Art Review - February Issue - (Page 66)

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The initial idea for Unpainted Sculpture, which looks like the pale, if opaque, apparition of a wrecked car, emerged when Ray suggested that a former student replace his crumpled fender with a cast fibreglass version of it. Quickly Ray claimed the idea as worthy of sculptural investigation and decided to take the idea to its logical, if perverse, extreme: ‘I spent a couple of months looking for a wrecked car that was really sculptural. I went to all these insurance yards, and I was looking at ones in which fatalities had occurred. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I wondered that if there were ghosts, would the ghost inhabit the actual physical molecules of the structure, or would it be more interested in inhabiting the topology or the geometry of the structure? You know, if you were to duplicate the geometry, would the ghost follow?’ Index, 1998 . Ray eventually settled upon a wrecked 1991 Pontiac Grand Am, and with a group of assistants began methodically to disassemble the vehicle into its constituent parts, making a mould of each in order to cast each part in fibreglass, finally assembling the various replicas to create Unpainted Sculpture. The title Ray chose for the piece is actually a lie: the sculpture is painted with a uniform coat of matt primer grey, which unifies the sculpture not unlike the way yellow paint unifies the parts of Caro’s Prairie 1967 . It had been some eight years since I had seen Unpainted Sculpture, when the work served as the stunning climax of Ray’s travelling retrospective. It now resides at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and, when I recently saw it again in person, had lost none of its initial, even hallucinatory impact – pun intended – as a disturbing emblem of the acceleration, recklessness and disposability of late capitalist culture at the end of the twentieth century. In this sense it responds, however ambiguously, to Warhol’s ‘death and disaster’ series of paintings 1962–3 and J.G. Ballard’s Crash. David Cronenberg’s filming of Ballard’s 1973 novel coincided with the production of Ray’s car. In fact, one can practically imagine it holding a potent charge a hundred – if not a thousand – years from now, even if one can’t possibly envision the society around it. Despite such cultural cachet, the real gravitational pull of Unpainted Sculpture is due to its form, which is at once elegant and fucked up. Like an accident, it stops time. The sculpture unifies – one might say collides – a number of ongoing concerns for the artist, bringing together the complex, folding forms of Baroque sculpture, the perceptual elasticity of Caro as one circles the work and the inside/ outside spatial dynamic of Donald Judd’s monochromatic boxes. Along the way, the work also plays out Ray’s interest in the generic versus the specific, and the hallucinatory versus the imagistic. Seen in person, what seems solid can quickly evaporate as one moves around the car or directs one’s attention from the inside to the outside of the vehicle. Or as Ray has suggested, ‘I think the piece has my very best and my THE FURTHER HE TAKES A WORK TOWARDS ‘COMPLETION’, THE MORE HE RELIES UPON THE VIEWER TO FIND THE FUCK UP very worst in it. It has a bit of my showoffiness, and my sensationalism and grandstanding… but it also has my best, I think, in its uncanny-ness. I hope it draws people in’ Index, 1998 . In part, Unpainted Sculpture is uncanny because the material is unified and continuous. The work is actually heavier than the car it was cast from, because the fibreglass is, on average, heavier than the material that comprises a 1991 Grand Am, an effect that seems to follow from Ray’s deceptively heavy 7 1/2 Ton Cube 1990 , a solid three-foot cube painted with white automobile paint. Adding to the perceptual conundrum is the actual act of translation of a variety of materials into fibreglass, which led Ray to a number of unexpected judgement calls. For example, the broken taillight on the Grand Am looked wrong to Ray once it was cast in fibreglass, though technically speaking the part was perfectly well made. Using clay, he adjusted the mould to create an easier perceptual transition from the inside to the outside of the taillight, which Ray compares to a cinematic dissolve artificially moving the viewer from one space to another. Like the title, the taillight is a fiction. How important is it for the viewer to see the labour in a work of art? Does the fact that each individual sculpture consumes years of time and thousands upon thousands of man-hours become part of the perceptual experience? Untitled Tractor 2003–5 follows closely from Unpainted Sculpture – one might even say it follows from the broken taillight of the Grand Am – yet the construction of the piece was far more elaborate than was its predecessor. The tractor immediately signifies labour – and, allegorically, the ghost of a long-departed American economy – but one might not immediately comprehend the amount or kind of work that went into its making. For Untitled Tractor Ray decided to replicate a brokendown 1938 Cletrac tractor in cast aluminium, but rather than making a direct mould of each piece he directed his assistants to carve a replica of each individual piece of the tractor. Like an early industrial capitalist, Ray carefully divided his labour, assigning different parts based on the individual carving skills of his assistants, resulting in a wide variety of exactitude and degrees of ‘finish’. Under scrutiny, the whole slowly gives way to a mind-boggling assemblage of individuated parts. Many of the parts are actually hidden from view within the tractor’s body, and one could interpret this as evidence of Ray’s madness, or merely his faith in the process. Both are probably true. Ask him, and he will say a person viewing the tractor can actually sense the existence of the unseen parts. But Ray’s faith in the viewer is always seemingly at risk. The further he takes a work down the slippery slope towards ‘completion’, the more he relies on the viewer to find the glitch, the fuck-up, the seam between reality and hallucination, that serves as a point of entry into the work. As contemporary culture and the art market accelerates to a mind-numbing blur, Ray feathers the breaks, almost imperceptibly, towards a standstill, and invites the viewer along for the ride. New work by Charles Ray will be on show at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York in November p 62-67 Charles Ray AR Feb07.ind66 66 3/1/07 02:49:02  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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