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I recently visited “Picasso Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art and was surprised by how taken I was with “Woman With Leaves” (1934). It’s a small figurative work, and it easily could be overlooked in the exhibition, as it’s placed in a room full of larger and more imposing sculptures. It’s a scrappy little piece made of dingy cast-plaster forms assembled and stacked into a figure of a woman. At first glance it is so Picassoesque that you almost need go no further: Assembled forms becoming parts of another whole. The relation of one to the other is charming and easily understood. But if you stop and ...
February 6 - 7, 2016
Charles Ray,
Making and Looking
, The Wall Street Journal
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Hello. This is Charles Ray. I want to tell you a story that’s really quite scary. I hike every morning in the predawn hours. I do this for health reasons. I get up at 3:30 to be on the trailhead by 4:10–4:15. It’s very dark at that hour, and during certain times of year it stays dark even after I finish my hike and am at home in my kitchen. I find it necessary for several reasons to carry a flashlight. The light not only illuminates the rocky trail, but is also a protective bubble, warning people and animals that I am about. I’ve gone through ...
Winter 2016
Charles Ray,
A Questionnaire on Materialisms
, October
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I have never been to Bolton Landing, but as long as I have known of the work of David Smith I have been aware that this is where he made his sculptures. It's not just a location but also a place with a temporal dimension. You can drive from New York City to Lake George and find the town of Bolton Landing. From there, make your way to Edgecomb Pond Road, and the Location of the studio and house will be apparent. This is due to memories of numerous photos taken by Smith of his sculptures in the surrounding fields. ...
2014
Charles Ray,
There Is No Color in the Great Outdoors
, Raw Color: The Circles of David Smith
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Shortly after Anthony Caro died last fall, I proposed a moratorium on the phrase "I really like his early work." In the context of Caro, this sentiment is generated from our taste rather than from a deeper understanding of his sculptures. The figuration from the '50s is not included in my moratorium, and to many this period of his oeuvre serves more as a footnote to his beginnings. Understanding the intent behind these potent bronze figures allows us to step forward with the artist, grasping the potentiality and originality of works like Twenty Four Hours, 1960, Midday, 1960 and Early ...
February 2014
Michael Fried, Charles Ray,
Anthony Caro 1924-2013
, Artforum
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Chris Burden's breakthrough perforance pieces, such as Shoot and Prelude to 220, or 110, both 1971, still unsettle our complacent acceptance of the status quo--a jolt that can make us overlook the delicate balance of elements at play in his work. The New Museum's building-wide retrospective will offer a great opportunity to contemplate an impressive cross section of this influential art's oeuvre. Burden turns a sharp visual eye on the broader social context of the artwork to simultaneously dissect and upend the figure-ground relationship that society idealizes even at the basic level of law and order, thereby bringing the backdrop ...
September 2013
Charles Ray,
Chris Burden: Extreme Measures
, Artforum
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If I did not have this computer, the floor of my office would look like a John Chamberlain exhibition, scattered with crumpled-up sheets of paper to remind me of the false starts I have made in writing this short essay. Like this imagined office floor, my appreciation of Chamberlain's work has been littered with false starts and misunderstandings. Perhaps my greatest misconception of Chamberlain's sculptures comes from their entanglement with recent American cultural history.
February 24, 2012
Charles Ray,
Soft Future
, Guggenheim Museum
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I have an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep during movies. Often I don’t make it through a title sequence without my wife elbowing me to stop my snoring. For this reason, it was really great to see “The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme” at the Getty Center this summer: Paintings of Roman arenas, slave girls, boys with snakes, and dignitaries from Siam awoke me to the splendors of a Hollywood screen. An additional bonus for Los Angeles (a city that loves its art professors) was the exhibition at LACMA of sporting images by Thomas Eakins. While Gérôme’s gladiators and bloodied ...
December 2010
Charles Ray,
The Artists' Artists
, Artforum
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Ten years ago, while driving up the central coast of California, I spotted a fallen tree in a meadow just off Highway 101. I was instantly drawn to it. It was not only a beautiful log but to my eyes it was perfectly embedded in the meadow where it had fallen. It had been on the ground perhaps 20 or 30 years. Pressure from the weather, insects, ultraviolet radiation and gravity were evident. If not imminent, total collapse appeared to be no more than a handful of years away. The ends of the log were beautifully detailed and drew me ...
