Charles Ray is giving me a pain in my stomach. He is doing this by giving himself a pain in his stomach. I can map my own body onto his. I know where the pressure is, where the blood is pooling in the limbs – or I think I know. My knowledge of Ray’s body is an act of faith, supported by the reality of my own body. I reach through the solidity of my own body, its dense flesh, its pains and pleasures, to give shape to the formless mist of another person’s body.

The deep sympathy between body and body is also the deep sympathy between body and object. Because another body is, in some way, my body, I can also understand the plank of wood as a limb or a penis or a finger. This is the thread between Ray’s ostensibly formal, non-representational work and his investigations of figurative sculpture and working with the body.

But I insist on a boundary beyond which my body remains private. Don’t tell me what it means to have my body in particular. I would not choose to torture myself like Ray does, half-crucified up there against the wall. I appreciate his gesture because it is beyond me. It has the generosity and the pathos of slapstick, as well as a hint of its humour. Like Buster Keaton, Ray’s work suggests a self adrift in a volatile and unpredictable world, where sudden spatial and temporal shifts are constantly intruding. One object, one body, is on the verge of becoming another.

As in the mythic substitutions of religion, one person can suffer so we don’t have to. One person’s body can bear our anticipated pain. But how strange that this kind of happy exchange, this generous gesture, can make us cry. When Marina Abramovic sat for hours on end at MoMA, the most common response was tears. People cried, perhaps, because they felt exposed, or because they felt forgiven. But maybe they also cried because something had been taken from them: the sacrificial victim who suffers on our behalf also takes away our right to suffer. The pain in my stomach is Charles Ray’s pain, not mine. Martin Creed says making art is sometimes like pinching yourself to see if you’re alive. If I can’t experience my own pain, if it’s taken from me, how will I know myself?

We watch the artist’s suffering body with gratitude, but also with pained fascination, as we might watch an ex with a new lover. We wait for our own bodies to return to us, from wherever they have gone.