Whitney 1993 Biennial
Charles Ray's "Family Romance" (1992-1993) uniform size naked, hand-holding nuclear family sculpture on display at Whitney Museum's 1993 Biennial exhibition.
Location: New York, NY, US
Date taken: March 1993
Photographer: Ted Thai
Ray's primary thematic concerns center around containment, integration, isolation, and self-sufficiency. A leader in Conceptual Realism, Ray's best work offers a metaphor for the gap between the literal and the symbolic (or the known and the unknown).
His art is compelling in its representation of consciousness as uncertain and fugitive, something toward which we continually grasp. His work seems to capture the strategic orientation and inescapable reflexiveness of the resurgent Realist figuration we've seen in this post-Postmodern era. It often involves odd discrepancies in resolution, a visual mismatch among parts, or a discomfiting slip between the model and the finished product. Other works make powerful use of shifts in scale, destabilizing our customary relationships to the objects they represent.
Both "Ink Box" (1986) and "Self-Portrait" (1990) display the mordant humor that occasionally surfaces in Ray's work. The former is an example of the perceptually oriented thought-puzzles to which Ray devoted his attention in the late 1980s. The three-foot cube is beautifully finished in gleaming black, and at first glance it is an instance of Minimalist formal power. Yet something is slightly off -- the work emits an aura of agitation that undermines the authority of the object. Closer examination reveals that the sculpture is actually an open box filled just past the brim with ink held from spilling by its own surface tension. The artist himself described the work as "neurotic" in its almost animate and threatening presence. The latter work presents itself as a department store mannequin, until one notices that it has imperfect features. The face is a genericized version of Ray's own, and the dummy models what has come to be the artist's trademark "Everygeek" ensemble: jeans, button-front shirt, windbreaker, and comfortable shoes. The pieces serve to define the generally indeterminate line between abstraction and figuration. Such flexibility illustrates how, at his best, Ray works between these supposedly polar-opposite methods, defamiliarizing the vernacular and making the commonplace strange.
