Wright Auction

Influential American photographer Catherine Opie is heralded for her color portraits that explore culturally constructed norms and boundaries surrounding the ideas of the American dream and American identity. The present lot, Untitled #3, is from her Large Format Polaroid Series, which was commissioned by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS. The series was an extension of her oeuvre at the time and she created it using the only large format Polaroid camera of its kind, shooting thirteen unique Polaroids in collaboration with performance artists Divinity Fudge (born Darryl L. Carlton) and Ron Athey.

Athey's performance practice employs S&M techniques and body modification to explore pain, trauma, transformation, and “allegorize the experience of survival, anger, and loss during the first decades of the AIDS crisis.” Divinity, who featured in two of the images, appeared frequently in Athey's work. Opie described the series of images as a “journey through the ideas, actions and personas in [Ron Athey's] performances, little vignettes from larger parts of Ron's work...The whole cast is not there, but the relationship with Divinity Fudge, who has performed with Ron for the past decade, is represented.”

The towering Polaroids, clocking in at over 8 feet tall, were shown at the Thread Waxing Space in New York in 2000. A press release for the show noted Opie’s diverse sources of inspiration:

Referencing photographs by Pierre Molinier and Robert Mapplethorpe, Opie dramatizes the pathos of self-representation pioneered by their work. Her subjects, conventionally regarded as outsiders, are placed at the center of monumental portraits. The viewer is presented with a depiction of physical beauty and enlightenment, heroic in scale.

The scale of these works is augmented by meticulous detail offered in the selection of tableaux, costume, and the physical ornamentation of Athey and Carlton’s bodies. Central to the suite of photographs is a cape belonging to legendary artist, designer, and performer Leigh Bowery. The works refer in equal part to religious depictions of ecstasy and suffering, such as portraits of St. Sebastian by Caravaggio, Titian, and Grünewald.

In Untitled #3, the viewer is confronted with an arresting image of Ron Athey wearing a crown of needles piercing his skin, drawing a more direct, suggestive, and recognizable parallel to the suffering of Christ so often depicted in art across the centuries.