‘Kind of Goya‐esque or Something’: Charles Ray's Early Works

Abstract

In Charles Ray's Plank Piece I‐II (1973), the artist creates a sculptural assemblage that holds him uncomfortably aloft. There has been little critical attention to his earliest performed sculptures created between from around 1973 to 1980, beyond characterizations as jejune experiments, homages, or hijinks. I seize on a statement by Ray that when he claimed in the 1970s that the works ‘[had] no meaning – or rather their meaning is dynamic, […] my friends laughed at me and said, “You idiot, it looks like the aftermath of a car wreck or a Goya print”.’ I pursue his ‘idiotic’ invocations: an eerily reminiscent etching by Goya; automobile disasters; the American War in Vietnam; and other contingent phenomena. The effect is a sustained experiment in looking, reading, and writing. Reading against the grain, Plank Piece I‐II provokes hermeneutic challenges – and new methodologies for criticism – towards a refashioning of meaning and history in performance.