“Since the first time I encountered Jordan Wolfson’s work, he has continued to surprise, challenge, and exhilarate me with his singular approach to imagery, material, and technology. His works reflect some of the most critical anxieties in everyday life and contemporary society, reaffirming why he is one of the most innovative artists working today.” – David Zwirner
Titling is incredibly precise. Titling is like … surgical. When you title an artwork, be very careful because the title can destroy a piece. I think it’s surgical. It’s so important.” Jordan Wolfson is discussing the notion of titling artwork over Zoom. He’s in Los Angeles, in late February, having this morning finished work he’ll show through David Zwirner gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong. The works comprise Red Sculpture, a boy the colour of ox-blood – more of that in due course – and three “panels”, two of which are Untitled. I ask Jordan Wolfson that with demanding consumers living in the 21st-century Algocracy (rule by algorithm), shouldn’t artists stump up proper titles for their “products”? That way admirers get to shoot, share, love, like and lavish the data analytics of a name all over Instagram, the world’s premium gallery space.
“No. Without a name it’s poetic,” Wolfson says. “By choosing not to give something a title, in a way, that’s beautiful.”Sensing my incredulity (though in reality I’m touched by his sentiment) he elaborates. “Sometimes when you give a name to something, you limit it. Let’s say it’s a sculpture … you have to give it a name that creates momentum for the artwork, it can’t hold back the artwork, or control it … so therefore …” I interrupt him. “Isn’t it most poetic to remove the title altogether, i.e, dump the bore- core term Untitled, which is so obviously a non-title? “That would be terrible,” he aghast. “Nothing can also be a very negative thing. It’s weird,” he says. He visibly minds scroll in deep silence for several seconds and reach an impasse. “There’s no right answer.” The subliminal irony in Wolfson’s words is not lost on me; like he needed a title to create momentum for the piece that still defines him a decade later. And before we talk of his Art Basel Hong Kong offerings this month, let’s first dispense with the, ahem … “animatronic in the room”.
About Jordan Wolfson and his artworks
Jordan Wolfson is a big deal in contemporary art, much like Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons. He provokes and plays devil’s advocate. Jordan Wolfson arrived with so much momentum on the back of one work, he all but detonated the 21st-century art aesthetic.
In 2014, David Zwirner New York (Zwirner commissioned and funded Wolfson’s proposal) debuted Female Figure, a scantily clad animatronic woman in heels covered in black smudges (the implication of being soiled in some way) in a brightly lit room more sterile than sensual, standing in front of a mirror, to which she’s attached by a rod piercing her torso, dancing to the pop music of Lady Gaga and Paul Simon, inter-spliced with words voiced – and written – by Wolfson.
Hypersexualised, hyper controversial and hyper compelling, she, or it, and Jordan Wolfson, were the talk – and outrage – of the town. And punters queued in legions, long before the Infinity Rooms and Kusamafication of art spaces as places of entertainment were underway. Female Figure felt like a twisted, retro-fit inventory of abandoned and/or abused narratives. Was she Breakfast at Tiffany’s bitch, Yellow Brick Road witch or post-nuclear Marilyn Monroe? Violent and visceral, art’s hybrid “It-girl” summoned the spectre of misogyny, women’s representation and how women’s images are consumed. And the really “sick” part? The robot was equipped with facial-recognition software and could “look at” the viewer. She returned your stare. These seemingly deranged automata with creepy crawly, fleshiest fingers were objectifying you. You, not she, had become the object. Shiver. It felt as gripping yet distasteful and shocking, or evil, as Bret Easton Ellis’s protagonist Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.
Artist, photographer, filmmaker and University of Pennsylvania senior lecturer in Fine Arts, Jamie Diamond recalls her first “date” with Female Figure. “I went to Zwirner gallery in 2014 and felt undeniably transfixed and repulsed; the immense empathy I had for this machine-like figure made me deeply uncomfortable. It wasn’t only the realism and the gaze that struck me, it was the fact that we were all seduced by this torture, there was cruelty and violence that left me feeling uneasy.” Jordan Wolfson occupies singular territory, she thinks. “His work enters the uncanny valley territory almost instantaneously, eliciting a visceral response of pure anxiety and intrigue.”
