The Charles Ray Experience

Experiencing Charles Ray in the flesh is much like confronting one of his perceptually boggling sculptures. The conversation stutters around ideas, some abstract, some fragmentary, some narrative. A direct question may be deflected only to re-emerge from some strange loop of elliptical reasoning in an entirely contradictory form, and he habitually undermines the weight of his opinions with "sort of," "kind of," "it seems to me." The subject of a highly touted retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Paul Schimmel (whose flawed but legendary "Helter Skelter" show of 1992 first put Ray on the art star map), Ray both exemplifies and stands apart from the handful of L.A.-based artists to achieve an international par in the ’90s art world. Doggedly formalist, Ray steers wide of the messy psychosexual theatrics in which Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley frequently indulge; yet the explicit sexual content of a string of early-’90s mannequin-derived sculptures fixed him in the public mind as one of these "bad boys" of contemporary Los Angeles art. "Charles Ray" the retrospective goes a long way toward broadening that perception.

One of the strongest shows to come out of MOCA in recent memory, it follows Ray’s progress from a second-generation disciple of British formal abstract sculptor Anthony Caro through his strange hybrids of formalism and Burden esque body art in the ’80s; the trompe l’oeil modern-art dislocations that followed, such as Ink Box (a large open cube filled to the brim with printer’s ink, mimicking an archetypal minimalist sculpture); the mannequin series (including three 10-foot fashion mannequins known as Fall ’91, a 6-foot-tall Boy, a nude family scaled to average height, and Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . . , an orgy made up of eight self-portraits); the giant toy Firetruck (not in the previous Whitney version of the show, it’s exhibited for the first time in L.A.); Unpainted Sculpture, the mimetic fiberglass car wreck (for which he reproduced each piece of a wrecked car); finally approaching his current locus of interests with the oddly affecting 16mm film Fashions. A model of artistic dedication, Ray pours much of his considerable earnings into the fabrication of new work. Recently, he taught himself to sew, and reproduced his trademark schlep uniform (jeans, plaid shirt and windbreaker) in exacting detail. While installing his show, he rode his bike to MOCA every day from his home in West L.A. I spoke with him in his modest bungalow a couple of days before the show opened.