| Monday, May 2, 2005 |
| Read this dry-ass academic article I wrote last night. |
It is important to start with the active viewer. Some person that decides to see
art, not as part of the landscape, but as an important adjunct, an enhancement
to the world around them. This is the lowest level at which what can be called
‘Art appreciation’. Once a viewer has reached this important turning point, the
next step is to decide as an individual, in what is an introspective and intensely
personal process, what is art. Once the guidelines are set, then the critical
process may begin in earnest. Good art, bad art, art that one may support, but
not care to look at. These are all distinctions that cannot be made by a passive
viewer. The steps in this process can be completed in the span of one second,
and may take a lifetime to refine, if one accepts that this process ever really be
said to be complete.
In today’s art world there are innumerable styles and ways people create what
they call art. The boundaries have been pushed so far from the time when art
was an aesthetic concern, rather than a cerebral one, many people may feel
they need to redefine the realm for themselves so they can actually feel
qualified to like art again. One definition of good art is work that causes a
change in perspective, instigates thinking, and adds a new light to a dark reality.
Good art realizes something new about what it means to be alive; as well as
remind the viewer that not everything we take as reality is real.
The work of Charles Ray is by this definition good art. Someone who is not
ready to let the work teach him or her something can often dismiss it after first
glance. Many of his works could be dismissed because they lack some of the
instant visual impact that other art has. To stop and take a second look will
reward the observer with the understanding that they are exactly what they
appear to be, but existing in another way. ” Ray takes the bedrock of reality,
weather something as abstract as a cube or as concrete as a human figure, and
then twists and tweaks it until it tugs at the reality of what one thinks one knows”
(Schimmell pg 60)
While growing up in Chicago his parents owned and operated a small
commercial art school. The school was successful having a location in the
center of the city and a practical commercial oriented curriculum. Ray however
was quite mischievous and his parents decided that he would be best in a
military school. So they sent him to Marmion military school in Aurora, Illinois.
The school was operated by the Benedictine order of the Catholic Church. This
period of intense regimented living and subsequent anxiety would effect his
future art. When time came for Ray to go to college he decided to attend the
University of Iowa.
Ray studied under Roland Brener a South African born sculptor who had
studied in London under Anthony Caro. Brener became Rays mentor and
provided him with the formal Modernist syntax that Caro transmitted to him. But
in the early seventies the Minimalists and Post-Minimalists were the most radical
artists and modernism was quickly becoming irrelevant. Ray became interested
in the art of Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, and Dennis Oppenheim who inserted
their bodies into the work as a medium for sculpture. The most well known works
from this period were pictures of himself being held two feet off the floor and
pinned to the wall by a plank of wood that was diagonally braced between his
pelvis and the floor.
After graduation he moved home for a year before starting Graduate studies, at
University of Kentucky but finishing at Rutgers and got his MFA in 1979. Ray
was torn between making sculpture and performance art and ultimately decided
he liked both. He began a series of works that involved the quintessential
minimalist structure the cube. Rays cube pieces usually involved himself as the
activator of the work. “Clock Man” of 1978 was a cube that was secured to the
wall and had a clock face on the front. Ray was inside the cube and his legs
dangled out. Ray would move the clocks hands from the inside according to
what he thought to be accurate minutes. When Ray came out he thought it was
six o’clock when actually it was three. After Graduation Ray began
teaching at the University of California in Los Angeles. His sculptures
throughout the eighties relied less on his body as the activator but
still toying with the viewer’s perceptions and still exploring the
cube. Some of my favorites from this time are “ink box”,
“ink line”, and“7 1/2 ton cube”. “Ink Box” consisted of a
shiny black cube with no top side, the empty cube was
then filled with printers ink until it reached the top and
formed a slight meniscus perfectly completing the cube.
This work tugs at the basic human instinct to touch something
smooth and shiny, and provides an unwelcome and possibly
disastrous surprise. “Ink Line “ had a similar concept where Ray cut a
hole in the ceiling and a corresponding hole in the floor installed a pump and
pipes in from the floor to the wall then across the ceiling to the top hole. The
system dripped ink in a steady stream from the top hole to the bottom, forming a
clean black line. In photos it appears to be a thin black string, and would cry out
for a confused viewer to touch it.
