Charles Ray Retrospective

Ray's art exerts no traditional appeal to the senses in terms of beauty of form, line, or color. In fact, the mundane nature of most of the objects in the exhibit tends to repel the viewer's interest. Pieces such as his 1990 Self-Portrait or the 1988 Tabletop would not raise any interest in most settings. Ultimately this is very important because any initial interest the viewer feels in them is entirely due to their presence in a museum and their presentation as art. In any other setting Ray's process of replacing the mannequin's head with his portrait and dressing it in his favorite clothes would be unnoticed, and the turning objects on the Tabletop would be easily ignored. Thus, it soon becomes clear that Ray's

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he mannequin stand is placed directly on the floor. If Self-Portrait were to be seen in isolation the clothing is bland enough and face sufficiently generalized so that nothing but the title would tell the viewer that this was a portrait of a specific person. Once the viewer knows that it is Ray himself, however, this leads to more careful consideration of the face and it becomes clear that this is not the relatively abstract sketch of human features featured on standard mannequins. By forcing the viewer's attention to the features the artist also draws attention to the hair, glasses, and clothes. These are very ordinary things but, as the viewer's consideration of the piece continues, it becomes clear that Ray must have chosen them because they were essential to the self-portrait he was creating. This, in turn, comments on some essential questions about portraiture. Like thousands of portraits from earlier centuries, the image of this particular individual has, at best, only a limited amount of meaning for viewers who do not know the man. Yet artists expended great effort on creating likenesses of sitters that probed their psychology, were beautiful in aesthetic terms, and sought to present more than a mere image. These
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1522
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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