"The implicit foreignness of the body in front of the work of art, according to the formalist scheme of things, was made explicit by Michael Fried in his famous attack on Minimalism, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967), in which he argued that Minimalist works had a theatrical presence in a space, a theatricality that called to mind the viewer’s body, which, by implication, undermined the autonomy and purity of the artistic statement.
Charles Ray appeared to be toying with Fried’s phobia in the image he created for the cover of the catalogue accompanying his recent U.S. retrospective (organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). It shows an image of the artist, digitally reduced by around 20% (and looking somewhat stunned) standing behind Anthony Caro’s painted steel sculpture ‘Early One Morning’ (1962) in a modern art gallery. One of several levels of irony in this image is that it seems to turn Fried’s fear of the return of the body of the spectator back on to a classic example of exactly the kind of formalist sculpture he sought to defend from the threat of Minimalism.
Neal White’s installation for ‘Clean Rooms’ features a single life size human figure, that could be related to one of Ray’s mannequin sculptures, ‘bagged’ in a ‘bunny suit’ made of felt, a material associated with the work of Joseph Beuys (who called for a mystical re-unification of art and science), but whose absorbent properties make it highly unsuited to a clean room environment. The dejected figure, its identity concealed, stands on the outside of an inflatable chamber, resembling a clean room, which houses a Victorian drawing machine that makes proto-Modernist drawings, resembling Spirograph images, seemingly without human assistance. The body, the piece seems to be implying, has been rejected not only by the clean room but by the art work itself (i.e. the drawing machine) which appears to act autonomously."
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Charles Ray
Retrospective Catalogue - MOCA, LA.
Detail of element from 'uncontrolled hermetic'
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