ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #29

Charles Ray @ Tate Modern, London, UK

Born in Chicago and now LA-based, the sculptor Charles Ray (bn. 1953) has shaken up notions of sculpture with his mannequins and objects. These life-size, and sometimes larger-than-life, fibreglass replications of people have disconcerted many a gallery-goer, but don't forget that Ray began in the '70s as a performance artist by adding his body to shelves and planks. The body is definitely a theme, but unlike the '70s Superrealists, Ray is more involved in the cultural and conceptual ramifications of his work. Thus his Whitney Biennial contribution in 1993 was to park a fire engine on Madison Avenue outside the Whitney Museum. Is this just another way to describe the world? Or an existential statement?


We caught up with Ray when he gave a talk at Tate Modern (24/03) to speak about his latest work. (To listen the Tate webcast of his talk browse here.)


Kate Zamet: It has been some time since your acclaimed mid-career survey at LA MOCA, the Whitney Museum and the MCA, Chicago back in 1998/99. Could you tell me what you are up to at the moment?

Charles Ray: I've been working on a couple of projects for a while since that show. I showed a figurative work in Venice last year (Aluminum Girl, 2003) -- a portrait of the artist Jennifer Pastor that I worked on for six years. I've also been working on a large-scale piece based on a fallen oak log that I had seen off the road when I was travelling in Central California. This log had been on the ground for maybe 30 or 40 years so all that was left was this 30 ft. trunk that was hollow through the middle and more elaborate at the ends where the roots were and where it began to branch. The logs fall over because bugs eat them from the inside and when a storm comes they don't have the strength to hold up. I looked at it quite a bit and I'd go up there and visit the site and think about it until, eventually, I decided (although I wasn't sure how) that I wanted to make a sculpture out of it.

My initial idea was to make an inflatable piece where somehow the inside and outside could be ultra tailored with the detail actually sewn into it. I was thinking of this term, "pneuma", which refers to the breath -- the power of spirit. This structure was just at the point that it would collapse in on itself from all the outside pressure of the UV, the rain and the bugs -- it was all cracked and ready to give in. And at the same time it had this internal structure that I found quite beautiful. This "breath" would sort of counter the equation and push out to counteract the external pressure that was working to collapse it.

I did a lot of research but eventually came to the conclusion that it was never going to be possible to get the kind of detail I wanted with an inflatable sculpture. Also, I had asked the landowners if I could take a mould from the log, but they weren't co-operating. So, I spent about another year hiking all over California looking for another log before I realised there was something about this log in particular that was really quite Platonic -- that it wasn't actually about a log, but about this specific form. Eventually, through a long convoluted process I did manage to get permission to use the log and when I finally moved it, it broke apart into 400 or 500 pieces. I then spent about two years taking moulds and reconstructing both the internal and the external structure in fibreglass. And now, the complete fibreglass structure is in Japan being hand-carved into Cyprus. My interest is really spatial embedding so it was important for me to have the internal structure carved as well as the exterior. We worked out a process to split the fibreglass structure into five sections so they had access to the inside as well so they can see what they are carving. It's still a couple of years away from completion at this point.

KZ: Over the years, many have tried to bracket your artwork, calling you everything from "LA impresario" to "appropriationist" to "conceptual" or even "traumatic realist". I get the sense that you're not one for labels, but with hindsight over the last 30 years, would you say you have been on any cohesive conceptual trajectory?

CR: Not conceptual, no. I'm a visual artist. A good artwork causes people to think and if a sculpture is effective, it continues to work in the world creating thoughts and feelings. So that's why these labels tend to get placed on things. My work is how I think, my relationship to others, my relationship to things and how I make sense of my world three-dimensionally. If you want the sculpture to be good you have to move away from the idea. My work is about embedding a thing in space somehow, exploring how to make an object stand in a room. I search to find the sculptural object -- to reveal the interior and exterior topology and the relationship of parts and to keep a trajectory of meaning between the elements -- between mind and matter, the actual and the physical.

KZ: Your body has always played an important role, whether through performance, as a formal or surreal element or recreated as mannequins, for example. How far is your work about autobiography, ego or everyman?

CR: I never think about myself as a generic everyman and I don't think I’ve ever done anything that reveals my psychology. I've used my presence, my body and portraiture as a structural element in the work but nothing has been revealed per se for the purpose of my own autobiography. For me, it is impossible to reach the subjective -- a mannequin cast from my own body is obviously a portrait in some ways, but only ever a plastic one.

KZ: Your work consistently shifts everyday perception and expectation in a way that's surprisingly startling and often humorous. Has it been your intention to purposefully shock or tease your audience?

CR: Intention? No. Humour is an element -- a quality within it, sure. The audience will interpret my work in their own ways and I don't really have any control over that. For me, the job of a sculpture is to be a sculpture and the viewer applies their own narratives onto them later. With a piece like the Unpainted Sculpture, 1998 [Ray's scale sculpture of a crashed car that was disassembled, cast piece by piece into fibreglass and re-built], I was initially interested in a presence or history of this particular car-wreck, whether ghosts of its past would inhabit the topology of the structure, but in the end I realised that I was seeking to break away from narrative and make it into an abstract. It was not about the car wreck itself, but about a Platonic world -- an otherworldly beauty where interior and exterior are one and the same.



Kate Zamet is a freelance writer and gallerist (Ritter/Zamet). She has written for Art Papers, Blueprint, Contemporary, Flash Art and is also a Contributing Editor for Free-Eye.


Image © the artist, courtesy of greengrassi and Regen Projects

© 2004 KultureFlash Limited