"A
Universe With
Edges Would Be
All Right If
Only I Didn't
Dream"
installation
for "5 x 5" at
the Whitney
Museum at
Altria,
2002
Statement
about
the piece,
printed in
catalog
accompanying
the show:
The Charles Ray piece I have chosen (Puzzle
Bottle, 1995)
has an air of
introspection:
the sculpture
is of the
artist
himself, tiny
and
nonconfrontational,
unlike the
other Ray
pieces I am
familiar
with.
The figure is
isolated in
the bottle,
shoulders
slightly
hunched,
looking ahead
contemplatively.
The pity might
feel for the
man trapped in
the bottle,
though, is
mediated for
me by the
title “Puzzle
Bottle”, which
refers to the
ship-in-the-bottle
trickery of
the piece.
I told a friend I was thinking about how
the figure
sees the world
from the
bottle.
She said, “Do
you know the
quote from
Hamlet-the one
about the
universe in a
nutshell…” and
something
about infinite
space. *
That
conversation
drew me to
start the
outer-space
images and to
start thinking
more about
limited or
unlimited
space.
By the time I
actually got
the quote, I
knew what I
wanted it to
say, or what I
wanted it to
mean, so I
roughly
paraphrased it
to suit my
needs.
This version
became the
title of my
piece.
My impulse was to make images of what the
man envisions
to be outside
the
bottle.
Considering
his contained
state, I
imagined the
most escapist
fantasies.
I made photos
of space
exploration
vehicles,
satellites,
skies, and
such,
simultaneously
with the
films,
sometimes
shooting the
same scenes in
both mediums.
The Humor of Ray’s work, the scale, and the
loneliness of
the man’s
situation
inspired me to
make the films
just a little
bit funny or
awkward.
I see an
inverse
relationship
between the
way Puzzle
Bottle and my
photos and
films use
scale.
For his piece,
Ray made a
miniature of
himself and
limited its
space by
containing it
in the bottle,
emphasizing
its
smallness.
For my photos
and films, I
made
miniatures out
of sugar and
provided vast
skies and
landscapes for
them, creating
uncertainty as
to their real
size.
Both uses of
scale create
tension
between
reality and
unreality.
They ask the
viewer to
engage in a
suspension of
disbelief:
to believe
that there is
a Lilliputian
man who might
fit through
the neck of
the bottle—or
possibly just
grew there—and
to believe
that the
miniatures or
the spaces
they inhabit
might actually
be real.
* “Oh
God, I could
be bounded in
a nutshell and
count myself a
king of
infinite
space, were it
not that I
have bad
dreams,” from
Hamlet, ed.
Louis B.
Wright and
Virginia A. La
Mar (New
York:
Washington
Square Press,
1958),
2.2.270-72.
Charles
Ray, Puzzle
Bottle,
1995.
Glass, painted
wood, and
cork. 13
3/8"x3 3/4"x3
3/4".
collection of
Whitney Museum
of American
Art, New York.
|
|
|
*for a statement
about the work click here
*for more images
and comments from this work,
see the featured
artist page from the
Man Overboard web site.
|
