Charles Ray
cat. no. 78
We confront a circular piece of the gallery wall, nine
inches in diameter, spinning so quickly that its movement
is almost impossible to detect. Instead, a stationary black
circle appears to have been drawn on the wall. The first
hint that the "wall drawing" is not what it seems comes
from the noise made by the work's motor in a moment
of near synesthesia, when sound suddenly snaps percep-
tion into focus. The gallery wall's normally neutral surface
becomes uncannily and anxiously animated.
With an intense interest in the work of postwar
British sculptors (especially Anthony Caro) and the early
minimalists, Ray literalized the corporeal metaphors of
lyrical modernism and exaggerated the abstract, aggressive
presence of minimalism.
Responding to the phenomenological imperatives
of minimalist sculpture, Ray's Rotating Circle subtly yet
disturbingly disrupts the rational relationships between
stable objects in space. The anonymous container of the
modernist gallery, on which minimalism is so dependent,
takes on the attributes of a feeling, moving body in Ray's
work. The circle, scaled to the size and height of the artist's
head, sets up a confrontation with the viewer.1
. Ray has said of the piece: "Another aspect of it
for me was trying to make something that was so abstract
it became real or so real it became abstract. You go
in so far you come out the other side."2
D.B
1. Charles Ray, in Lucinda Barnes, "Interview with Charles Ray." in Charles
Ray (Newport Beach, Calif.: Newport harbor Museum, 1990),
2. Ibid.
Excerpt: pg. 290, The Quick and The Dead. Walker Art Center, 2009.
