The Charles Ray Experience

There’s things that for me . . . yeah, sure, certain aspects . . . could be feminist. Things about it I understand.

But the process by which Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . . actually came about was much less psychological than you think, y’know? I think of it more as a flat and lonely piece rather than erotically charged. It’s really flat, nothing’s revealed; I’m masturbating. You don’t know what my preferences are. You don’t know what I’m thinking of. At first it looks as if I’m really vulnerable — this has been carried through lots of work, even back in the early pieces where I used my body, like the Shelf piece. You walk into the room and I look really vulnerable. But I’m not. It’s so set off that nothing of me becomes revealed. In Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . . there’s nothing revealed about me. You don’t know me any better. You know, I make it, it’s a big sex orgy, and then you see it. You see nothing. Family Romance and Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . ., to me, are similar problems: How, in this day and age, do you make a group figurative sculpture? Art is this dialectic between the abstraction and the image. I’m interested in it working as a sculpture, in how the forms look put together. I think it had all the stuff under the surface because it was a good sculpture. But I didn’t build this around it to bring these things out — I would have rejected and not finished it if it didn’t have those, but I think it’s part of the process. Time is part of the problem — to make a real formal baroque sculpture in 1998. That’s what I wanted to do. It’s fuckin’ hard.