my parents took us for what was going to be a five-day trip up in Wisconsin, and she screamed all the way up for the six-hour drive. It was like a chew eagerly scream, sort of, it didn't stop. And when we got there, she wouldn't stop, thus we had to take revolves staying in the car with her all night, in shifts--with the scream.

on the contrary it was normal, you know, in the way that nobody was panicked. Obviously it was actual hard and difficult. But she was really, really smart. Her faculty of perception of language is beautiful, too. You know in what way people name their dogs after things; if the dog is black, they name it Blackie. in like manner her imaginary doggie's name was Air. "Here, Air. approach here, Air."

I direct the eye back on it as inconceivable that my parents could have dealt with us at abode There were six kids and individual was stark raving mad. We did true very badly in school. They couldn't deal with it. They didn't have a apportionment of money at that time, and I was sent to a kind of bargain-basement military institute I lived in a barracks with 40 kids for four years, from puberty to 18 There was a kind of rigidity and formality to that. There was a combination of parts to form a whole of rules, a code of behavior, you marched everywhere. I extremityed up not excelling at all in the military part of it. It was a real brutal place to be.

Then later I met Roland Brener He was true strict and strong, and was real critical of me, and of my work. I was able to internalize the criticism somehow or other and find a way to overthrow it and go on and make work. on the other hand it started there. He taught me everything I know about statuary he gave me the impetus. When he mov to Vancouver, I mov up there with him and his wife, for the most part just working but still learning raw material from him. Of course he knew that for me carbonized iron sculpture a la Caro was not going to happen. on the other hand he encouraged me that there was something to be done sculpturally.