Charles LeDray
That eclecticism is revealed in one of the show’s earliest pieces, Workworkworkworkwork (1991), consisting of 588 objects arrayed on the floor against one wall. Most are small items of clothing and even smaller replicas of books and magazines–everything is proportioned to a miniature people. Some publications have real titles, like Time; there are also items of gay porn and some odd titles LeDray invented (“Sleaziest,” “News…and Sex”). Though visitors aren’t intended to turn the pages, each magazine in fact has insides (made of cut-up magazines). LeDray originally displayed the piece on a Manhattan sidewalk, hoping to re-create “the display of used goods for sale by homeless people.” Russell Ferguson in the show’s excellent catalog quotes critic Ralph Rugoff on LeDray: “The tiny scale can actually concentrate an object’s presence, almost in the manner of a fetish.” Ferguson himself suggests that the objects’ scale “contributes to their separation from their full-size context in everyday life,” making us feel that, “like Gulliver, we have traveled to a remote part of the world, somewhere quite familiar yet disturbingly strange.”
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LeDray says the rainbow doesn’t just stand for gay pride but is a kind of “catchall symbol” in which people see what they want to see. While he took the title from the Beatles song, and the design of the shirt from the hippie era, and both references hint at a tribal inclusiveness that echoes LeDray’s obsessions as a collector, the title also suggests simultaneous orgasm.
LeDray began using human bone in 1995–in Wheat, for example, an elegant carving of a stalk of the plant. Some have seen an AIDS reference here too. And LeDray admitted the possibility of poetic meanings when he told Hilarie M. Sheets in the New York Times, “It’s just calcium, but it’s of human origin, so it’s charged in a lot of different ways.” He added that he “was trying to make something that’s about life, something that’s adding rather than taking away.”
