Charles Ray’s A copy of ten marble fragments of the Great Eleusinian Relief

Materially it is unlike any of the stone sculptures or ceramic vessels around it, though its images—of Classical robed figures rendered in profile—fit right in. Currently on loan to the museum, this finely engineered work by contemporary sculptor Charles Ray is a copy of an ancient Roman relief, one with a history that bridges time and place. I sat down with Lisa Çakmak, chair and curator, Arts of the Ancient Mediterranean and Byzantium, and Giampaolo Bianconi, associate curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, to learn more about Ray’s gleaming sculpture and its ties to Classical antiquity.

Elizabeth Dudgeon: Members who’ve been with us a while will likely remember the midcareer retrospective Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997–2014, which took up the entire second floor of the Modern Wing in 2015. For those who may not already be familiar with Ray’s body of work, could you start by sharing a bit about him and his practice?

Giampaolo Bianconi: Sure. Charles Ray is an American sculptor from Chicago. He was educated at the University of Iowa and then at Rutgers and has been living and working in Los Angeles for the past 40-odd years. He has dedicated his work to the interactions between sculpture, bodies, and space, and he’s unique in his generation for having a really rigorous and special focus on figurative sculpture. He’s worked a lot with abstraction as well, but none of his peers have worked with figuration to the extent that Ray has. He spends many, many years working on a single object. Each work is the result of hundreds of complex and deliberate decisions and often new technological modes of production that he has pioneered.

There’s a word that he uses to describe his process: embedment, which is kind of a weird word, but it describes the certain quality that he wants to achieve. It’s a combination of the literalism of what his sculptures represent and a kind of abstraction that they bring to mind, and it also indicates the way he wants them to relate to the places where they’re installed. He wants them to evoke the feeling that they need to be there or have no other choice but to be there. And I think that’s what makes his work and his choices resonant for so many people.

Elizabeth: The work that we have here on loan now, A copy of ten marble fragments of the Great Eleusinian Relief, is a modern sculpture with a long history. Can you walk through it for me?

Lisa Çakmak: The history of Ray’s relief goes all the way back to ancient Greece. There’s a relief in the collection of the National Museum in Athens depicting, we think, the moment where Demeter and Persephone bestow the knowledge of agriculture onto humans. Hundreds of years later, this work was copied by Roman artists. Ten fragments from a Roman relief wound up in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a curator made the connection to the earlier Greek work, recognizing it as a copy. To display the Roman fragments, the Met commissioned a plaster cast of the Greek relief and embedded its fragments within it, completing the picture. It’s this composite work that inspired Ray to make his own copy of the relief—what is essentially a copy of a copy.

Elizabeth: I know a lot of thought went into the placement of Ray’s work in our galleries. How did its history inform where you decided to install it?

Lisa: After thinking about it for some time, Giampaolo and I felt strongly that it ought to be placed in immediate conversation with the sort of ancient works that inspired it. It’s not just the visual similarity of his work to the ancient ones that makes it appropriate for the Jaharis Galleries—there’s also that intellectual, conceptual connection that I think makes it doubly so. 

Lisa: The ancient Mediterranean world comes down to us largely through reinterpretations and copies, whether it’s medieval monks copying manuscripts or ancient Roman sculptors carving something inspired by an ancient Greek original. And by making this work, Ray has inserted himself into a really long practice of looking at the past, but in a really conceptually clever, sophisticated way. If this were installed in the Modern Wing, I think we’d lose that resonance. At the same time, we’ve purposely placed it very close to the Modern Wing. 

Giampaolo: I want to add that when it comes to copies, the singularity of the art object is itself a big myth. So many things that we see in a museum or in an art gallery are variations of an artwork that came before it. And I think that Ray is dealing with that legacy here in a way.

Lisa: Right. Copying so often has a negative connotation—you copy someone’s homework, you get in trouble, right? But copying in art isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When I talk about the ancient Mediterranean world, I always stress that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Copying isn’t this slavish, mindless thing. It takes significant skill to carve a block of marble. And so often the notion of copying Greek art minimizes the artistry and creativity of these later Roman versions. The Romans are looking back, and yes, they are copying, but they’re also iterating and developing and moving things forward and using images in new and different ways. 