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CHARLES RAY DID IN FACT STEAL the thirty-two-foot-long fallen tree that inspired his recent sculpture Hinoki, just as rumor has it. After spotting the tree in a California field, Ray tried and failed to acquire it through legitimate channels. Not to be deterred, he returned to the site, chain saw in tow. Over a series of trips, he transported the tree, in hundreds of pieces, back to his studio in Los Angeles. Thus commenced Hinoki's decadelong backstory--protracted even for Ray, who often spends years on his intricately fabricated sculptures in order to achieve just the right subtle-yet-delirious mimetic shift. Hinoki ...
September 2007
Rachel Kushner,
1000 words: Charles Ray talks about Hinoki
, ArtForum
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The beginning of this essay is the problem of Genesis; time starts before space, and time is very easy to understand until you try to explain it. Space of course has no meaning outside of time, which is its experience. This art show is about space, which I guess is like saying my watch is about time. Actually I do not wear a watch but like you have lived in both space and time. For centuries philosophers and scientists have studied the inscrutability of both these phenomena. Saint Augustine said that time is very easy to understand until you try ...
June 28, 2006
Charles Ray,
A four dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures
, Matthew Marks Gallery
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Charles Ray tells Michael Fried how Anthony Caro's work has influenced his own - Michael Fried: When did you first become interested in Anthony Caro's work, and what did it mean to you then? Charles Ray: In 1971 at the University of Iowa. I enrolled in a sculpture class that was taught by Roland Brenner, who had been a student of Caro at St Martins in the early 1960s. Brenner was very strict in his approach to teaching the sculpture studio class. We leaned to weld and were taken to the scrapyard to buy metal. We drew or sketched our ...
spring 2005
Michael Fried and Charles Ray,
Anthony Caro: Early One Morning...
, Tate etc.
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Last October at an exhibition of 60 young Italian artists in Turin, I encountered ''WalkAround'' by Patrick Tuttofuoco: a three-story staggered grid of blinking lights set to computerized music. I did not like it. As I circled the show I came back to the work several times. This optimistic disco-sculpture required a subtle shift or change in my ability to look at art. I created a space in my mind for this new friend. Art that requires development in the viewer is not as common as one might hope.
December 29, 2002
Charles Ray,
ART/ARCHITECTURE: THE YEAR IN REVIEW; IF YOU ASK ME
, The New York Times
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IN college I heard a story about Giacometti and Picasso walking down a decrepit street in Paris. Picasso, looking up at the ramshackle buildings, asked, ''How can these buildings possibly continue to stand?'' ''Force of habit,'' Giacometti replied. I found the comment hilarious, but as I grew older and began to struggle to get my own sculptures to stand, I started to wonder, ''What does the guy know that I don't?'' Since then I've kept coming back to Giacometti's work. With each return I get a new insight, a fresh experience, but also something harder to articulate: a sense that ...
October 7, 2001
Charles Ray,
Thinking of Sculpture As Shaped by Space
, The New York Times
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A project for FOREHEAD writing & art journal
1990
Charles Ray,
Four artists curated by Charles Ray
, FOREHEAD writing & art journal
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I make sculptures that engage the viewer physically and psychologically. The use of simple structures focuses attention on the spectators' relationship to the work. The following is a brief description of four of my sculptures. Ink Box A 3' x 3' steel box, painted with black automobile lacquer, is filled to the brim with two hundred gallons of black newspaper ink. The top surface perfectly matches the gloss and color of the sides of the box.
January 1988
Charles Ray,
Charles Ray: A text
, Spazio Umano/Human Space
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I use forms that are images of men and animals. My interest is not in the identity of the image, but rather in the feeling of human duality and contradiction that the sculptures generate. These feelings are communicated through the use of constructed elements made of wood, concrete, or steel. Briefly, in these paragraphs, I will explain the sculptural and personal sources of my work. Psychoanalysis traces human trauma to a conflict between eros and death.
1980
Charles Ray,
Charles Ray
, New Orleans Review
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