.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This photograph records a performance in which Charles Ray, then an art student in Iowa, lashed himself to the branch of a tree for several hours one afternoon. The position is undoubtedly uncomfortable, but Ray appears balanced and calm, at once submissive to his physical situation and in command of what would be the subsequent reception of this curious event and its representation.
Although Untitled is a fairly straightforward documentary photograph, and the story behind it can be relayed in a few sentences, the work wryly evokes-and sends up-the art historical climate that surrounded its making. Ray studied sculpture in the early 1970s, and about the then-dominant movement of Minimalism, and the prized abstract, simplified, geometric forms and a truth-to-materials aesthetic. Yet as much as Minimalist sculpture may have staged a dramatic encounter between the art object and its beholder, its chief practitioners, such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd, downplayed the importance of the human body as subject or referential frame. man body Ray took this ethos to task in several works, including Plank Piece (1973), in which a flat wooden board, standing on end, wedged his bent body to the wall. Untitled, like work by Ray's contemporaries Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman, thus reintroduced the human body-and its physical force and potential for endurance-to contemporary art at a moment when it was largely disregarded. He emphasized the importance of the photographic record in documenting events that were unrepeatable and momentary, and the slyly comic sensibility in evidence here extended to his later works in photography and also performance, sculpture, and film.
Although Untitled is a fairly straightforward documentary photograph, and the story behind it can be relayed in a few sentences, the work wryly evokes-and sends up-the art historical climate that surrounded its making. Ray studied sculpture in the early 1970s, and about the then-dominant movement of Minimalism, and the prized abstract, simplified, geometric forms and a truth-to-materials aesthetic. Yet as much as Minimalist sculpture may have staged a dramatic encounter between the art object and its beholder, its chief practitioners, such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd, downplayed the importance of the human body as subject or referential frame. man body Ray took this ethos to task in several works, including Plank Piece (1973), in which a flat wooden board, standing on end, wedged his bent body to the wall. Untitled, like work by Ray's contemporaries Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman, thus reintroduced the human body-and its physical force and potential for endurance-to contemporary art at a moment when it was largely disregarded. He emphasized the importance of the photographic record in documenting events that were unrepeatable and momentary, and the slyly comic sensibility in evidence here extended to his later works in photography and also performance, sculpture, and film.