How did an American contemporary artist come to make statutes? High modernist training in an avant-guard environment looked to statues with boredom if not distaste.  During the second half of the 20th century statues were commemorative likenesses of national heroes and dead people in city parks. Hopelessly square and conservative. The status quo desired artwork that expressed values that were emotionally understood. If there were a few great statues sprinkled through the great armies of bronze figures and horse riders littering our city parks we did not have the eyes to recognize a bronze general from a commemorative cannon parked in front of the county court house.

There is a school of philosophers who do not believe in the reality of specific objects in the world. A table is a non-existent entity. Atoms or rather subatomic particles simply behave tablewise. To say that there is also a table in addition to the atoms is a redundancy that is fundamentally unnecessary. Perhaps Charles Ray is an artist who makes statues that behave sculpturewise. Or is it the other way around?

A Lecture by Charles Ray

Experimental Statues

September 24, 2016, Sat, 14: 30-16: 30

TFAM auditorium

Please reserve in advance via the following link: https://goo.gl/6ZL04M

The lecture will be in English; consecutive translation is available; free admission

Charles Ray is widely regarded as one of the most significant artists of his generation. His work has been exhibited extensively, at venues including Documenta IX (1992), three iterations of the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003, 2013), and five installments of the Whitney Biennial (1989, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2010); and, since 1990, in solo exhibitions in Basel, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Bern, Vienna, and Oslo, among other cities.

Ray studied sculpture at the University of Iowa and Rutgers University. He is best known for his sculptures of altered and refashioned familiar objects. Critic Anne M. Wagner once commented on Ray’s work, ”In all his seamlessly executed objects, Ray fixates on how and why things happen, to say nothing of wondering what really does happen in the field of vision, and how such events might be remade as art.” He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.