Charles Ray (born 1953) – undoubtedly one of the most conceptual and visually stunning sculptors alive today – is currently having a cultural moment with four exhibits across two continents, including “Charles Ray: Figure Ground” at New York's Metropolitan Museum. your art.
Throughout his career, Ray has been in constant dialogue with the entire history of sculpture dating back to ancient Greece; and also with America for its (homo)social and racial tensions as well as for its art and literature. sohbete immersed.
Bringing together sculptures from all stages of Ray's career, "Figure Ground" consists of approximately 1973 works, including three photo prints documenting early work from 19. Ray has been making art, sculpting for nearly fifty years: and during that time he has produced nearly 100 works. Ray's work reverses the Marxist view that quantity is quality: in Ray's case, quality is quantity.
“Chicken” (2007), “Hand held egg” (2007) and “Hand-held bird” (2006) are three pieces that are materially and conceptually linked – the first being the smallest and undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary. exhibition. The last two arose tangentially and in the process of creating "Chicken". In “Hand holding the egg,” we find a porcelain depiction of a child's hand gently holding an egg that is clearly emptied, or, as Ray puts it, “the beast is long gone.” An irregularly shaped opening at the top clearly reveals the empty darkness inside. The “hand bird” is actually a full white painted stainless steel bird fetus intended to be held by the audience – a welcome proposition that has sadly been rendered impractical in the context of a public exhibition.
“Chicken” combines both environments: the eggshell is stainless steel, the chick (complete inside its shell) is porcelain. A perfectly round hole, in stark contrast to the cracked opening of the egg-holding hand, reveals very little of the animal inside, yet it's totally there. It clearly echoes the choice to create an artificially round opening – it becomes a kind of window: a window to time, to the flesh, to the secret, a two-way portal created leaving an uncreated space.
At first glance, “Tractor” (2005) and “Chicken” could not have been more different, materially or otherwise. To begin with, the full-size “Tractor” (a surprisingly ambitious sculpture) is gigantic; also in a neglected condition: the front fender has come off and it has collapsed to the ground; his back, or continuous track, was cut as if succumbing to an anti-tank mine. It seems that the original impetus of “Tractor” was being a child and playing with such a machine. Is it then an unclaimed object of childhood memory being reproduced? Or is it the childhood memories themselves that are fragile and prone to decay and fade? Or is Ray consulting the limits of human creativity in the face of time and the elements?
Yet for all their differences, “Tractor” and “Chicken” have one important thing in common: both are complete in themselves. Even though their internal structures are mostly hidden from us, those structures are still there. The perfectly round opening in the 'chicken' state barely reveals the creature inside (a claw, perhaps the tip of a wing), but the whole bird is there. Similarly, with the "Tractor": all parts of the machine are there, even if the field of view is closed. When it came time to do the covering, Ray was immediately met with stunned disbelief, for of course no one would be able to see inside: Ray's response was that if left unsealed, the audience would do nothing but look inside – the statue would be gone. .
For example, I remembered Kurasawa in the movie Red Beard (1966), who included famous items in his sets that would never be seen by the audience in the hospital drawers and cupboards. In Kurasawa's case, the purpose and justification for including things that do not enter the viewer's experience is likeness to reality. If the actors feel like they're in a real hospital rather than on a set, their performance will likely be much better. But it's not authenticity that drives Ray: The first tractor he found was aesthetically transformed, completely rebuilt from aluminum. Ray calls it "a tractor in heaven." If so, then it is a tractor not in the paradise of an idyllic afterlife, but in the paradise of Plato's Forms. It does not present us with a real tractor or, better yet, a found tractor, not a representation of a tractor, but rather something that blurs the distinction between the two, the real and the copy – an abyss that defines Plato's fundamental problem. dualist metaphysics Ray is doing what artists and philosophers have been trying to do for over two millennia (indeed, since at least Aristotle).
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