There is a certain minimalist aesthetic here with the forms but also the
interaction between the viewer, literally creating “theater” type of tension
between the work and viewer, but few would credit Freid with this level of insight
when he famously critiqued the minimalists. “7 1/2 ton cube” is nothing more
than a solid steel cube 36x36x36 that Ray painted with automotive paint white.
The crisp clean white presents a façade of lightness when in actuality there is
little one could do to store more weight in the same amount of space. Even with
the title, there is still room for the viewer to doubt the veracity of the claim made
by it. What one must understand when dealing with work of Charles Ray is that
the title may be the only link between what a reasonable person would consider
truth, and what Charles is presenting to us as his version. The title is the
signpost marking the departure of the real world, and arrival into the world of art.
A simple white box can baffle the mind, given a chance. Six sides all the same,
undetailed and without the aid of the title there would be little hope of an
unguided mind to be able to accommodate the complexities. Using that measure
it would be easy to see how quickly the mind would resort to despair when
confronted with a work like “Unpainted Sculpture” and the “Tractor”. Unable to
find a place in the ordered rows of logic that make up the rational mind, a wall
protecting the viewer from over stimulation would descend, set in place by a
mind simply unable to accept the number and variety of variables the work
requires be acknowledged, just for it to exist at all. What first appears to be
opaque is the body’s first line of defense against a concept that would surely
break it’s tenuous grip on the rules of engagement. The ..15 shade lens that
removes all but the most basic of information, allowing the rest to trickle through.
Charles Ray has been a included in many of the important art shows of the
nineties, including “Post Human,” ”Helter Skelter; L.A. Art in the 1990’s,”
“Documenta IX,” and the Whitney Biennials of 1989, 1993, 1995, and
1997. His mid-career retrospective opened in June 1998 at the
Whitney museum, and then traveled to MOCA Los Angeles,
where the artist lives and teaches, and ended at MOCA Chicago
where his family is from.
“Unpainted Sculpture” was completed in 1997. Ray spent
months touring different insurance lots looking for the
perfect car that had been involved in a grizzly wreck.
He was looking for a car that had been mashed up
in a way that the bends of metal would stimulate
the eye in the modernist fashion. Once he
found one he bought it and took it to the
studio to begin the real work. Ray and his
helpers disassembled the car and
molded each part in a rubber mold
then cast an exact replica in fiberglass.
He then painted the fiberglass flat
gray and reassembled it exactly. The
result is what looks like a wrecked car
that he spray-painted gray.Every time
Ray unveils a new work there is a lot of hype,
especially since he’s is rather slow to produce
them. People want to know how can he top his last
work, and a perfect fiberglass replica of a old smashed
up Grand Am could be quite difficult to top.
Charles Ray began a large-scale work a number of years ago
that was to be known as “Tractor”. Due to the complexity and
range of skills necessary to successfully complete the project,
the control over the final stages of the process were handed
over to the Johnson Atelier, a renowned art foundry in New
Jersey.
Ray had found an old vintage Cletrac Tractor broken down
on some farm out in California and purchased it from the
owner. He took the broken down machine as well as the
leaves and twigs and trash that lay around the base, and
transported them back to his studio in Los Angeles. He
and assistants meticulously deconstructed the machine.
All the parts that could be taken apart were disassembled,
categorized and labeled. Next a team of students and
other artists for hire began to model each part in white
stoneware clay, measuring with calipers as to make an as
perfect as possible duplicate. If the radiator was bent and rusted then the
modeler had to replicate every bend and blemish.
Hand modeling a simple bolt could take days, the number and complexity of the
parts made the scope of the project mind boggling. As the parts were completed
they were given to a mold maker to take a silicon rubber mold, which was then
stored in a crate, eventually to be sent the foundry in New Jersey.
Crates upon crates arrived with Ray when he first arrived and a meeting was
called. The craftsmen and women working on the next phase needed to hear for
themselves the standard described, that they were expected to keep. We were
going to put this tractor back together with cast aluminum parts and we were
going to make three of them, exactly the same.
Casting wax into the molds net three copies of each part. These waxes were
meticulously chased as a set, never separated. All three pieces were to be done
by the same person, leaving as near to the same marks on each as the well-
trained human eye could detect. They were then sprued and invested as a set,
with each gate and vent landing in the very same position on each one the three
copies of each part.
A ceramic shell refractory mold was built with layers of slurry deposited over
time. The molds were put in the burnout kiln and the wax was melted out, then
molten aluminum poured in.
