More Than Meets the Eye

Charles Ray steps from his hotel in lower Manhattan and turns uptown, heading to work on the biggest exhibition of his career, and perhaps other unpleasantness. The wiry, intense Los Angeles sculptor decides to walk the 50 blocks to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is installing a major retrospective of his work. Yet halfway uptown, he passes two freshly spilled cups of coffee. He stops and stares, trying to puzzle out the human drama that ended with puddles on the sidewalk. He’s fascinated. A few blocks later he stops to peer through the window of a church whose modern architecture intrigues him.

Ray may be Southern California’s hottest artist at the moment; his works are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars; he is enmeshed on this spring day in the machinery of Manhattan’s culture industry. Yet on the way to the museum, his mind wanders to subjects far more mundane. Perhaps they are more appealing than the task awaiting him at the museum, which he clearly does not relish. “Getting the shows installed, making sure the work’s in good shape, arguing with curators--it takes a lot out of you,” he says in an interview later. “Being in a room full of my art makes me incredibly nervous because the work always gets damaged when it’s shown, and I hate my openings.”

Besides, he adds, “The social aspect of being an artist has always made me uncomfortable.”

That makes this a very uncomfortable year indeed for the reticent sculptor, whose show opened at the Whitney in June and moves on to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on Nov. 15. His monochrome replica of a crashed car and his big toy firetruck and his towering woman mannequin and his spinning circle of beige and his narcissistic orgy sculpture and his steel cube filled with ink, considered by many his “breakthrough” piece in 1986, have reached a moment for critical appraisal by the art world. After years of being seen by the insular circles of artists, critics and collectors, Ray’s work is being presented in major events, to be reviewed by the world at large. For most artists, this would be a moment of achievement and excitement. But for Ray, it is pure anxiety.

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In New York City, a few days before his opening at the Whitney, I find Ray nervously pacing the galleries on the fourth floor. Two dozen people are bustling about. Everything looks on track, but Ray doesn’t seem to be having much fun. “I feel sick,” he mutters to one of the crew. Passing through the entry gallery, he spots two workers silk-screening his name onto the wall. “It seems a bit big, don’t you think?” he says to no one in particular.

It’s at precisely this point--when his works are being installed for public view--that Ray is forced to relinquish control, and it obviously sets him more on edge. “I’m not allowed to touch any of the work unless a Whitney representative is present, because none of it belongs to me anymore,” he explains with a shrug.

The 1990 work, “7 1/2-ton Cube”--which weighs what its title suggests--has to be gingerly scooted into place along a meticulous track that traces the support beams in the Whitney, lest it go crashing into the basement.

Equally challenging is the installation of “Unpainted Sculpture,” which Ray made by buying a wrecked 1992 Pontiac Grand Am, dismantling it, casting hundreds of pieces in fiberglass, reassembling the molded pieces using photographs of the disassembly process as a guide, then finishing it with two coats of spectral gray primer paint.

To get the fragile sculpture into the museum, the Whitney hired structural engineer Peter Higgins, who designed a system to hoist the piece--which weighs more than a real car--up an elevator shaft at the Whitney. This little maneuver carries a price tag of $40,000, and Ray is visibly relieved when the nerve-racking procedure is over.

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Ray’s work is as strange as it is strong, and it evokes power- ful responses, including from those who perceive it as silly or far-fetched. Like a businessman who goes about the day with a mouse tucked inside a pocket, Ray’s work harbors secrets, and there’s usually more going on than first meets the eye.

Take the 1988 work “Rotating Circle.” The piece appears to be nothing more than a circle drawn on the wall. Yet what you’re looking at is a motorized disc set flush within the wall’s surface, spinning so fast that it appears stationary. Described as “genuinely disconcerting” by Time magazine critic Robert Hughes, the piece gives off a whiff of menace that permeates everything Ray produces.

Because Ray is extraordinarily patient and apparently has little concern for money, his work can be laboriously time-consuming. “Self-Portrait with Homemade Clothes,” for instance, is a four-minute film of Ray modeling a suit of clothes. Ray made all of the clothes himself after teaching himself to sew, and everything bears his touch, including socks and underwear that the viewer never sees. He also cobbled his shoes. Ray considers the film--and everything else he’s made--a work of sculpture, straining against the limits of what sculpture can be.

