Charles Ray, Plank Piece I-II, 1973

A truly frazzled Friday feeling, as enacted by the American sculptor Charles Ray in his two-part photographic work Plank Piece. Featuring the artist’s body as a central component, the artwork was made in the 1970s at a time when Ray, like many of his contemporaries, was pursuing the idea of sculpture as an action rather than an object. It was “contrived through a complex balance between weight and gravity” in which “the artist suspended his body using only a plank of wood”, in the words of the National Galleries of Scotland, resulting in “a minimal, graphic image that is at once humorous and unsettling”.