Ray explained that the metal chasing would be a crucial part. When a rough
casting comes out of the mold there are sprues and vents attached to the
casting that need to be cut off, and the areas where they attached need to be
textured to match the surrounding areas. Again maintaining continuity
throughout, one worker would metal chase a whole set of any three given parts
attempting to replicate tool marks the modelers made in the clay, on the areas
that needed chasing. Then they were painstakingly labeled as part number this
of tractor number that. Related pieces were set aside together until larger
subassemblies could be started.
The next part would be the most difficult part, reassembling the tractors.
When the time came for this step in production, Ray again stepped outside the
bounds of what was expected of him. A hands-off approach could be taken as
standard operating procedure for artists who have achieved a certain level.
Charles Ray had certainly achieved this level, but rather than dropping the
project into the loving arms of the Johnson Atelier, he decided to move to
Princeton, 12 miles from the foundry. He also brought his number one modeler,
Frank, with him.
Many clients of the Johnson Atelier show up for brief periods of time to oversee
their projects completion, usually stopping in to approve the final pattern for
mold making and then several weeks later for the patination or paint job.
Charley and Frank could be seen working at the foundry daily, sometimes on
weekends.
Real concerns began to bubble up as to whether Ray really thought all these
parts would go back together in spite of all the variables involved with this
process. Each part, through all of the materials it will be made of, has a built-in
tolerance. It would be impossible for a human hand to model anything to the
exactness that a machinist could do with a mill and lathe. Bolts can be modeled
close but never perfect enough to thread into a nut that was also made by hand.
Clay shrinks and warps a little as it dries, rubber molds can twist, and deform
mating surfaces, wax tends to slump and aluminum becomes measurably
smaller as it cools. Maintaining the highest standard possible was key in every
department, but no matter what was done, each step was adding to an ever-
thicker barrier of tolerance that would need to be broken through in order to
reach completion. Even as precise as the parts were they would never fit exactly
as they had.
Asked what he had in mind for the assembly, he said he really did not know, but
he had confidence that the team would find a way to make it all happen.
So the castings were hammered and cut and welded together starting with the
insides of the engine working out. A lot of the parts had to be ground down and
tweaked to fit back together but the majority of them actually fit pretty well
considering the process.
Once all of the bushings, and pistons and pushrods of the engine were cast and
chased and placed and mounted the top plate was welded on, and the world
said goodbye to an aluminum engine casing that has thousands of dollars, and
countless hours worth of work inside that no one will ever be able to appreciate
or even see, ever again.
When confronted with the notion of making only the parts that are visible from
the outside to save millions and years worth of work with a hollow tractor, no one
will ever know, except the 50 staff members who are working in it. His response
was simple, and standardized. “God will know”
Not to be accused of zealotry, it does not seem that he was actually making
these tractors for God, but rather there was an accounting to be had that was
not under the control of men. It amounted to the moral force that kept him
honest about art making. This was not a game for him, his art was his life and if
he cut any corners to make his life easier then the whole thing would just be a
fake. The same hand need make each part and each mark need be made on
one part and exactly the same on the other two. It was the set of rules he
decided upon and he had to maintain them in order to feel honest about the
work.
The artwork here is the idea, and the tractor represents it, but the religious
paradigm used metaphorically works well here to describe the details of what is
happening. God represents the enforcer of the rules, the ultimate arbiter of
pride, and the one whose judgment cannot be avoided. A viewer looking at the
finished piece may be impressed by the craftsman ship of the work but then
dismiss it as just a copy of a tractor, but what is inside must be taken on faith. A
real student of the work may believe with all of her heart that what is held up in
legend be actually true to the work, but it is exactly at the point where proof is
produced, that faith is lost. Faith in the light of proof is unnecessary.
Ray’s choice of material should also be considered. He uses common materials,
materials available to everyone, in contexts or quantities that make them
exciting. Ink, iron, wood, fiberglass. For the tractor he uses aluminum, a
decidedly non-precious and eminently recyclable material, eschewing pretense
of monumental work, instead to produce an actual item.
Instead of tributes to the expected regime of aesthetic hoi polloi, he concerns
himself with the splendor of that which is left over. Defining his own terms, he
uses a lexicon of decay and bombast to shape for the viewer an intimate and
true beauty.
