The entrance to the Getty Center is a parade of excess. Visitors look for deer and take in the cityscape as they ride the cable-pulled hovertrain funicular, eventually shuffling out onto the arrival plaza to confront two sculptures: Aristide Maillol’s L’Air and Charles Ray’s Boy with Frog. Maillol’s lead sculpture, designed in 1938 and cast in 1962, was conceived in response to a commission by the city of Toulouse commemorating the pilots who died while working for the airmail service l’Aéropostale. Despite its weighty material, the female nude balances lightly atop its pedestal with a buoyancy fitting of its title. She floats forwards while glancing back over her outstretched arm, keeping a watchful eye on Boy with Frog. Ray’s figurative sculpture of an oversized nude boy proudly holding a frog by one hind leg does not meet her gaze. His eyes empty, but, with some certainty, seem enrapt with the wriggling frog.
Ray’s sculpture was commissioned by François Pinault, a French art collector and luxury goods magnate, intended for permanent installation outside Pinault’s museum at the Punta della Dogana in Venice, Italy. In 2009 it was installed there, facing the Lagoon, under the gaze of Guiseppe’s Benoni’s 17th century sculpture of Fortune. Perched on one foot on a gilded sphere born on the shoulders of two slaves, Fortune, in the words of one historian, is “free to turn with the wind, as changeable as human destinies at the mercy of seas and trade.”1 And for years, as tradewinds dictated, she would sway back and forth, watching over Boy with Frog.
This early version of Boy with Frog, composed of painted fiberglass draped over a stainless steel armature, was a pattern intended for the preparation of a mold, and temporarily displayed in Venice until a proper solid stainless steel version could be completed. The sculpture was removed from its public location in 2011 by the city of Venice after public demands to replace the sculpture at the Punta della Dogana with a reproduction of the nineteenth century lamppost that formerly stood there; resurrecting a firmly established make-out spot whose vitality had been temporarily quashed under Boy with Frog’s gelid, blank gaze.2 On its way home to Ray’s studio in Venice, California, the Getty Center invited Ray to display the sculpture on their grounds temporarily.3 The Getty’s Boy with Frog was slated to be taken down in January of 2012, yet it remains there still, as if blessed by Fortune. Now visitors to the Getty are invited to gaze upwards, the oldest trick for reverence, at this illusion of solidity.
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It takes a fortune to make Charles Ray’s sculptures. Alongside his studio assistants he entrusts many aspects of the production of his work to fabricators. In the field of sculpture fabrication has come to mean that the processes of production are executed by specialists outside of the artist’s studio. Sometimes this means the sculptor has ordered a part or finish to be folded into an industrial workflow, but, in recent years, this has also come to mean production spaces dedicated entirely to the fabrication of sculptures. This mode of sculpture production can be traced back to Donald Judd, whose turn from painting toward serialized sculptures in the 1960s was a pointed effort to distance himself from what he saw as the illusionistic tendencies of the European art of his time.4 Judd moved from painting geometric abstraction, to producing sculptures for the floor, works that exposed the underlying ideas of order implicit in industrial production. “The order,” he wrote, “is not rationalistic and underlying, but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.”5 His aim for a systematic use of industrially fabricated parts was to leverage the impersonality of these materials and techniques against an art that supposedly privileged the private experiences of the psyche. Filled with the language of the American Pragmatists, early Judd employed the processes of industry as ready-made, not as the historical process of labour.6 His ante was one fetish for another.
The labour of the fabricator is simultaneously congealed and evaporated in a sculpture. The silence of this process drew Judd toward fabrication. He used fabrication to create non-figurative, singular works of art through the whole of industrial production, enunciated through surface, form, color and series. His drive for visual immediacy was to form a connection between the viewer and a truth, between the particular and the whole. Yet the whole for Judd was not social totality, it was something closer to a Platonic ideal. Fabrication, like any mode of production, is composed by the social, and the space of the social is anything but smooth.
