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.
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*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.
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