Untitled
Artist
Tom Friedman
(St. Louis, Missouri, 1965 - )
Title
Untitled
Creation Date
1998
Century
late 20th century
Dimensions
24 1/4 x 46 in. (61.6 x 116.84 cm)
Classification
Photographs
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
lambda print
Credit Line
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Jennifer and Joseph Duke Gift, 1999, 1999.230, © Tom Friedman; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Tom Friedman’s self-portraits, which frequently employ non-traditional media such as aspirin, wooden blocks, or sugar cubes, reveal a sense of humor and technical sophistication. In this work, the artist starts from a digital photograph of himself standing, and reorganizes his body, or his likeness, as a series of pixels stretched horizontally beyond the stage of easy visual recognition. Its “blur” seems to parody the “self-expression” of Color Field painting, as it almost aggressively subsumes its subject. Friedman transforms the body into a technological surrogate—a barcode, or similar device, waiting to be scanned and retranslated by some other technological interface. Creating a version of self whose identity seems to be engulfed by the medium in which it is realized, Friedman’s work playfully queries the relationship between “information” and the self it construes.