“There’s an element of Populism in Charley’s art that invites a simplistic reading, but the work is very densely layered,” says a New York art dealer who goes by the name Hudson, and whose gallery, Feature, has exhibited Ray’s work since 1985. “And as the time that elapses between works grows longer, he collapses more and more into each piece. Charley takes information most artists would use to make several works and folds it all into a single piece.”

More specifically, Ray’s work synthesizes art “isms” that are at odds with each other. His work is inflected with traces of Conceptualism--an idea-driven style that places a low premium on the value of craft--and Formalism, a style that’s about little else but craft. He juxtaposes elements of Minimalism, a Modernist style rooted in an almost naive belief in the sanctity of high culture, with aspects of Post-Modernism, a school steeped in irony that tends to sneer at the posturings of high culture. That this complex work is faring so well in the marketplace also has something to do with Ray’s savvy in exploiting the “wow” factor. Simply put, his art can be astonishing to look at.

“Traditionally, sculpture has been an inquiry into issues of form and volume. Charley addresses those things, but his art also operates on a behavioral level,” says L.A. dealer Stuart Regen, whose Regen Projects represents Ray and financed “Unpainted Sculpture.” “There’s always a double take with his work.”

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Visiting Ray at the Mar Vista bungalow he shares with artist Jennifer Pastor, I find myself wandering through a ragged yard in search of the front door, which is nearly obscured by overgrown bougainvillea. Ray seems startled to find me at the door, then recovers, shows me to a chair and begins digging vigorously through a junk drawer in search of misplaced paperwork. With the metabolism of a hummingbird and the coffee habit of a sailor, he rarely lights anywhere for long and tends to pace.

“You can see we’re not big art collectors,” he says, gesturing to the bare walls in the house’s tiny front room. “I love art but I’ve never bought an artwork or even considered it.”

Ray and Pastor, his companion of seven years with whom he settled down after two marriages, live with the dishevelment of college students. Shelves of books include texts on psychology, puzzles, sailing, physics, contemporary fiction and art. A bathroom scale sits on the hearth of a faux fireplace, and dominating the sparsely furnished living room is a huge boat sail.

“Charley knows what’s important for him and doesn’t care about owning a nice car or a house,” says Cornelia Grassi, a London-based dealer who works with Ray. “He thinks a lot about how to avoid being crushed by the art world, because he needs to feel mobile.”

Toward that end, Ray lives in a rented house. “I’d never own a house again,” he declares. “It’s good to find a rental that doesn’t have rugs, too, because people who don’t have rugs in their house let you do more.”

Ray’s equally modest studio is a few blocks from his house on a seedy stretch of Lincoln Boulevard in Venice. An unheated shoe box of a room devoid of natural light, the place is cluttered with surplus materials from various works, photographic equipment, two sewing machines, a sink in need of a scrubbing and a couch fashioned out of dirty foam rubber and plywood, scribbled with phone numbers. Standing guard in a corner is a nude sculpture of Pastor that Ray hasn’t figured out how to complete.

Ruby Neri, an assistant, is working on a clay bust of Ray’s head. Another assistant, Manuel Alvarez, is focused on an enormous clay relief occupying the center of the floor that Ray will photograph for use on the poster for his show. Hanging on metal racks are garment bags protecting clothing made by Ray.

Did you enjoy sewing?

“No,” he quickly answers. “But yes.”

*

Ray was born in Chicago in 1953, the second in a family of six children. His grandparents on his mother’s side were Irish immigrants, and his grandmother on his father’s side lost her mother when she was young. Her father and brothers then bought a gold mine in Colorado, where they felt life would be too rough for her, so they shipped her off to an orphanage in Pasadena run by nuns. As a young woman, she met Ray’s grandfather, who bought a commercial art school in Chicago, Ray College, which he and Ray’s grandmother ran before passing it on to Ray’s father.

Ray says he had Catholicism drummed into him as a child but decided early on that it wasn’t for him. He still, however, identifies himself as Catholic. When Ray was 10, this relatively typical family was upended by an affliction his younger sister Stacy suffered.

“Stacy was diagnosed as autistic schizophrenic, which tore my family apart and affected all of us differently,” Ray recalls. “I was dyslexic--to this day I have a hard time tying my shoes--and was a complete failure at school. Because my parents had their hands full, my older brother Peter and I were sent to Marmion Military Academy in Aurora, Ill. Cinder-block buildings, inspections once a day, marching everywhere--that was my life for four years. There were no girls at military school, so I didn’t have girlfriends when I was young, and I was shy and slow with that.”

