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“When it comes to more volatile social issues, I think it usually starts out as a provocation or a bad boy experiment, which is an incentive for him to start thinking,” says Jack Bankowsky, a former editor of Artforum. Famous 2014 exhibition by Ray, Koons and Katharina Fritsch. “The aspect that kicks this hornet’s nest is definitely part of his personality, but it shapes it, and what comes out at the other extreme is the complexity we associate with his work.”
In “Huck and Jim” the flesh of both characters is turned into stainless steel. Jim stands upright. Huck is bent at the waist, his hand held as if reaching for a river. It was their nakedness that apparently frightened Whitney, but the statue’s real precariousness is Jim’s right hand hovering gently above Huck’s waist. In the space between lies a whole ball of desires and sorrows.
“’Huck and Jim’ is pretty profound as a memorial,” says Walker, who currently organizes an exhibition of decommissioned Confederate monuments for LAXART. “It’s like ur-Americana. These are not clothed soldiers or virtuous men, but somehow embody a national narrative, a national identity. We have an idea of how a monument should function. And then Charles Ray actually gives us something to think about, and it’s like, No no no! Put the clothes back on!”
“There’s a disconnect I got from Smith and Caro,” Ray says of the no-touch nudes. A similar charged separation is echoed in “Sarah Williams,” a reversal of positions: Huck in disguise stands upright, Jim crouches behind him, a series of black-and-white models feel even more politically charged.
But take a close look at Jim’s right hand. Note the hook that Jim uses to shape Huck’s dress in Twain’s novel, the fishhook carved in relief on his half-clenched palm. Theirs is an emotional, historical and racial interweaving in which parts and whole are inseparable. They are embedded in each other, just as “Sarah Williams” is embedded in our space.
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