On ‘Charles Ray: Figure Ground’, A Radical Conservative Screen


The Metropolitan Museum of Art has never looked as sharply contemporary, or even cool, as in the exhibition. “Charles Ray: Figure Ground.” This boldly modernized exhibition examines the five-decade career of remarkable American sculptor Charles Ray in just 19 works of art, three of which are photographic pieces. They occupy a vast gallery of 9,600 square feet, divided by a single wall. The expanse of the dark, empty stone floor is less like the Met than the Whitney Museum’s fourth floor of the old Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue. Welcome now seems to say.

Before reading a single mural text, the open landscapes of the exhibition show that space itself was a big consideration for this artist, as it was for the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist majors Donald Judd and Richard Serra. But Ray had a busier agenda; This agenda has expanded over the years to include American history, literature, and pop culture, as well as the history of sculpture itself. Spacious space is especially important for Ray’s more powerful figurative sculptures than ever before, in which distortions of size, scale or proportion often have an instinctive, even disturbing, effect on viewers. And this effect becomes provocatively complex when viewed from different distances and angles at his sculptures.

It’s another thing to look at a 9-foot-tall statue of a nude man made of silvery, softly shimmering metal from 30 or 50 feet high, and when you’re much closer, staring at him to admire his stature and pique your interest. next to her is her relationship with a younger adolescent male, almost bent over, his hand close to the floor of the gallery, as if to buy something. You may begin to wonder if the strength of this two-figure statue clenched to the ground reflects the fact that the figures have the density and serenity of stone: they are solid aluminum, a ubiquitous industrial material, and are hand-finished. The wall sticker becomes clear as a real enigma begins to take shape. The work is called “Huck and Jim”, the main characters of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” – an adult who escaped from slavery, the other a white boy coming down on a raft from Mississippi, and it’s worth it. They spend most of their activity-packed journeys without clothes. It leaves the viewer with a complex wax ball that includes homoeroticism, masculinity, and racism, America’s permanent self-inflicted wound.

Nearby, “The Frog Boy” presents another conundrum: a larger-than-life boy – 8 feet tall. Its white-painted stainless steel body is reminiscent of Greek marble and the 19th-century sculpture derived from it. “Fisher Boy” by Hiram Powers, 1857 owned and can be seen on the Met. As the boy observes the frog with hooded malice, his flawless skin hints at innocence, in striking contrast to the highly detailed roughness of his victim.

Ray belongs to a generation of sculptors mostly born in the mid-1950s who refused to take Minimalism as an answer. The reductive style had almost completely eliminated object creation among the Conceptualists. But the young artists returned to the object with a new consciousness. Artists such as Ray and Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, Jeff Koons, Alison Saar, Ana Mendieta, and Takashi Murakami have found ways to bring figure and narrative back into sculpture.

Ray’s efforts were closest to traditional sculpture, particularly in his use of realism, while also updating some of Minimalism’s most cherished beliefs – his rejection of the sculpture’s base, his love of abundantly used industrial materials, his attention to detail, and his attention to size and proportion. . This combination actually identifies him as a radical conservative.

Ray was born in Chicago in 1953 and earned a BFA from the University of Iowa in 1975 and an MFA from Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1979. In 1981 he accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he began to reside. The City of Angels and has lived there ever since.

While still a student, Ray did serious work and brilliantly did the art of his predecessors. For a while he appeared as a jester in the court of serious art. Two large black and white photographs of “Plank Piece I and II” (1973), one of the earliest works at the Met, show the artist’s riff on early Post-Minimalism’s emphasis on soft flexible materials and artists’ use of their own bodies. . He goes on better, using his body as a soft material, fixing his loose form to the wall with a thick board, as if it were a soft lead sheet in a statue of the young Richard Serra.

Over the next decade, Ray designed numerous sculptures related to performance, often in Surrealist tones. Not surprisingly, working like this tired him out. Ray must have realized that if he wanted the body in his art, it could no longer belong to him.

To the credit of show organizers Kelly Baum and Brinda Kumar, this carefully curated show effectively epitomizes the growth of Ray’s sensibility, his steady opening since the late 1980s; shift of focus from the personal to the civic; It is the attainment of a kind of perfection or specificity that conveys the concentration and arduous methods by which these works, which can sometimes take 5-10 years, emerge.

Ray’s first figurative sculptures, which appeared in 1990, were mannequins, arguably the most visible examples of contemporary figurative sculpture in America’s vast consumer geography. Crafted to their specifications by professional mannequin makers from painted fiberglass with glass eyes, these works allowed changes in size and scale to confuse the audience. The oldest mannequin piece from the Met is from 1992, almost identical to these figures of a very pale, red-haired, blue-eyed boy, perhaps a mother’s lamb, dressed in a delicate set of shorts, shirt and knee socks. Showcases in the 1950s and 60s. Everything seems innocent enough, except that this kid is almost a foot and a half tall, some kind of monster that doesn’t reflect very well on either kids or parents.

Even more disturbing is “Family Romance,” a sculpture of the classical nuclear family with four mannequins consisting of mother, father, sister, brother. Parents got smaller, kids got a little older, so all about 4½ feet tall – and bare. Another odd effect is that the scale change makes children appear larger than their parents, suggesting that in many American families children grow up too quickly, never by fully immature parents.

After a while, this show doesn’t seem so small. Look, read the labels, ponder the thorny unanswered questions that so many fragments leave you with. “Boy With Frog” and “Huck and Jim” were intended for public display, one in Venice and the other in front of Whitney, and were later withdrawn. Maybe Ray is the ultimate folk sculptor who wants people to think. It repeatedly avoids the expected. When you approach the “Woman Lying”, an aluminum figure on an aluminum block, you see that this art history trope is gradually replaced by a very contemporary-looking real person with squint eyes, love handles and cellulite, and moreover, power. personality. Made from honey-colored Japanese cypress wood by Japanese woodworkers, the “Archangel” (2021) has its own casual features: flip-flops, folded jeans and a man bun. But her extreme leanness is otherworldly, with her raised heel and outstretched arms hinting at the miracle of flight.

“Sarah Williams,” an aluminum sculpture, also from 2021, is the show’s final work. He goes back to the story of Huck and Jim’s antebellum to depict a scene where Jim helps Huck disguise himself as a woman so he can guess who might threaten their freedom in their last break. This time Huck looks incredibly tall, wearing a long dress with folds falling like flutes on a column; Kneeling behind her, Jim works on the hem. They both play roles: a white teenager and a Black man doing women’s work. And they both seem obviously upset. Huck’s head is bowed; Jim’s face is raised, slightly sore. Perhaps they sense the impending fire – the Civil War, whose tragic work will remain bitterly unfinished more than 150 years later.


Charles Ray: Figure Ground

through June 5, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.



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