“It’s not just about seeing,” says Moritz Wesseler, the director of the Fridericianum, in Kassel, Germany. “It’s also something about feeling.” Wesseler, who organized the museum’s exhibition “Charles Ray,” opening next Saturday, points to the artist’s sculpture School Play (2014), modeled on the son of a colleague. Ray has noted the deliberately blank face, out of focus, not yet fully formed. In contrast, the youth’s costume—a bedsheet toga, neatly tied by his parents, and a toy sword—is crisp in its details.
“It’s a metaphor for education,” says Wesseler. Parents pick what children wear, molding them for the adult world. Wesseler’s own mother gave him an ice cream for learning to tie his shoes. That blank face, it turns out, has much to say.
