08/10/2001
by Martha Schwendener

Los Angeles-based artist Charles Ray (b. 1953) has been included in everything from Venice and Whitney Biennials to Documenta and Post-Human at FAE, Lausanne in 1992, curated by Jeffrey Deitch, which toured Europe in the early 1990’s. He’s had retrospectives at the Whitney Museum, both Los Angeles and Chicago MOCA’s and in the near future, he’ll collaborate with the Fondazione Prada, Milan joining a list of artists like Laurie Anderson, Michael Heizer, Carsten Holler, Dan Flavin and Sam Taylor-Wood. (His work is also in the current Los Angeles County Museum exhibition of selections from the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, directors of The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles).

Ray, who heads up the sculpture department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), uses the body to explore a range of subjects: identity, family, portraiture, consumerism, and the nude in art. Mannequins appear in several of his most famous works: Oh Charlie, Charlie, Charlie , shown for the first time at the 1992 Documenta, includes eight nudes (all bearing a striking facial resemblance to the artist) arranged in a sprawling orgy; and the 1993 Family Romance, a grotesque portrait of a family of four in which Ray has distorted the proportions of nude children (aged three and six), making them the same height as their parents (also nude).

Ray has garnered plenty of critical acclaim over the years, but now — particularly in the wake of his 1998 Whitney retrospective — it has begun to translate into higher market values. One of Ray’s early works, Plank Piece I-II (1973), an edition of seven sets of photographs in which the artist pinned himself to a gallery wall with a plank of wood, sold at Christie’s this spring for $ 280,000 (€ 303,800) — just below its low estimate of $ 300,000 (€ 325,500), but double the price of Richard Prince’s photographs from the 1970’s and roughly comparable to many of Cindy Sherman’s 1970’s photographs. (In November 1999 an edition from the same Plank Piece set fetched $ 260,000 (€ 282,115), and one sold for $ 330,000 (€ 353,000) at Sotheby’s in 2000.)

Some of the other works by Ray that have come up for sale recently include Boy, a mannequin that sold for $ 800,000 (€ 868,000) at Christie’s in May 2000, a motorized sculpture called Rotating Circle that sold for $ 180,000 (€ 195.3002) at Sotheby’s in November 1999, and performance-based photographs like Untitled, which documents an afternoon Ray spent bound to a tree branch, which sold for $ 170,000 (€ 184,450) and All My Clothes, in which the artist modeled his wardrobe, which fetched $ 100,000 (€ 108,504) at the same November 1999 Sotheby’s sale.

The record price for a Ray work was set in November 2000 at a Christie’s New York auction. Not surprisingly, it was for a sculpture: Male Mannequin (1990), a fairly straightforward (for Ray) sculpture of an anatomically correct man. That work sold for $ 2,200,000 (€ 2,387,107). But not every work of Ray’s that hits the market sells. This spring, the well-known photograph, No (1999), which plays a Magritte-style, "ceci n’est pas une pipe" game with the viewer, since the sitter is a fabricated model of Ray (hence, Ray and not Ray) failed to sell at Sotheby’s (it was offered at $ 400,000-600,000 (€ 434,000-651,000).

Nonetheless, Charles Ray remains the darling of the critical art world, and it is this support that has buoyed his prices over time. It would be surprising, given the success of artists like Bruce Nauman—(a generation older than Ray and working in a very similar vein)—if Ray’s prices fell in any big way.