Charles Ray, Mind-Bender

The last work on the way out the door of the laser-sharp mid-career survey of sculpture by Charles Ray, which opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is a large, 1992 self-portrait photograph of the artist. Ray shows himself from the waist up, standing before a carefully lit blue-gray background and wearing a plain, neatly ironed red denim shirt with white plastic buttons.

His arms are folded lightly across his chest, the pose suggesting a casual demeanor fudged by a hint of self-protection. Studio lights reflect off sizable horn-rimmed glasses, partially masking eyes that gaze off into the distance, over the shoulder of a staring viewer.

The skin is the giveaway. Especially on the right hand, as well as areas of the cheeks and forehead, the deeply creased skin seems too shiny and light-reflective, while its surface appears strangely dead, as if smeared with foundation makeup by an over-eager mortician. Cued that something’s not quite right, you scan the hair, which turns out to be artificial--a wig--while the far-off eyes have been painted on.

The photograph doesn’t picture the artist after all. It pictures instead a mannequin, carefully constructed in the image of the artist. Like a next-generation photograph by 1980s icon Cindy Sherman, “No,” as the work is titled, merges self with doppelganger, identity with fiction.

Which is the self-portrait: the photograph or the mannequin? Or, maybe it’s the whole work of art, in all its mind-bending complexity? Ray’s camera image of a “self” that isn’t there is an Ur-photograph, definitively recording an absence, not a presence.

“No” is one of five obvious self-portraits in the survey (a couple that aren’t so obvious turn up too). They come in a variety of guises.

“Self-Portrait” (1990) is the earliest: an ordinary department store mannequin that wears Ray’s clothing and has been fitted with a head whose face was cast from the artist’s own. “Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . . “ (1992) is an auto-erotic orgy of eight nude mannequins, also cast from Ray’s body, sprawled out on the floor in a literal depiction of a vulgar admonition. “Puzzle Bottle” (1995) puts a small, painted figure of the artist into a corked wine bottle, conflating the old conundrum of a ship impossibly built inside a glass bottle with that of a desperate S.O.S. tossed out to sea by some forlorn, ship-wrecked sailor: Lemme outta here!, the mute little figure seems to implore.

Each self-portrait carries its own specific pitch and loopy sense of surprise. If one thing is constant in all of them, though, it’s the particular look on the artist’s face.

Inflected by a somewhat blank, slightly distanced visage, Ray invariably portrays himself as perplexed. Even in the supposed throes of sexual passion, in the very funny, X-rated “Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . . ,” the eight nearly identical faces remain unencumbered by expressions of lust, excitement or delirious release. Instead, they seem not quite sure what’s going on.

The quizzical expression gets its uncanny kick from acting as an unexpected mirror for your own nonplused response, in the face of the sculpture you’re looking at. In Ray’s face you see your own discomfited situation being frankly reflected.

This sense of perceptual connection between art and audience is both disorienting and compelling. But it’s a key to Ray’s achievement as an artist.

“Ink Box,” his breakthrough sculpture from 1986, which signaled the emergence of a mature and important voice, approaches this odd interactivity in an abstract--and slightly diabolical--way. A dense, solid, black steel cube, three feet on a side and standing on the floor, turns out on closer inspection to be an open box filled to the brim with pitch-black printer’s ink. (Look closely; you’ll see the meniscus quiver.) Puzzled doubters invariably breach the standard prohibition against touching a work of art, much to their immediate, grimy dismay.

The MOCA survey, organized by chief curator Paul Schimmel, had its debut in June at New York’s Whitney Museum of Art (it travels next summer to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in Ray’s hometown). A few works have been added, including the magnificent 1993 sculpture of a fire truck, made by replicating a child’s toy at the size of an actual vehicle. Parked outside the museum on Grand Avenue, the fire truck stands as a symbol of public emergency rendered in the guise of childhood fantasies writ large on the landscape of the adult world.

The dissonance (and poignancy) between youth and maturity reverberates through several of Ray’s sculptures, including the 1992 mannequin, “Boy.” A blond, fey, 1950s-style storybook lad wearing blue suspendered shorts, white knee-socks and black shoes with straps has been fabricated at the size of an adult (he’s 5 feet, 11 inches tall--about the artist’s height). The kind of kid who, if he existed in real life, would be beaten to a bloody pulp in the schoolyard on a daily basis, “Boy” has a raised right hand that points directly at you, thumb and forefinger cocked in childish imitation of a gun.

Bang! Bang! You’re dead. Like the little man inside the puzzle bottle, your reaction to an encounter with this adult-size little wraith from the past will likely be: Lemme outta here!

Given works like “Boy” and “Fire Truck,” one interesting addition to MOCA’s version of the survey not seen in New York is a re-creation of Ray’s first exhibition, mounted in 1971 at the tender age of 18. Five sculptures, all lost but reconstructed for the survey from photographs, are in the first gallery.

Three are composed from cement blocks balanced aloft or held in precarious tension by steel rods deployed on the floor. Two are painted steel forms reminiscent of the formalist sculpture of British artist Anthony Caro (the red one was actually reconstructed backward, a result of Ray’s dyslexia). Finger-like forms paw at the ground or attempt with great effort to lift themselves above it.

These works, while plainly derivative of formalist and process works of other artists of the day, show Ray grappling from the start with fundamental issues of sculpture--with mass, space, color, gravity and the inevitable relationship to the floor. The usefulness of showing these youthful, inescapably flawed sculptures here is to assert that formal aesthetic concerns are essential to convincing art, even when Conceptual strategies become a major force, as they soon did for Ray. The seamless and inventive fusion of material precision with conceptual acuity has made him an important artist.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Broadway, (213) 626-6222, through March 14. Closed Mondays.