Sculptor Takes Himself Out of Picture : Charles Ray comes up with new forms--not his own--in departure from confrontational body sculptures

Charles Ray has disappeared.

Once, the 37-year-old artist was regularly seen among the sculptural materials employed in his art. His naked body would lay perfectly still inside a horizontal steel box attached to the wall, with one arm dangling through a cutout hole to literally create a sculptural appendage, the other arm resting on the bump of a bony hip that peeked above the box.

Or else he would stand, again naked, with his head in a lineup of ordinary objects placed on a high shelf: vase next to box next to gasoline can next to human head.

Or, simpler still, Ray would pin himself against the wall with a plank, the dead weight of his torso pressed between the two, conspiring with gravity to suspend his body several feet off the floor. In these precocious student works, his body became a human painting hanging on a gallery wall.

The transformation of flesh and blood into the form of sculpture, domestic container and painting came to an end about five years ago, as Ray began to disentangle his body from his art. A principal interest of these body-related works had been the peculiar, if frequently unexamined, relationship between a work of art and the spectator who encounters it. Simply by making the spectator aware that, as a viewer, he was not the only living, breathing half of the liaison, Ray clearly meant to disorient that common relationship. Made quietly unnerving, the spectator’s discourse with art would be refreshed and vivified.

At least, it would be vivified in principal. In practice, that eye-opening refreshment did not quite work out. Ray’s body sculptures had developed out of a larger artistic shift. His hybrid form brought together aspects of performance art and Minimal sculpture--two modes that had emerged in the 1960s in an effort to acknowledge and explore the complex social space in which art and meaning take shape. But, for me, encounters with Ray’s body sculptures were marred by their decidedly demonstrative nature; they had a nagging aura of show-and-tell.

As with the operatic installation art of Ann Hamilton, which also employs costumed actors as silently posed perfomers in elaborate tableaux, a conspiratorial quality of “let’s pretend” defused the necessary tension of Ray’s art. Certainly it was startling to come upon a naked person embedded in a sculpture. Yet, in order to convincingly stage the performance-sculpture, the mute artist/performer was required to ignore the spectator--to simply pretend you were not there.

For an aesthetic determined to dig deep into a spectator’s equivocal experience of art, this was a rather ironic handicap. The body-to-body confrontation central to Ray’s endeavor was safely intellectualized, out of physical harm’s way. Your surrender to the situation was demanded.

A key ingredient in Ray’s evolving solution to the dilemma has been to sidle off center stage, as his often compelling work of the last several years attests. Now, he lurks impishly in the wings. Ray began to make sculptures in which the essential pivot is often a perceived absence of the body. Typically, the spectator’s presence fills in for the artist’s. At its best, Ray’s art becomes a vivid point of contact between the artist’s outstretched hand and yours. His sculpture could be described metaphorically, as attempting to harness that electrically charged space between the index fingers of God and Adam in a certain Sistine ceiling fresco.

A good chunk of Ray’s work from the past five years may be seen in Newport Beach and Los Angeles. Nine sculptures dating from 1986 through 1989 are on view, through Sept. 23, at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, including his great breakthrough piece, “Ink Box.” And five more recent works, all but one made this year, are presently at Burnett Miller Gallery, where the Los Angeles-based artist has lately been represented, to Aug. 31.

The Newport Harbor exhibition is the artist’s first significant show at a museum--a single exceptional piece was included in last year’s biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art--yet, it’s somewhat disappointing. The show feels lackadaisical. Several individual works are strong, and a few have not been seen here before; still, the selection as a whole seems decidedly haphazard.

Together, the concurrent exhibitions suggest several emergent themes in Ray’s sculpture; at the museum, however, it’s hard to discern any curatorial point of view at work, save for an apparent desire to offer a general sampler of the artist’s increasingly important oeuvre. Nor is there a catalogue or brochure, nor even a didactic label on the wall (according to a museum spokesman, a planned brochure has been delayed). The show, which will not travel, feels more like a commercial gallery presentation than a rigorous museum exhibition.

Ray’s art frequently looks simple, but in fact it is often very difficult to install and maintain. (For proof, try filling an old-fashioned porcelain bathtub with water, then mounting it--vertically, not horizontally--on a wall. Ray’s water-filled “Bath,” from 1989, floats impossibly in the space of the museum wall, as if seen from an aerial vantage point.) At least three of the nine works at Newport required heroic measures to accommodate. You have the sense that the complications of installation were all the museum could handle.