Because there were art supplies around the house, Ray began drawing at an early age, but he quickly left paint and canvas behind. Even as a child he loved building things. At the University of Iowa, Ray studied with Roland Brener, a former student of Anthony Caro, the British Formalist whose lyrical geometric abstractions of the ‘60s brought an end to the domination of the organic sculptural monoliths popularized by Henry Moore.

“I found something really accessible about Caro’s way of working,” says Ray, who earned his bachelor’s at Iowa in 1975, then went to Rutgers University for a master of fine arts degree in 1979. “He just shifted stuff around until it locked together aesthetically, and his way of working made sense to me.” Paul Schimmel, chief curator of MOCA and organizer of Ray’s retrospective, says that “although Charley would have you believe his work is based in formalism, it’s not that simple. The work also deals with themes of mortality and dislocation and evoking a sense of awkwardness in the viewer similar to the one I think Charley feels.”

A few days later, Ray takes me to Marina del Rey to see his 40-foot sailboat, which is magnificent. In looking at the sleek craft, I’m struck by Ray’s tendency to compartmentalize his life: He can barely be bothered to button his shirt, but his artworks and his boat are immaculate. Listening to him patiently explain the boat’s computerized navigational system, I hear the teacher in him emerge.

“It never occurred to me to move to L.A. until I was offered the job at UCLA,” says Ray. He was teaching in New Orleans in 1981 when invited here by UCLA, and now is a tenured professor of art. “Los Angeles suits me, though, because it’s a place where you can be alone and work. Plus, I can sail here year-round. Sculptors often like sailing because it involves a kind of formal rightness. The shape of the sails and the waves, the way you’re transported to another horizon but the horizon’s on a slant, gravity’s different--it involves lots of sculptural things.

“Physical stuff is great,” adds Ray, who suffers from a bad back brought on by years of lifting heavy things. “I used to drink a lot, but I stopped completely in 1990, and I also smoked two packs a day for years but quit that too. Smoking just seemed so old-fashioned to me--you know, France, 1945.”

As he roams around the Marina, clad in his standard sneakers, jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, Ray talks about his early career.

“In the ‘70s I was making works designed to push materials to the breaking point--I dropped a wrecker’s ball onto a sheet of metal, for instance, and dropped a plate of steel onto a row of fluorescent lights. After that, I began incorporating my body into the work--I spent an afternoon with my body bound to the branch of a tree, and had myself pinned by a plank to a wall so that my feet dangled above the floor.”

In 1975 Ray began using time as a raw material for sculpture: He re-cut Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” backward. He recorded the transformation of a set of new white clothes into black as they became soiled over a period of months. He removed the workings of a public clock and attempted to tell time--using his arms and legs as indicators--based purely on his sense of what time it was.

Finding performative sculpture exhausting, he began looking for another way of working, and that’s when his mature style began to form. First came a series of four diabolically clever boxes begun in 1986. The most fully realized was “Ink Box,” a black steel cube filled so completely with printer’s ink that the liquid surface appears solid. The piece is disorienting because the viewer isn’t quite certain if the top is steel or liquid. Most people end up dipping a finger into the filthy ink.

In 1990 Ray began working with department store mannequins, and it kicked his career into high gear. “When Charley did the first mannequin piece I thought he’d gone completely ga-ga,” Schimmel recalls, “but it was in that piece that he figured out how to combine issues of identity with Formalist sculpture.”

Among his early works were three eight-foot female mannequins in different poses, clothing and makeup. One of them, “The Pink Lady,” is perhaps his most famous sculpture. The terrifying thing about the piece is that it’s comfortingly familiar--it’s simply a woman dressed for a day at the office--yet it towers over the viewer.

“ ‘The Pink Lady’ rides the Freudian wave,” Ray says. “You know, the big lady, the relationship to mom--those things are obviously part of that piece.”

Many art world insiders have loved Ray’s work for years, though the opinions are by no means unanimous. In the Los Angeles Times, critic Christopher Knight has described Ray as “one of the most compelling sculptors working today,” an artist whose strongest work is animated by a “wonderfully sneaky one-two punch . . . .” The “Unpainted Sculpture,” for instance, is “a replica that oozes an inescapable sense of queasy adult emergency, born of ordinary childhood playfulness,” Knight says. Village Voice critic Peter Schjeldahl summarizes the Whitney retrospective as “a series of exquisitely calibrated aesthetic shocks.”

