The artist at play
Revisiting my profile of Montana's Chuck Ringer
In 1994, when I was a new writer for Montana Magazine, one of my very first assignments was to profile the Joliet artist Charles Ringer. It led to a friendship. I revisited the article recently; I think you’ll see why I wanted to share it.
It’s the movement that draws you in to Chuck Ringer’s “kinetic” sculptures. The cowboys, vehicles, cross-country skiers, musical instruments, and animals, animals, all sorts of animals -- they all move.
They rock back and forth on their axes. You give them a little push and they keep going, the hypnotic smoothness of a pendulum combined with the captivating curiosity of an out-of-sync windshield wiper.
“You have to actually participate with the work,” Ringer says, “by touching it. And then you get to study it and watch it and try to understand what kind of physics is going on. It’s a real soothing, relaxing thing, looking at the cycles of these pieces. It almost puts you in a trance, and then you can fantasize that you’re entering its work: I’m a cowboy, or whatever.”
Before you know it, Ringer’s gallery, the “Ol’ Wrecking Yard” at the north end of Joliet, has won you over. You’re entranced. It’s only much later, if at all, that you pause: This is art -- maybe I shouldn’t be touching it.
That delayed reaction makes Chuck Ringer happy. “You’re supposed to touch it!” Ringer grins, proceeding to relate with pride how a sign in front of his work at the Buffalo Bill Center in Cody used to read, ‘This is the only piece in the entire museum you can touch.’”
Ringer values the interaction because it brings a sense of playfulness. As his wife Emily says, “You don’t have to be trained in art to come in and say, ‘That makes me feel good.’”
A growing number of people are having that sensation. Ringer’s resume reads like a Who’s Who of galleries, museums, corporate and private collections, including names such as the Smithsonian, the Whitney, the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, and celebrities from Martina Navratilova to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The notoriety is justified. Ringer’s works are more than mere curiosities. They present a sense of vibrancy, movement, and beauty that extends beyond the fascinating physics of their operation.
In addition to the kinetic works (most of which can sit on a table or bookcase), Ringer has recently branched out into wall pieces, deck pieces, and smaller, anchored versions of some of his kinetic silhouettes. Yet even the non-moving pieces seem to be alive.
Ringer’s greatest artistic gift is to bring an amazing liveliness to everything from “the creature” -- a 18-foot-high humanoid metal structure that makes the studio a regular landmark on the road from Billings to Yellowstone Park -- to the seven-inch-tall “little people” with which he started his career.
“This is what Chuck did in school instead of paying attention to his teachers,” Emily says. “He had a little piece of clay and started making a head. People will ask how long it took to make a piece, and he’ll say 46 years.”
Perhaps Ringer’s most amazing gift is that he does this in such an unusual medium: steel. “It’s unfamiliar to a lot of people,” Ringer says. “When they think of metal sculpture, it would be bronze, molded, made a thousand at a time. But anything to do with steel is really one of a kind, because you have to hand-make every piece.”
Early in his career, Ringer, an incurable collector, used whatever metal he had at hand (which was frequently automobile parts, since the “Ol’ Wrecking Yard” was indeed a junkyard when the Ringers bought it in 1971). The old sheet metal from a car roof would be transformed -- one drop at a time from a welding rod -- into hairs on the head of a seven-inch-tall banjo player.
The methods have modernized. He now uses a plasma torch and even an occasional template to cut silhouettes out of new stainless steel. But he rails against computer cut-outs. “I hand-cut all my stuff,” he says. “I feel it puts the value into the work. All the little bumps are my heartbeats as I lean in on the machine.”
Having spent 18 years on kinetic works, Ringer has a good handle on the figures themselves. “Actually,” he says, “the hardest part of any of these sculptures is the part that isn’t even looked at -- the base.” It has to sit in perfect balance, yet the act of welding warps the metal. Ringer has to compensate in advance, planning for the warp to bring it in balance.
The Ringers have spent all that time on their own, independent, separate from the art establishment. “I’m basically self-educated,” Chuck says. “No training, just learned from my mistakes.” And he is surprised and disheartened that his independence doesn’t count for more in the art world.
“People always want to know where you studied, who you studied with,” he says. “The art world can get very political at times.
“We’re real independent here,” he continues. “Some people see that as a risk or a threat. They say, ‘We want strings attached to this guy, so when we pull, he jumps.’”
And Ringer won’t jump. “We have a lifestyle to protect. That’s the most important thing to us: to raise our kids properly, to enjoy ourselves, to be able to contemplate why we’re flying through the universe on a chunk of rock. You miss all that when you get too involved in watching what the norm is.”
The Ringers have been largely successful in defining and protecting that lifestyle. For example, they’ve educated their three children at home, also involving them in the family art business, from greeting customers to welding (”The family that grinds together binds together,” Emily deadpans).
Ringer has also been able to take the time to create pieces that he realizes won’t sell. One example is “the spaceship,” a sort of welded steel adult playground set-up, complete with lights and a ray-gun. “I like to do things that are non-serious,” Chuck says, “that can’t be stereotyped by any political groups in the art world. They’re just like, ‘Oh! It’s a weird thing!’”
But creating the personal space can have its price. Take the regular hours for the Ol’ Wrecking Yard, for example. There aren’t any. As a general rule, if the big wooden gates in front are open, you can wander on in. But on any given day, they may not be open. The Ringer family may have taken off, en masse, for an art opening or a mountain-man rendezvous.
The family is aware of the toll this has taken. Emily says, “People are finally starting to appreciate that this is something different; you can’t see it at K-Mart. But for years we scared them away.”
And yet in some ways that fits better with the Ringers’ conception of art. “We’d rather have people come in here who are really curious,” Emily says. “They come in and say, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in here but I just can’t stand it any more; can I have a tour?’ You have their curiosity, their imagination.”
Again, it’s the role of art as something that doesn’t just sit on the wall, but interacts with you, and pushes you to interact with your neighbor. The Ringers carry this to an extreme with their version of an opening.
“We’d have these pot-lucks,” Emily says, “and Chuck would unveil the spaceship, or the Creature, and you’d have all these different people, from local rural people coming down with their hot dish, participating in an art event with urban people from Billings.”
“All these walks of life,” Chuck cuts in, “all wondering what’s going on here. And they were talking to each other... They couldn’t get into the cliquey thing at all -- something’s unveiled and they have to communicate with each other: ‘Whoa! What is this?’”
But after all, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Ringers invite their neighbors the ranchers to their openings, and not only because the art appeals across such a spectrum. It is the neighboring ranchers with whom the Ringers have the most in common: talented, versatile, and fiercely independent.
Charles Ringer died last month. Montana feels smaller without him.
Thank you John. Chuck and Em have been such good friends for so many years. Your words have taken me down memory lane bringing back so many wonderful stories and How fascinating his way of thinking was. He is definitely the most unique friend I’ve ever had. Thank you for turning on the flood of tears.
Thank you for republishing this wonderful piece. We can feel a bit of his whimsy through your words. And I envy you for that spatula.