Tell Wolfson that Female Figure is the American Psycho of the contemporary art world, and his riposte doesn’t touch the sides. “Yes, but I also thought Lunar Park was a masterpiece. And I thought Glamorama was a masterpiece,” he says, citing two of Elllis’s later successes. It’s a canny deferral, almost Koonsian, i.e, Jeff, the artist of extravagantly glossy and expensive rabbits, balloons and dogs, a blue one of which (USD40,000/HKD 313899), was smashed in Miami the previous day. Wolfson’s been too busy to know of the canine calamity but is cosy with Koons. “We met a couple of weeks ago. Every time we see each other we just kind of hang out. He’s very kind, he’s been very supportive to me, and when I’ve had challenges I’ve called him several times.” And you can just imagine how many times Wolfson must have felt the need. “And you know, a lot of that construction of me as being like an ‘anti-hero’, a lot of it is a construction by journalists. But Jeff is great. I don’t have any problems with Jeff. I don’t really have any problems with anyone, but I actually like Jeff.” Do they compare notes, or appraise each other’s works-in-progress? “We show each other stuff we’re working on, yes, but that’s all I want to say.”
We’re back to the former It-girl. “Every artist, or writer, has a work that goes somewhere because of the times it was made in, and it happens at that moment,” he says, as a way of explaining Female Figure, or that of American Psycho. Think Stanley Kubrick. “Why was Kubrick so very interested in Barry Lyndon, you know what I mean? Everyone has a shadow.”
Jordan Wolfson produced Colored Sculpture two years later, a freckled, red-haired boy trickster, who shares much in common with the look of the original Huckleberry Finn (though we think him redolent of spoiled Snively Throckmorton in Yogi’s First Christmas), attached to metal chains, who is by turns dragged and then smashed head-first on the ground to the fragmented accompaniment of Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman. It also looked at you. And talked: “Two to kill you, three to hold you, four to bleed you, five to touch you, six to move you, seven to ice you, eight to put my teeth into you …” Colored Sculpture spoke Batemanspeak or written Wolfsons peak. And was stunning, disorienting and harrowing to behold. “I vividly remember seeing Colored Sculpture at David Zwirner New York in 2016,” says Kylie Ying, co-founder of ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair and JINGART. “It was an immersive installation with a playful boyish-looking sculpture that speaks to the subculture of our time while also invoking familiar childhood memories. I next encountered him as part of David Zwirner’s Art Basel online viewing room, 15 Rooms, which was an interactive programmed- robot installation. This was one of the most cutting-edge AI-produced works I had ever seen, which really opened up new possibilities and pathways for artistic creation. I think he’s one of the most remarkable among the new generation of artists today with his ability to powerfully capture important social, political and cultural issues in innovative and daring ways that we can all respond to no matter our background.
In staging such works, Wolfson evokes and evolves a narrative conjured by the likes of American video artist Bruce Nauman, whose early film Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1968), feels like a prototype for Colored Sculpture. Nauman’s Clown Torture (1987) also anticipates Wolfson’s forays into the violence/ innocence trope. It’s just that with Wolfson, the anguish and “charisma” are elevated.
Poppy Donguxe Wu, chief curator at Beijing’s X Museum and a fan of Wolfson’s, sees his influence thus: “Wolfson launches attacks that dissimilate (or, for some other people, solidify) scepticism and technophobia. The results of blending technologies from eras spanning thousands of years are delusional. Animated and inanimate parts of sculpture in Jordan Wolfson’s work are articulated in a way reminiscent of a mindful mutant finding itself performing a never-ending show.”