Giampaolo: I think that’s really important. Somewhat related, we have two versions of light switch sculptures by Claes Oldenburg that render the same daily object in different ways. Copying and versioning, which is what Oldenburg did with his light switches, are not the same thing, but that process still demands a number of similar and complex questions: What materials are you going to use? What scale?

Lisa: Ray is bringing new technologies to this history of copying, both in terms of material and the way that material has been carved and shaped—though Ray is pretty secretive about his exact methods. The technological aspects of his work have made me look anew at the older technologies that were used to make the works around it, whether it’s carving marble in the third millennium BCE, casting bronze jewelry in the Geometric period, or hand-potting an Athenian ceramic and firing it with this really complicated triple-firing process in the Classical period.

Giampaolo: Ray often plays with scale in his figurative work, but in the relief he’s preserved the original scale of the Greek and Roman versions, which I think says something about how he’s thinking about them. What he brings to the table is a completely new material: a really shiny aluminum that is very obviously modern.

Elizabeth: Beyond technologies, are there other resonances the Ray evokes in conversation with works in the gallery?

Lisa: Definitely. Just walking through the space, it’s very easy to see what influenced Ray—many of the Greek objects feature garments and faces rendered in the same style as Ray’s relief, for instance, and if you walk a little bit farther back, you’ll see a handful of Greek relief sculptures. But perhaps less obviously, the Ray has a very special resonance with a nearby Cycladic figurine. These figures are always thought to look very contemporary—they’re very influential in modernism—but they are really, really old. The difference, chronologically, between the Ray and the Cycladic figurine is 5,000 years. I love that. I think the fact that you can stand in one spot and see two objects that engage with antiquity, one that is itself an ancient object and another that is really very visually connected in the same space, is really special.

Elizabeth: What else do you think happens when we deviate from more conventional approaches to display? So often museum galleries are organized chronologically or by region, but here you’ve very deliberately placed a work outside of these contexts.

Giampaolo: Yeah. It’s funny—museums have set a sort of expectation for chronology and geography in certain groupings, but artists tend to think in far richer and more complex ways about their own work and where it comes from and what it’s in conversation with. When they visit the museum, they never want to see the stuff that I’m responsible for, the contemporary art. They want to see what came before—ancient works, or European paintings, or African art. I’m glad this installation points to that.

Lisa: And I always love to have a chronological backbone to a display, but I don’t want to do everything at the expense of chronology. I want visitors to be able to make their own discoveries and associations, and time and place aren’t always the most fruitful lenses.

Elizabeth: You’ve mentioned all of the layers wrapped up in Ray’s work—of culture and time and interpretation. What do they make you think about?

Lisa: I’m always thinking about this sort of thing, actually. It’s important to remember that a fair amount of the ancient sculptures we have on display don’t look the way they did when they came out of the artist’s workshop. They have been restored and repaired by later artists, in some cases really famous artists. And so there’s a question that comes up time and again in my field: is it still ancient if it’s been touched by a later artist? To which I say absolutely. Because when something is 2,000 years old, it doesn’t just live one life, it lives two or three or four subsequent lives, and these are all part of its history, and that’s okay—we should celebrate that. Even a modern object from 2017 is part of a series of objects that have lived really long lives. 

Giampaolo: So many of Ray’s works clearly have a kind of spirit, or there’s an animism to them, I think. And in the case of this relief, the animism must be that it holds within it the history of all the objects that came before it that have informed its creation. You really feel that, standing among the ancient works. And I hope members will make a point of seeking out this really special work by Ray on their next visit.

—Lisa Çakmak, chair and curator of the arts of the Ancient Mediterranean and Byzantium, and Giampaolo Bianconi, associate curator of modern and contemporary art, with senior communications editor Elizabeth Dudgeon