Excerpted from Rex Ray: Art + Design

Back in 1997, I was in the Bay Area and on the town one night with my friend Liz, and she said, “Come on, Doug, we have to go to this art opening tonight.” I asked where, and Liz said, “In a hair salon up on Fillmore Street. Just come. It’ll be great.”

To be honest, I managed my expectations way downward for this one, and the hair salon opening was supposed to have been only one small event in the larger scheme of the night. When we arrived it was still just light out, and not many people had shown up yet. I just wanted to flee.

Once inside, though, I looked up on the wall, and I had a “Holy shit!” moment. I mean, sometimes in life you just fluke into the right thing at the right moment — like, say, the time I got free tickets to see Nirvana unplugged — and Rex Ray’s show was one of those right moments. It must have been two thousand hand-cut collages map-pinned (before everyone started pinning art to gallery walls) to an upper stratum of wall above all the machines, the one nearest to the ground still maybe a foot above my head. And they were so raw — unframed, unrefined, and uncategorizable in a way that made my head go ping — that I realized I was experiencing the shock of the new.

But the thing was that these pieces, all on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper, were tough as nails and unslick — but they were also knowingly so, self-possessed and therefore superslick at the same time. “How did he do that? What’s going on here?” I felt like someone walking down a Manhattan street in 1962 and seeing Andy Warhol’s Dick Tracy in a Bonwit Teller shop window. A precipice moment, where past and future are synthesized into one discrete parcel. It was hyperreal.

About Rex himself I knew nothing, nor did Liz, aside from the facts that he had a cool name — almost too cool — and that he was having a show in a hair salon. Who was this guy?

Within ten minutes of our arrival, the room filled with 300 people and I developed fabulousness fatigue and had to leave, but I spent the rest of the trip asking everyone I met, “So, what do you know about Rex Ray?” “What do you know about Rex Ray?” Now, consider: this was pre-Google, pre-Wikipedia — pre-everything, it seems like now — and if you wanted a quick bio on people, you still had to do some legwork. A picture slowly emerged, always murky, always intriguing, often sounding like an urban legend: He used to be a really crabby salesclerk at City Lights bookstore in North Beach. He’s seemingly designed half the rock concert posters in San Francisco. He’s David Bowie’s graphic designer. He’s just started doing real artwork, and this is his first show. He’s started doing really big canvases.

It all turned out to be true. In the end, I arranged a dinner with Rex through a mutual friend and was quite nervous about meeting the guy. I don’t know what I was expecting — jodhpurs and a monocle? Mapplethorpe-style leathers? Too cool for school? Hairdresser on fire? And then Rex showed up with his own distinct look — yes, he has a look; he’s one of those people who can pull off a look — and in he came, and we discussed Joan Didion, the history of Interview magazine, Bowie’s B-sides, 1970s cinematographers, California freeway construction, the apocryphal biography of Amanda Lear, and — well, Rex was basically the living compendium of knowledge and enthusiasm about all of my dream Jeopardy! categories. I remember the profound sense of pleasure in knowing I’d made a new lifelong friend. That gets harder as one ages.

His work. Rex’s work inhabits that small sliver of territory where art and design don’t quite so much overlap, but rather swap identities so quickly and fluidly that one is never sure which is which. His pieces function as luxury goods, but at the same time they’re art, and quite rigorous art at that. His work is well aware of its mission to confuse you. Its ultimate goal is to trick somebody who ought to know better into saying, “It’s not art, it’s design,” thus exposing a lack of knowledge about shifting dunes in the sands of visual history.

In this way, Rex’s art correlates closely to that of other artists who seemingly cross over from design or pop art graphics, such as Takashi Murakami or Ryan McGinness — art that at first makes you think of a sneaker showroom, a skate park, or, well, a hair salon — and isn’t it strange how new ways of seeing emerge from the least likely places? What museum culture lacked in vitality during the ‘90s was richly overcompensated for by the design world. It was Wallpaper* magazine 24/7 back in 1998, and Rex was smart enough to find a way out of the hothouse, not by leaving it but by going deeper within it.

Rex’s work appropriates the trendiest dimensions of dépeche mode–style culture. In his earlier collage works, before he began using his own custom-printed papers, it’s possible to see blips of Abercrombie & Fitch typography leaking off the edge of a rectangle and into the picture frame. Supermodel images bleed through curvishly cut shards of Vanity Fair. By appropriating luxury images of that era in the manner he did, Rex was making a specific critique of the style-driven consumerism and the ludicrous extremes design culture reached near the decade’s end — and yet, of course, the Rex Ray punch line: he ended up defining the culture by trumping it. He also points out a natural extension of the pop art agenda established by, yes, Warhol, Johns, and Rosenquist. His work isn’t just “clever”; it’s smart, and it is, in a weird way, compassionate about the culture it critiques. There’s a humanity there.

That humanity emerges through the sheer joy and line quality of the paper cuts Ray makes. They have a sort of McCall’s-magazine-circa-1968 craft-project feel to them — “101 Things to Do on a Rainy Day!” — and it’s this willingness to adopt such a flagrantly design-y, retro (yet in no way campy) formal quality that makes his pieces feel not only beyond smart but humane, too. Lily Tomlin once spoke of a bumper sticker she wanted to make: “Honk if you know the difference between satire and parody.” Maybe there lies the strongest truth about Rex’s work: at first glance you think he’s satirizing something, and then you think (or want to think) it’s a parody of something bigger, and only once you get past that do you realize that his work is sui generis — a critique, not a reworking — and that from the colliding worlds of art, design, media culture, fashion, and street culture, he has created work utterly of the moment, yet utterly eternal.