Robert Gober and Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1988

Narrator: This photograph is a collaboration between Robert Gober and Christopher Wool. They included it in a joint exhibition in 1988. Curator Elisabeth Sussman.

Elisabeth Sussman: The woman's dress is a summer dress, which is interesting. Because it's a dress that has no sleeves, no neckline, it's not a, it's a very vulnerable dress. It's there in this kind of wintry landscape. That's interesting, to me. The dress is, looks like a white dress, but it has a printing on it of a repetitive black and white pattern, and that black and white pattern is by Christopher Wool, and resembles the kinds of paintings he was doing at the time.

The other thing that is striking about the photograph is that the tree that it's hanging on, is a three‑pronged tree. For some reason or another, this dress hanging on the tree reminds you slightly of a crucifix, there's just a slight idea that this could be a stand in for a body. But it's really, there's no body there, there's just a dress.

To me, it was very much about kind of establishing this, a sort of mood. Yeah, a feeling of walking into a gallery space that wasn't a neutral space, and that was trying to tell you something that you were going to be emotionally vulnerable to.