The power of the work of Charles Ray is in what cannot be seen, and in the
understanding that things are actually much more complex and amazing than
our eyes can comprehend
art, not as part of the landscape, but as an important adjunct, an enhancement
to the world around them. This is the lowest level at which what can be called
‘Art appreciation’. Once a viewer has reached this important turning point, the
next step is to decide as an individual, in what is an introspective and intensely
personal process, what is art. Once the guidelines are set, then the critical
process may begin in earnest. Good art, bad art, art that one may support, but
not care to look at. These are all distinctions that cannot be made by a passive
viewer. The steps in this process can be completed in the span of one second,
and may take a lifetime to refine, if one accepts that this process ever really be
said to be complete.
In today’s art world there are innumerable styles and ways people create what
they call art. The boundaries have been pushed so far from the time when art
was an aesthetic concern, rather than a cerebral one, many people may feel
they need to redefine the realm for themselves so they can actually feel
qualified to like art again. One definition of good art is work that causes a
change in perspective, instigates thinking, and adds a new light to a dark reality.
Good art realizes something new about what it means to be alive; as well as
remind the viewer that not everything we take as reality is real.
The work of Charles Ray is by this definition good art. Someone who is not
ready to let the work teach him or her something can often dismiss it after first
glance. Many of his works could be dismissed because they lack some of the
instant visual impact that other art has. To stop and take a second look will
reward the observer with the understanding that they are exactly what they
appear to be, but existing in another way. ” Ray takes the bedrock of reality,
weather something as abstract as a cube or as concrete as a human figure, and
then twists and tweaks it until it tugs at the reality of what one thinks one knows”
(Schimmell pg 60)
While growing up in Chicago his parents owned and operated a small
commercial art school. The school was successful having a location in the
center of the city and a practical commercial oriented curriculum. Ray however
was quite mischievous and his parents decided that he would be best in a
military school. So they sent him to Marmion military school in Aurora, Illinois.
The school was operated by the Benedictine order of the Catholic Church. This
period of intense regimented living and subsequent anxiety would effect his
future art. When time came for Ray to go to college he decided to attend the
University of Iowa.
Ray studied under Roland Brener a South African born sculptor who had
studied in London under Anthony Caro. Brener became Rays mentor and
provided him with the formal Modernist syntax that Caro transmitted to him. But
in the early seventies the Minimalists and Post-Minimalists were the most radical
artists and modernism was quickly becoming irrelevant. Ray became interested
in the art of Chris Burden, Bruce Nauman, and Dennis Oppenheim who inserted
their bodies into the work as a medium for sculpture. The most well known works
from this period were pictures of himself being held two feet off the floor and
pinned to the wall by a plank of wood that was diagonally braced between his
pelvis and the floor.
After graduation he moved home for a year before starting Graduate studies, at
University of Kentucky but finishing at Rutgers and got his MFA in 1979. Ray
was torn between making sculpture and performance art and ultimately decided
he liked both. He began a series of works that involved the quintessential
minimalist structure the cube. Rays cube pieces usually involved himself as the
activator of the work. “Clock Man” of 1978 was a cube that was secured to the
wall and had a clock face on the front. Ray was inside the cube and his legs
dangled out. Ray would move the clocks hands from the inside according to
what he thought to be accurate minutes. When Ray came out he thought it was
six o’clock when actually it was three. After Graduation Ray began
teaching at the University of California in Los Angeles. His sculptures
throughout the eighties relied less on his body as the activator but
still toying with the viewer’s perceptions and still exploring the
cube. Some of my favorites from this time are “ink box”,
“ink line”, and“7 1/2 ton cube”. “Ink Box” consisted of a
shiny black cube with no top side, the empty cube was
then filled with printers ink until it reached the top and
formed a slight meniscus perfectly completing the cube.
This work tugs at the basic human instinct to touch something
smooth and shiny, and provides an unwelcome and possibly
disastrous surprise. “Ink Line “ had a similar concept where Ray cut a
hole in the ceiling and a corresponding hole in the floor installed a pump and
pipes in from the floor to the wall then across the ceiling to the top hole. The
system dripped ink in a steady stream from the top hole to the bottom, forming a
clean black line. In photos it appears to be a thin black string, and would cry out
for a confused viewer to touch it.
There is a certain minimalist aesthetic here with the forms but also the
interaction between the viewer, literally creating “theater” type of tension
between the work and viewer, but few would credit Freid with this level of insight
when he famously critiqued the minimalists. “7 1/2 ton cube” is nothing more
than a solid steel cube 36x36x36 that Ray painted with automotive paint white.