Others are less impressed. “Mr. Ray’s art is about other art to a degree that will baffle anyone who doesn’t get his references,” the New York Times’ chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, says of the Whitney exhibition. “I was a little sorry the show didn’t add up to more.” Time magazine’s Hughes dismisses Ray as “a small bass being treated as a potential Moby Dick” and describes the work as “a series of one-liners.”

Discussing the mixed reviews over coffee later, Ray admits, “I know it’s just one person’s opinion, but still, it hurts. Twenty-five years of my life and Kimmelman says it doesn’t add up to much? Of course that hurts.”

While critics disagree about Ray’s works, collectors seem increasingly drawn to them. L.A. businessman Eli Broad recently bought “The Pink Lady” from British collector Charles Saatchi, “who would only sell it on the condition that Broad buy everything of mine that Saatchi owned.” That included three photographic works and four sculptures, one of which was “Firetruck,” a spectacular work from 1993. Ray produced a toylike firetruck at nearly the size of a real one and parked it on a city street outside the Whitney. The trick with this piece, which will be shown in Los Angeles for the first time in November, is that you can’t quite decide whether it’s a toy trying to become a real truck, or a real truck trying to become a toy.

“I’ve heard Broad was primarily interested in ‘The Pink Lady’ and was overwhelmed by the prospect of owning the firetruck,” Ray says of the $1.2-million transaction. “It’s unfortunate if that’s true, because the truck is better than ‘The Pink Lady.’ ”

“Charley tends to dismiss ‘The Pink Lady’ because it’s his most famous piece, but it’s an extraordinary work,” counters Schimmel. “It’s formally unnerving, simple and clear. Charley’s uncomfortable with the visual trickiness that comes easily to him, but it’s enormously seductive and has a sensational quality people love.”

Sensational is certainly the word for Ray’s 1992 piece, “Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . . ,” a work in the Rubell Family Collection that comprises eight nude self-portrait mannequins positioned so as to suggest an orgy. “ ‘Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . .’ looks like a revealing piece, but I see my own image as just another raw material,” Ray says. “The absence of clothes doesn’t mean anything’s being revealed.”

In Schimmel’s view, that piece and others show that Ray “has a weird ability to step outside himself. I think it goes back to the discomfort he has with himself--the nerdy kid at the Catholic military school--and that it’s revealing of him, yet not revealing at all. It’s kind of a preemptive strike, because he’s saying: ‘Here’s what I’m doing and who I’m doing it with, and this is what you’re supposed to think about it.’ ”

*

En route to a coffee shop recently, Ray mentions something that’s on his mind. “Did you know that a wound watch weighs more than an unwound watch?” he asks incredulously. Ray explains the phenomenon in layman’s terms: Winding a watch infuses it with energy, which has weight. The discussion then moves to the genesis of two of his works.

“My stuff always starts kind of innocently,” he explains. “For instance, for years, every time I saw a fancy car I’d find myself thinking about what a sculptural object it was. One day I had this idea of making a toy car and parking it on the street. Then I read a newspaper article about how L.A. donated used firetrucks to Mexico, where they were refurbished and used. I liked the idea of a firetruck as a civic gift, so when I was invited to be in the 1993 Whitney Biennial I decided to develop the idea for that.”

As for “Unpainted Sculpture,” Ray recalls: “I was at dinner with some students, and one of them mentioned that his roommate kept borrowing his car and crashing it, to the point that it was almost totaled. He wondered if he should get body work done on it, and I jokingly said, ‘Why don’t you take a mold of the crumpledness, cast that in fiberglass, and put it back on?’ And the idea stuck with me.”

Having figured out the elaborate technology necessary to execute the piece, he made only one of them. “Charley never thinks about variations on a theme because he wants to start from scratch every time,” Grassi says.

That’s what he’s doing with the rotting log. It’s been cooking in Ray’s head for a long time, inspired by a massive rotting log he spotted along a stretch of highway north of Los Angeles.

“I have to locate the farmer who owns the land and get permission to take a mold of the log,” Ray says.

“An enduring problem with sculpture is how to get it to sit on the floor with authority. I’m not sure what this sculpture will be, but I was struck by how beautifully this log sits in this field. The sculptural problem it presents is: How do you move it indoors and get it to sit in a room with equal authority? I think it’s a beautiful problem.”