In a room at Tate Modern, a boy is getting beaten up. He has a chain fixed to the top of his head, another attached to an arm, a third to a leg. As I watch, computer operatives sitting next to me press buttons, activating cranes that pull the chains taut. He spins into the air, limbs fly out, the torso swivels upside down. The chains loosen, he smacks into the ground. Then music kicks in over loudspeakers. Percy Sledge is ardently, if grotesquely inappropriately, singing When a Man Loves a Woman.
The boy is an animatronic puppet, slightly larger than life, with glossy red hair and loose limbs like the 1950s American TV cowboy puppet Howdy Doody. His gap teeth and leering eyes reference Mad magazine’s Alfred E Neuman, his ragged trousers Huckleberry Finn.
It is as if I’m looking at an artist’s meditation on Abu Ghraib or child abuse – a simulation of suffering. The artist, not for the last time in this interview, demurs. “This is real violence,” Jordan Wolfson tells me as the body gets dragged again across the floor, grazing his face. “It’s real abuse, not a simulation.”
How is beating up a puppet real violence? “Because I’m applying real physical violence to a figure even though it’s made of animated parts.”
Tate Modern has just acquired this artwork, entitled Colored Sculpture, for its collection and opens it to the public on 3 May. Neither Wolfson nor the Tate will tell me how much it cost, only that it was bought with funds from Irish art collectors Marie and Joe Donnelly.