Two parents, two young children: “It’s a nuclear family,” Ray has said, the model of American normalcy. Though the figures are harmoniously aligned, evenly spaced, and linked by clasped hands, a simple action has put everything wrong: Ray has made all of them the same height. They are also naked, and unlike the shopwindow mannequins they resemble, they are anatomically complete. This and the work’s title, the Freudian phrase for the suppressed erotic currents within the family unit, introduce an explicit sexual tension as disturbing in this context as the protagonists’ literally equal stature.
Ray became interested in mannequins while working in a department store as a college student, and in the early 1990s he began exploring their visual and psychological possibilities. In Family Romance, the manipulations of scale imply a disruption of society’s understanding of the balance of power: not only have the children grown, but the adults have shrunk. Like other works of Ray’s, the sculpture suggests forces of anonymity and standardization in American culture. It also involves the surprise of an object that seems familiar, yet is not—a strategy the artist has employed over the course of his career to interrogate ideas of “normalcy” and American middle-class values.
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
Two parents, two young children: “It’s a nuclear family,” as Ray says, the model of American normalcy. Yet a simple action has put everything wrong: Ray has made all of them the same height. They are also naked, and unlike the store-window mannequins they resemble, they are anatomically complete. This and the work’s title, the Freudian phrase for the suppressed erotic currents within the family unit, introduce an explicit sexuality as disturbing in this context as the protagonists’ literally equal stature.
Early works of Ray’s submitted the forms and ideas of Minimalism to the same kind of perceptual double-take that Family Romance works on the social life of middle-class Anglo-Saxon America. He has worked in photography and installation as well as sculpture, and his art has no predictable style or medium; but it often involves the surprise of the object that seems familiar yet is not. Like other works of Ray’s involving mannequins, Family Romance suggests forces of anonymity and standardization in American culture. Its manipulations of scale also imply a disruption of society’s balance of power: not only have the children grown, but the adults have shrunk.
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 345.