The crisp clean white presents a façade of lightness when in actuality there is
little one could do to store more weight in the same amount of space. Even with
the title, there is still room for the viewer to doubt the veracity of the claim made
by it. What one must understand when dealing with work of Charles Ray is that
the title may be the only link between what a reasonable person would consider
truth, and what Charles is presenting to us as his version. The title is the
signpost marking the departure of the real world, and arrival into the world of art.
A simple white box can baffle the mind, given a chance. Six sides all the same,
undetailed and without the aid of the title there would be little hope of an
unguided mind to be able to accommodate the complexities. Using that measure
it would be easy to see how quickly the mind would resort to despair when
confronted with a work like “Unpainted Sculpture” and the “Tractor”. Unable to
find a place in the ordered rows of logic that make up the rational mind, a wall
protecting the viewer from over stimulation would descend, set in place by a
mind simply unable to accept the number and variety of variables the work
requires be acknowledged, just for it to exist at all. What first appears to be
opaque is the body’s first line of defense against a concept that would surely
break it’s tenuous grip on the rules of engagement. The ..15 shade lens that
removes all but the most basic of information, allowing the rest to trickle through.
Charles Ray has been a included in many of the important art shows of the
nineties, including “Post Human,” ”Helter Skelter; L.A. Art in the 1990’s,”
“Documenta IX,” and the Whitney Biennials of 1989, 1993, 1995, and
1997. His mid-career retrospective opened in June 1998 at the
Whitney museum, and then traveled to MOCA Los Angeles,
where the artist lives and teaches, and ended at MOCA Chicago
where his family is from.
“Unpainted Sculpture” was completed in 1997. Ray spent
months touring different insurance lots looking for the
perfect car that had been involved in a grizzly wreck.
He was looking for a car that had been mashed up
in a way that the bends of metal would stimulate
the eye in the modernist fashion. Once he
found one he bought it and took it to the
studio to begin the real work. Ray and his
helpers disassembled the car and
molded each part in a rubber mold
then cast an exact replica in fiberglass.
He then painted the fiberglass flat
gray and reassembled it exactly. The
result is what looks like a wrecked car
that he spray-painted gray.Every time
Ray unveils a new work there is a lot of hype,
especially since he’s is rather slow to produce
them. People want to know how can he top his last
work, and a perfect fiberglass replica of a old smashed
up Grand Am could be quite difficult to top.
Charles Ray began a large-scale work a number of years ago
that was to be known as “Tractor”. Due to the complexity and
range of skills necessary to successfully complete the project,
the control over the final stages of the process were handed
over to the Johnson Atelier, a renowned art foundry in New
Jersey.
Ray had found an old vintage Cletrac Tractor broken down
on some farm out in California and purchased it from the
owner. He took the broken down machine as well as the
leaves and twigs and trash that lay around the base, and
transported them back to his studio in Los Angeles. He
and assistants meticulously deconstructed the machine.
All the parts that could be taken apart were disassembled,
categorized and labeled. Next a team of students and
other artists for hire began to model each part in white
stoneware clay, measuring with calipers as to make an as
perfect as possible duplicate. If the radiator was bent and rusted then the
modeler had to replicate every bend and blemish.
Hand modeling a simple bolt could take days, the number and complexity of the
parts made the scope of the project mind boggling. As the parts were completed
they were given to a mold maker to take a silicon rubber mold, which was then
stored in a crate, eventually to be sent the foundry in New Jersey.
Crates upon crates arrived with Ray when he first arrived and a meeting was
called. The craftsmen and women working on the next phase needed to hear for
themselves the standard described, that they were expected to keep. We were
going to put this tractor back together with cast aluminum parts and we were
going to make three of them, exactly the same.
Casting wax into the molds net three copies of each part. These waxes were
meticulously chased as a set, never separated. All three pieces were to be done
by the same person, leaving as near to the same marks on each as the well-
trained human eye could detect. They were then sprued and invested as a set,
with each gate and vent landing in the very same position on each one the three
copies of each part.
A ceramic shell refractory mold was built with layers of slurry deposited over
time. The molds were put in the burnout kiln and the wax was melted out, then
molten aluminum poured in.
