Charles Ray gets a major survey at the Art Institute

The Art Institute of Chicago’s big contemporary art show for the summer is called “Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014.” That’s plain enough. On display is nearly two decades of work by Ray, one of this country’s foremost senior contemporary artists.

More to the point, the exhibition, in case anyone missed it, though it’s hard to imagine how, is about sculpture with a capital “S.” That’s the kind of sculpture discussed in formal terms of proportion, scale and weight, and often ascribed timeless themes of beauty or strength. It’s what gets taught in Art History 101 and basic Art Appreciation classes, in the module that begins with the perfect figures of Ancient Greece and Rome and ends with honorific monuments of the horse-and-rider variety. Examples are easy to come by: for the former, visit the classical wing of any large museum; for the latter, take a walk through any major urban park.

Or, for the next few months, visit the Charles Ray show. It features classicizing sculptures of men and women, youths and animals. Ageless motifs of sleep, love and death figure broadly. There’s even an equestrian statue, although if the hunched rider (modeled after the artist) and docile horse (a rented nag named Hooper) can be taken as a monument to anything, it’s middle age.

Let me be clear. I don’t particularly care about proportion, scale or weight, and I think beauty and strength are highly overrated. Why I am bothering at all to write this review is not even because the Art Institute made the unprecedented decision to clear its contemporary art galleries of the permanent collection normally on view so as to have 18,000 square feet to devote to just 17 of Ray’s artworks. (Two more are located elsewhere around the museum.) I’m writing it because one of the pieces in this exhibition, a 31-foot-long reproduction of a fallen oak tree meticulously carved in Japanese cedar, is the sculpture I love more than any other in the city of Chicago.

Yet I don’t care one whit for anything else on view in Ray’s exhibition, except perhaps for his equally precise duplication in dull grey fiberglass of a wrecked Pontiac Grand Am.

That sweet, naked little boy playing so intently with a toy car, smoothly figured in stainless steel and painted white? I have one at home. (A real live naked little boy who plays with cars, that is — I certainly can’t afford a Charles Ray sculpture, which can go for upwards of two million dollars at auction.) That porcelain baby chick about to hatch from its stainless steel egg, visible through a perfect hole in the shell? If I wanted to peer at such basic facts-of-life scenes, and sometimes I do, I’d be at the Notebaert Nature Museum, not an art museum. That colorless fiberglass bas-relief of a barefoot man offering a bunch of fresh-cut flowers to a barefoot woman, based on photographs of the artist and his new wife standing in their living room? Puddles are less shallow.

Ray was born in Chicago in 1953 and raised in Winnetka. His family owned a commercial art academy and he grew up passionate about sailing and art. In 1981 he moved to Los Angeles to teach sculpture at UCLA, where he remains a popular professor in the Department of Art, and for the next decade or so he made unsettling geometric experiments, like a circular wall panel that spun so fast it was unnoticeable save for the hum of its motor. In the ’90s he switched to figuration, with electrifyingly uncanny results, including an eight-foot-tall female mannequin in a hot pink power suit and a self-portrait featuring eight naked Charleys engaged in group sex or, rather, mutual masturbation.

To hear Ray tell it, and this sort of thing has come up again and again in interviews, including most recently in The New Yorker, subject matter isn’t what really interests him, but rather the medium of sculpture itself. That’s despite the evidence of what may actually be interesting to viewers about his work.

Fast-forward to 2015: here are the results of Ray going deeper and deeper into methods and materials, never mind the extra-sculptural matter of content. The show has traveled from the Kunstmuseum Basel, in Switzerland, and is co-curated by Bernhard Mendes Bürgi and James Rondeau. It is unbelievably conservative in terms of subject matter, exhibition design, wall texts and formal concerns. But it is new, very new, in terms of technology: Ray sometimes uses machines to achieve solid aluminum and stainless steel constructions that weigh thousands of pounds, and to create finishes that look like molten silver.

But Ray’s sculptures, for all their commitment to artistic research and technical innovation, are not about anything that actually matters in the world today, or at least not in a way that expands meaningfully beyond what most people already consciously experience in their day-to-day life. We all sleep. Most of us fall in love. We watch our lovers sleep beside us. Many of us have children or know others’ children and are mesmerized by their curiosity and fierceness. We all have real bodies and are intimate with them, as with those of our closest companions. We don’t especially need sculptures to communicate any of this.

Where Ray succeeds in making work of astonishing grace and ontological power is when he leaves behind hackneyed subjects and applies his obsessive sculptural single-mindedness — the kind that can lead an artist to work on a single sculpture for ten years, or to take apart every piece of a tractor, reproduce it, then put it back together again — to images of death. There are two such sculptures here, and I do not tire of looking at them — not thinking about them, but walking around and looking at them with my bare eyes.

“Unpainted Sculpture” is a near-perfect replica of a shattered sedan, its dead driver long gone. Ray and his assistants disassembled, catalogued and molded the original car piece by piece, made fiberglass copies, then tried to put it all back together again. Painted a uniformly flat grey, every detail, from the exposed engine block to the nubby interior upholstery, demands pure attention to its form. The gulf between that kind of looking and one that acknowledges the fatality of the collision is as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. “Unpainted Sculpture,” especially when displayed against a wall of windows overlooking glorious Millennium Park and the gleaming Chicago skyline, is a truly great American sculpture.

“Hinoki,” the sole artwork in the show that is part of the Art Institute’s permanent collection, lies exactly where it always does, by a southern window on the second floor of the Modern Wing, as if this temporary exhibition had sprung up around it like weeds. The sculpture’s name, which means cypress in Japanese, is identical with its material — a gesture Ray has used elsewhere — but I, not knowing Japanese, have always also taken it as the name of a dearly beloved, laid out to rest in the most moving of memorials. Having found an immense weathered log while driving along the central coast of California, Ray returned with assistants and sawed it up, carried it back to his studio, made silicone molds, fabricated a fiberglass version, shipped it to Osaka, and there had it hand-carved by a master woodworker and his apprentices. Why not simply put the original tree into the gallery? By modern standards, that could be sculpture enough, but in taking it apart and recreating it, Ray learned that object inside and out, not as an arborist but as an artist, and he imbued the new object — his sculpture — with that knowledge. It’s present in every whorl and gnarl of cleanly whittled cypress. It’s there on the outside of “Hinoki” and on its inside, a hollow heart-shaped space that stretches from one end of the tree to the other.

Artists have long tried to one-up nature, but painted grapes, no matter how realistically depicted, will never really get a peck from a bird, whatever ancient Roman authors may have to say about it. I, however, would crawl inside “Hinoki” and rest given half a chance — if not the real oak fallen in the field.

“Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014” runs through October 4 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Ave., 312-443-3600, artic.edu.

Lori Waxman is a Tribune special contributor and a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute.

ctc-arts@tribpub.com