Systems of fabrication, and their potential for customization, are not, as Michelle Kuo writes of Jeff Koons, the “subordination of the object to the subject.”7 What fabrication appears to offer the artist is the authority of the industrially produced object, free from the artist’s involution with the rest of society. Rather, fabrication could be seen as an opportunity to draw out the dimensions of a thing that commerce negates. Perhaps what fabrication could offer an artist is a method by which to display our involution with a libidinal economy, in which psychic life and economic force are intertwined.
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With Boy with Frog the public confronts the nudity of a male on the cusp of adolescence. His nudity amplified by his smooth, matte white surface — entirely without interruption. The gaze glides along his rich, soft skin, caught only by the parts that have been most worked over: the frog’s warts, the boy’s curly hair, and his plump, veiny testicles. Against a rationalized grid of travertine at The Getty Center, he forms a solid outline. In French Neoclassicism closed line compositions were a guarantor of purity, and an expression of the social production of clean and proper bodies, as well as a vehicle for the sensual.8 Enclosing the body aroused anxieties about the possibility of representing a pure body, and Ingres’ use of closed line in Grande Odalisque caused the woman to be taken by critics as a sublime beauty and a conjurer of death. The line that contains the body in form promises to subdue the unruly web of pleasures, but the images of enclosure are haunted by the very anxieties they were designed to quell. This tumbling between pleasure and trauma endures in the erotics of our time.
In ancient Greece the sexualized body of the boy was seen to hold the hope of future virility. Young men were encouraged to practice in gymnastics and hunting expeditions, and their growing muscles were seen as a vow of dominance, the promise that their society would prevail. The primary sexual ethic in the ruling class of ancient Greece was moderation, and a man had to prove he was the master of himself before he could become the master of anyone else. Those who could not control their lust were tested with the challenge to looking at a beautiful boy without desire.9 Wealthy married men often took an adolescent male lover, a paidika, and the love of boys was widespread and widely accepted. Their ethics centered around a constant questioning of one’s behaviour toward themselves and others, rather than a code imposed by a religious or legal institution. The aim was to live beautifully and in so doing to slake one’s natural thirst for sex by sleeping with beautiful human beings.”10
To live beautifully today would be to live amongst beautiful things, not boys. What the paidika was to adult male desire, Boy with Frog is to industrial demand. To produce a boy the size of Ray’s sculpture requires “state of the art” technologies, the same whirring CNC machines and powerful computers that originated as technologies of sovereignty, deployed in the service of art. Unlike Athens this sovereign does not reside in the heavens, but in the invisible hand of the market. Charles Ray’s relation to the market is something like that of a libertine who challenges the social order through vengeance on those who attempt to subdue the natural callings of the libido.11 Just as the Libertine sought to spoil the purity of aristocratic women, Ray’s sculpture aims at the virtuous tones of minimalism. And his work is caught in the dilemma of the Vicomte de Valmont: embittered by the situation and compelled to critique it, the Libertine loses faith in his vindictive eroticism precisely because of its successes. He can no longer trust the social forms that gave birth to his efforts, nor is he able to return to simpler pleasures. At this point the Libertine either chooses love and risks his presumed independence, or negates love and lapses into nostalgia. Which direction does Boy with Frog take?
Boy with Frog is a single topological surface. Without orifice he is impenetrable, and to be truly invulnerable is to live the fantasy of the market. The market penetrates into every aspect of life, but is never penetrated itself, just as the boy’s body, sealed to industry standards, is incapable of pleasure. We cannot imagine the boy parting his smooth lips to share a moan, but could easily imagine him subjected to mass production. Industry, a bedfellow of the market, draws its austere erotics from market’s claim to autonomy. Boy with Frog takes both forks of the Libertine’s path: he presents a bygone erotic life that calls into question the erotics of our time, yet sequesters the inquiry with the austerity of industry.