Ray explained that the metal chasing would be a crucial part. When a rough
casting comes out of the mold there are sprues and vents attached to the
casting that need to be cut off, and the areas where they attached need to be
textured to match the surrounding areas. Again maintaining continuity
throughout, one worker would metal chase a whole set of any three given parts
attempting to replicate tool marks the modelers made in the clay, on the areas
that needed chasing. Then they were painstakingly labeled as part number this
of tractor number that. Related pieces were set aside together until larger
subassemblies could be started.
The next part would be the most difficult part, reassembling the tractors.
When the time came for this step in production, Ray again stepped outside the
bounds of what was expected of him. A hands-off approach could be taken as
standard operating procedure for artists who have achieved a certain level.
Charles Ray had certainly achieved this level, but rather than dropping the
project into the loving arms of the Johnson Atelier, he decided to move to
Princeton, 12 miles from the foundry. He also brought his number one modeler,
Frank, with him.
Many clients of the Johnson Atelier show up for brief periods of time to oversee
their projects completion, usually stopping in to approve the final pattern for
mold making and then several weeks later for the patination or paint job.
Charley and Frank could be seen working at the foundry daily, sometimes on
weekends.
Real concerns began to bubble up as to whether Ray really thought all these
parts would go back together in spite of all the variables involved with this
process. Each part, through all of the materials it will be made of, has a built-in
tolerance. It would be impossible for a human hand to model anything to the
exactness that a machinist could do with a mill and lathe. Bolts can be modeled
close but never perfect enough to thread into a nut that was also made by hand.
Clay shrinks and warps a little as it dries, rubber molds can twist, and deform
mating surfaces, wax tends to slump and aluminum becomes measurably
smaller as it cools. Maintaining the highest standard possible was key in every
department, but no matter what was done, each step was adding to an ever-
thicker barrier of tolerance that would need to be broken through in order to
reach completion. Even as precise as the parts were they would never fit exactly
as they had.
Asked what he had in mind for the assembly, he said he really did not know, but
he had confidence that the team would find a way to make it all happen.
So the castings were hammered and cut and welded together starting with the
insides of the engine working out. A lot of the parts had to be ground down and
tweaked to fit back together but the majority of them actually fit pretty well
considering the process.
Once all of the bushings, and pistons and pushrods of the engine were cast and
chased and placed and mounted the top plate was welded on, and the world
said goodbye to an aluminum engine casing that has thousands of dollars, and
countless hours worth of work inside that no one will ever be able to appreciate
or even see, ever again.
When confronted with the notion of making only the parts that are visible from
the outside to save millions and years worth of work with a hollow tractor, no one
will ever know, except the 50 staff members who are working in it. His response
was simple, and standardized. “God will know”
Not to be accused of zealotry, it does not seem that he was actually making
these tractors for God, but rather there was an accounting to be had that was
not under the control of men. It amounted to the moral force that kept him
honest about art making. This was not a game for him, his art was his life and if
he cut any corners to make his life easier then the whole thing would just be a
fake. The same hand need make each part and each mark need be made on
one part and exactly the same on the other two. It was the set of rules he
decided upon and he had to maintain them in order to feel honest about the
work.
The artwork here is the idea, and the tractor represents it, but the religious
paradigm used metaphorically works well here to describe the details of what is
happening. God represents the enforcer of the rules, the ultimate arbiter of
pride, and the one whose judgment cannot be avoided. A viewer looking at the
finished piece may be impressed by the craftsman ship of the work but then
dismiss it as just a copy of a tractor, but what is inside must be taken on faith. A
real student of the work may believe with all of her heart that what is held up in
legend be actually true to the work, but it is exactly at the point where proof is
produced, that faith is lost. Faith in the light of proof is unnecessary.
Ray’s choice of material should also be considered. He uses common materials,
materials available to everyone, in contexts or quantities that make them
exciting. Ink, iron, wood, fiberglass. For the tractor he uses aluminum, a
decidedly non-precious and eminently recyclable material, eschewing pretense
of monumental work, instead to produce an actual item.
Instead of tributes to the expected regime of aesthetic hoi polloi, he concerns
himself with the splendor of that which is left over. Defining his own terms, he
uses a lexicon of decay and bombast to shape for the viewer an intimate and
true beauty.
The power of the work of Charles Ray is in what cannot be seen, and in the
understanding that things are actually much more complex and amazing than
our eyes can comprehend