Still, coupled with the actual gallery presentation at Burnett Miller, the perspicacious (and peripatetic) visitor will find numerous rewards. Together, the shows make plain that a lexicon of forms has begun to emerge in Ray’s mature work, forms whose ancestry in his early body sculptures is clear. The shelf, or table-top, is a recurrent motif, as are the rotating disk and the mannequin (a surrogate human body). And the box, or other type of container, is perhaps pre-eminent.

Space, a sculptor’s principal medium, is keenly deployed within this range of forms, several of which can coexist in a single piece. “Table” (1990) is most eloquent in this regard. A simple table of steel, topped by a clear sheet of plexiglass, is arrayed with a variety of containers--pitcher, bowl, drinking glasses, carafe, covered jar--also formed of transparent plastic. In each case, the plane of contact between container and table-top has been cut out; if you put anything in the bowl, for example, it would go through to the floor. Intangible space seems to flow disconcertingly through the sculpture.

The jar provides a subtle but important counterpoint to that flow, its cover rudely putting a lid on the action. Thus are the fluid properties of space made strangely visible, while emptiness is given energetic life.

Two earlier table sculptures also play with perceptual incongruities. One transforms a still life into a group of individual objects, each slowly rotating at an almost imperceptible speed; the other connects its assorted still-life elements by way of a network of tubes crisscrossing beneath the table’s surface. (A fourth table, not in either show, removes the surface of the table altogether; each still-life element is suspended by a supporting rod, together identifying a plane of empty space.) Vaguely diabolical in bearing, these disparate sculptures show how Ray returns to a simple motif to mine it in a variety of ways.

More important, there is something poignant and solitary about the table sculptures. The technical complexity of Ray’s art is such that you tend to scrutinize the work in an effort to understand how it was made and, by extension, through what processes the idea might have originated. The table sculptures conjure someone sitting alone at a kitchen table--”contemplating the salt shaker,” as it were, or thinking about the nature of things. The artist, in absentia , is suggested.

He also turns up as a costumed department store mannequin in a recent self-portrait sculpture, as well as in an installation in which a framed, photographic self-portrait is curved to fit the swelling, curved wall on which it incongruously hangs. The curved wall, irrationally bowed out into the room, seems to be responding to enormous hidden pressures; riding the crest of the wave, the artist’s image is carried along for the ride.

Ray’s mannequin is very funny, in part because such things are supposed to be generic, not specific, and in part because artists’ self-portraits typically tend toward the cerebral or emotionally refined, not toward assertions of cultural status as a commercial dummy. “That’s not really me,” this rudimentary self-portrait declares, its unexpected candor running contrary to the very genre of portraiture.

A slightly earlier manifestation of the department store mannequin motif is also on view. This undressed, anatomically incorrect mannequin has been pointedly “corrected” by the artist. At first, the hyper-realistic genitals on the otherwise schematic dummy are startling; soon, it is the hyper-phoniness of the idealized dummy itself, with its typical department store style, that seems truly odd. Ray’s addition to this bizarre creature, which was initially designed to be a surrogate for you and me, unearths an implied duet between idealization and taboo.

Technically, the obvious tour de force at Burnett Miller Gallery is a wonderful mechanized carousel titled “Revolution Counter-Revolution.” The base of a child-size merry-go-round rotates clockwise, at a fairly good clip. Four pairs of suspended ponies and two swings, all empty and awaiting riders, also rotate, but in the opposite direction. Ray has calibrated the speed ratio of these two conflicting rotations so the riderless steeds appear nearly stationary, suspended in space as the ground plane rushes away. Almost imperceptibly, the horses inch forward, as if against an unseen but overwhelming inertia.

More quietly, if nonetheless technically surprising, “7 1/2 Ton Cube” (1990) is a pure white, pristine, perfectly milled block of solid steel. Its elegant, immovable bulk stands as wild counterpoint to Ray’s most accomplished sculpture, the pivotal “Ink Box” (1986). A hollow, open cube of black-lacquered steel, also three feet to a side, “Ink Box” is filled to the brim with some 200 gallons of jet-black printer’s ink. The quivering meniscus of ink that is the top plane of this menacing black cube forms a threatening surface just begging to be touched, even in the face of certain disaster. Avant le deluge , the hair-raising conflict between a desire to act and a denial of experience is tightly focused.

In the evocation of disarming conflicts such as this, Ray’s art finds its most profound resonance. At his best, he is able to locate these complex perceptions deep in the bodily consciousness of the spectator. The High Modernist conception of the work of art as an all-knowing, all-seeing eye, disembodied and disengaged from the passive viewer but held aloft as his moral guide, is laboriously pulled back down to Earth. Charles Ray gives his art weight and dramatic space--and he acknowledges the same prerogatives for its spectators.