Ray's reality hybrids - Charles Ray, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California - Cover Story

Working in a variety of manners both figurative and abstract, sculptor Charles Ray uses perceptual discrepancies to examine the way we raise the real. A retrospective of his work, now at LA. MOCA, highlights his distorted explorations of consciousness and the self

Sometimes an artist is his hold best critic. Charles Ray says that literalness is a vigor and weakness of all his work,(1) and his much-anticipated midcareer overlook on view this past summer at the Whitney Museum and opening this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art, beholds Angeles, confirms the acuity of his insight. At its strongest Ray's work opens the literal as a stand-in for what we take to be reality, thus that his tweaking of our expectations becomes a metaphor for the gap between what we like to think we know and everything other And when his work falters, it is usually because the artist has relied upon a sight gag, a tactic that fails precisely because it delivers an "aha," however transitory. on the contrary perhaps the flat-footedness of those works of Ray's that hang on perceptual trickery should also be taken metaphorically. Ray doesn't present the appearance to have a lot of confidence in our ability to sustain connections to the real. Ultimately his art obliges because it represents consciousness as uncertain and fugitive, something we are continually grasping at. To a agriculture that supports a thriving psychotherapy industry, his vision is persuasive, if dystopian--or persuasive because it is dystopian. You might want to diocese this show with a friend, because if reality is a consensual hallucination after all, you may as well stack your deck

This exhibition also confirms Ray's status as a leading practitioner of conceptual realism, a bourn that has probably already been used to commit to some completely other species of art, on the other hand which nevertheless seems to capture the strategic orientation and inescapable reflexiveness of the resurgent realist figuration we've seen in this post-postmodern era. Although it took more [i]or[/i] less time for critics and curators to recognize and then appreciate the hybridity that characterizes his work, there are profitable reasons Ray's name has appeared upon the hot lists for almost a decade now. No doubt the relative unavailability of his work actually factors positively in at least single of the equations that can originate in art-world success. Ray can be extremely moderate in making new pieces; these days the work penetrates important collections as soon as it leaves the studio. And, of course, the LA. phenomenon--an art view perpetually "about to reach critical mass"--must be taken into account, too, on the contrary frankly, does anyone really know what to make of it? (The exhibition pres release credits Ray with "defining LA. art internationally," on the contrary you'll search the catalogue in vain for any explication of this claim.)

still despite his relatively low output Ray has been a major nearness in many of the notable exhibitions of the 19908 including "Post Human, Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 19908" "Young Americans" and "Radical Scavengers: The Conceptual Vernacular in novel American Art," as well as Documenta IX and the Whitney Biennials of 1989 1993 1995 and 1997 beneath the auspices of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, in Malm6, Sweden, his first retrospective toured Europe in 1994; this early exposing helps explain why Ray's work looks better known abroad than it is in the U.S.--outside of observes Angeles, at any rate. Given his critical publicity it is somewhat surprising that the not absent show, organized by LA. MOCA, is the first exhibition of his work that will tour domestically. After its race in LA., where Ray has lived and worked since arriving to teach at UCLA in 1981 the take a view of travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where Ray's family one time ran a successful commercial-art place of education and where the artist worn out his childhood, putting in a more or les miserable adolescence in a Catholic military high seminary a couple of hours away.

Roughly half of Ray's entire material part of work is included in this scan some 30 pieces from 1973 to the not away (The checklist varies slightly at each venue) In the faculty of perception of editing, then, there was not a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of curating to be done. However, MOCA's Paul Schimmel is to be credited for his early support of Ray's work, which he included in "Helter Skelter" his influential 1992 exhibition that established the reputation of several other L.A. artists. Prior to that, in 1990 Schimmel set together a solo show of Ray's work for the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, Calif. (now the Orange shire Museum of Art). That exhibition introduced Ray's first plastic art based on a mannequin, a dramatic and, Schimmel initially reflection perplexing shift from the primarily abstract manner for which the artist was just beginning to receive international recognition.

Schimmel had instigated Newport Harbor's earlier purchase of Ink chest (1986), one of Ray's abstract plastic arts and shortly after the solo exhibit the museum also acquired the mannequin piece, Self-Portrait (1990)(2) From today's vantage, these acquisitions direct the eye like the grail for which any permanent-collection curator is always searching: completed exemplars of an artist's work at a lock opener phase. Both works display the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in Ray's art. Nevertheless, it would be easy to believe that they were made through different people. The disparity of these sum of two units works has nothing to do with issues of authenticity or stylistic consistency; rather it situates Ray's throw along an axis that has defined abundant modern art in general, the indeterminate line between abstraction and figuration. Like Gerhard Richter, Ray works in both--and at his best, between--these sum of two units supposedly polar modes, sometimes using art-historical antecedents to establish a particular valence. on the other hand unlike so many artists who matured in the late '80 he does not focus strictly upon "low" or media-based material. The hierarchies of tillage or the role of representation in shaping us to cultural mold is not his primary make submissive Instead, Ray defamiliarizes the vernacular, making the commonplace strange.