At first sight, the intricately tattooed naked male body trapped on the metal rack could be a corpse. Hooks in his cheeks pull back his skin and pinion him to the frame. On his chin there's an Egyptian-style beard, although it's unlikely that any Egyptian king went to the afterlife impaled on a baseball bat.
There is both a vulnerability and strength in this exposed body. Two monk-like figures emerge with buckets and invite us to dip our fingers in the white foamy substance within, and anoint the man. There is initial reluctance, and then a rush. There is something oddly moving about it. How often do you touch the naked body of a stranger? How often do you touch a stranger at all? It is impossible not to think of the two Marys tending the body of Jesus. One woman sets about the task with the touching zest of Dickens' Mrs Gamp. The body glistens, surreal and strange. Its fingers begin to move.
This is no laying-out of the dead, but more a ritualised form of resurrection, created by Ron Athey, a man who has turned his body into an ongoing piece of art. Athey was raised in a Pentecostal family: you can take the boy out of the church but you can't take the church out of the boy. His work is imbued with spirit, rite and an ecstatic magic.
Here, he rises shaman-like from the dead and, in a magic circle, invokes those already gone – in particular, the drag-queen Divine from John Waters' films Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, who becomes identified with Jean Genet's outcast character from his prison novel Our Lady of the Flowers. Whether you are alert to the references hardly matters. As with all Athey's work, it is the ritual that matters. He grapples physically with grief and death; he makes us stare our own mortality in the face.
• This article was amended on 3 June 2014. It originally stated that Athey's father was a Pentecostal minister. His father was never Pentecostal and Athey did not meet him until he was an adult. He was raised by his Pentecostal grandmother and aunt. This has been corrected.
