Charles Ray

Published to accompany a mid-career retrospective traveling from New York to Los Angeles to Chicago in the coming months, this is the first comprehensive look at the 45-year-old Ray, a quietly influential figure in the art world for over a decade. While Ray, who early on moved from performance to sculpture as his primary means of expression, has produced a limited output, we can now stand back and appreciate his body of work as a whole. The mostly explanatory text complements the simple eloquence of the pieces themselves, but curator Schimmel does find a trail of Freudian abnormalites and psychological concerns throughout the conceptual artist's productions. This oversized book (11" x 14") does a good job of capturing the play with scale that is central to many later works; early performances (such as "Plank Piece," during which Ray draped himself over a board against a wall) are well documented in photographs within the essays. Recommended for all libraries that collect works on contempoary artists.--Doug McClemont, New York