Sculptural One-Liners

By ROBERT HUGHES

It's compensation: as the water drains out of the pond of contemporary art, as the belief in everlasting invention that was hard-wired into American expectations during the 1960s dwindles, small bass and medium carp are treated as potential Moby Dicks. Witness the California artist Charles Ray, 45, whose mid-career retrospective, curated by Paul Schimmel of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art, recently opened at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art.

The catalog is somewhat hyperbolic--at one point Schimmel actually manages to compare a sculpture of eight naked effigies of Ray sprawling around in a masturbatory group grope to Rodin's Burghers of Calais--but Ray comes out of this show looking clever and sometimes more than that. His sculpture Fall '91, 1992, is a figure of a woman, 8 ft. high, in a red suit, done with slightly more detail and verisimilitude than a window dummy but with much less than complete lifelikeness. Its effect is to wrench your sense of scale out of kilter: far away, with no real humans near it, it seems close to you; then you realize how big it is, and it takes on the threatening and remote aspect of Big Momma, as though you, the viewer, were no longer an adult but a child.

A similar contradiction underlies Ray's big piece blandly titled Unpainted Sculpture, 1997. He found a Pontiac Grand Am that had been totaled in a crash that killed the driver, and then proceeded to dissect out each of its hundreds of distorted parts, make fiberglass copies of them, paint them a uniform light gray and reassemble them as a ghost wreck: maximum violence contradicted by a sort of plodding cool.

Ray's work is a series of one-liners, and these depend for their effect on what all one-liners need: a punch, a certain concision. Without that, they straggle. Told in outline, the plot--if you can call it that--of his short film Fashions sounds at least notionally amusing. A fixed camera stares at a rather mannish-looking model standing on a turntable, wearing an outfit of Ray's design. She revolves once, and then we cut to the same model wearing a different dress. There are about a hundred of these changes in the course of the 12 minutes the film lasts, and every outfit is as banal as the last. It's meant (one presumes) to satirize the cultural pretensions of the upper reaches of the rag trade: Warhol with the glamour taken out. It makes for a very long 12 minutes.

This side of Ray's activity is cognate with the spirit of '70s conceptual art--its fondness for solemnly carrying out small, meaningless activities, for loading with importance gestures that didn't mean beans so as to criticize the "importance" assigned to artmaking itself. His earliest work was, in fact, done in the '70s, and it produced a number of hybrids of minimal and performance art. Often they involved the prototypical Minimalist cube, with Ray inside it and some parts of him sticking out--a box with a clockface, for example, its hands moved by the artist, whose legs hang out of two holes in the bottom like a pendulum. Inside, in the darkness, Ray would try to guess what time it was and move the clock hands accordingly.

Even in the '80s and '90s, much of Ray's work came down to a worthy but not particularly stimulating kind of cutting-edge activity, which hit the buttons of insecurity (sharply, sometimes) without generating much in the way of aesthetic pleasure. This is especially true of his sculpture involving generic store-mannequin figures. The blankness and not-quite-humanness of shop-window mannequins, and their eerie reference to the real human body, have been among the standard tropes of modern art since Surrealism in the '20s. When Ray takes one, models his own face on it and then dresses it in his sailing clothes--or takes another and grafts a replica of his own genitals and pubic bush onto it--he doesn't seem to be doing much, despite the catalog's claim that the results are "profoundly disconcerting."

More effective--and genuinely disconcerting--is Ray's more abstract work. In Rotating Circle, 1988, a disk the same color as the gallery wall is set flush with the wall. You'd hardly notice it except for the hum that issues from it. This, it turns out, is made by an invisible motor: the disk is spinning so fast that you can't see the motion, and it would burn your hand if you touched it.

The sharpest piece of sculpture as frustrated interaction, however, is Ink Box, 1986, a big black cube that sits on the gallery floor doing absolutely nothing--minimal, gloss-lacquered and inert. Except that the top of the cube is the surface of 200 gal. of black printer's ink, which would muck you up thoroughly if you so much as touched it. This is one of the few times that Ray's work seems almost as nasty as Bruce Nauman's. It sums up the smart, nerdy, passive-aggressive character of Ray's imagination. Sometimes a minor artist will produce a truly unforgettable image, just one. Meret Oppenheim's Surrealist fur cup and spoon, for instance, or Jeff Koons' stainless-steel rabbit. Ink Box is one of those.