“Female Figure has given me an enormous opportunity to make other works,” Wolfson says. Has he developed a soft spot for his hybrid femme fatale? “She’s a sculpture, so I have a custodial relationship with her,” he matter-of-facts. “It doesn’t really go beyond that. I have a pretty objective custodial relationship with the sculpture, and when I see it now, I see myself when I was 33 or 34 years old, and at a certain time in my life when the work just came to me. But other than that, I’m pretty much just focused on the present producing new artwork.”
And how. Later this year in December, Wolfson will travel to Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia (NGA) for the world premiere of his Body Sculpture (2017-2023) piece, a recent acquisition by the gallery. Body Sculpture is another animatronic work combining sculpture and performance as a means of eliciting emotional and physical responses in the viewer. It will be shown alongside a selection of his earlier works. “NGA bought the first edition and we’re producing it now,” he says. “It’s about consciousness and the body of the viewer becoming present and I’m really excited to have this relationship with them. It’s about the idea that you can become transcendent because of your proximity to a cultural object, and the transcendence begins in your body.”
How has Wolfson’s art taste evolved or devolved? “The idea of what’s beautiful has to do with where my shadow is at a certain moment. I’ve never really talked about this, but maybe every artist has a shadow and a shadow is always moving and we’re always changing, and when content reflects against the shadow and generates something, and suddenly you are like in your shadow, it matches with your shadow and how you see the world. Because the world is always changing. Sometimes you’re watching the news, sometimes you’re not watching the news, sometimes you’re into Fassbinder [film director Rainer Werner], sometimes you’re into Bergman [Ingmar], or sometimes you’re on Netflix. So what this thing is changes, but that doesn’t mean that work from the past loses its power, it just changes.
It’s just that you as the maker, in terms of your taste, can’t stay the same because you don’t stay the same. What was beautiful to me five years ago is not beautiful to me now.” And then an entertaining and enlightening art moment happens. “It’s about the art of seeing. And using yourself. We’re a combination of things, like our consciousness, our bodies, our whole histories and trauma, and all these things that have happened to us as we get bumped along in our lives, it’s sort of like a horn.” Musical references once again. “Consciousness is like air coming through a horn, and the sound of the air vibrating through the horn is based on the form of the horn [puts his hands together, blows, and emits a triumphant, resonant horn sound] … that’s how art gets made … [I laugh at his musical rendition of art’s process] …you just let it happen, that’s just the sound I’m making right now. That’s my sound. But it’s always changing, it’s the relationship to yourself.”
Wolfson’s panels for Hong Kong hail from a very different kind of mechanism. I’ve been shown one, Cat with Apples before we speak, which features a cat, some apples and some chains. I tell Wolfson it looks somehow meme-y, internet-y, sort of appropriative. “I created it using an artificially intelligent prompt,” he says, “using AI software to create images, so a cat, chains, and apples.” This sounds a lot like Dall-e 2, the nascent AI system that creates images from text commands and threatens to put artists out of business.
“It is Dall-e,” says Wolfson, who has chosen to trial it. “I don’t want people thinking I’m just an AI artist,” he says, smiling. “AI is a means to an end, it’s like a synthesiser, it came from me typing into the prompt. The most interesting part is the manifestation of the image through a machine onto the world. Those art AI images are directly out of my mind. But they’ve had to go through an intermediary kind of device to create it.” And how did he find the erratic results of text commands? “It took a little while to get the hang of it, in terms of … [mindscrolling] … it’s like a musical instrument and learning how to play Dall-e like an instrument that just happens to be generating images.” Can we expect to know the text input that generated the pictures, like next-gen AI titling?
“No. I’m not interested in that. That becomes meta. Also, I realised that the tool for creating those images is much less interesting than the images, but then, we also discovered the tools for creating the images are more interesting than the images, in a philosophical way. The images themselves are flawed because they’re created by this … less-feeling consciousness. But maybe that’s also quality.” Mindscroll. “I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.”
Wolfson detests Instagram. “I’m very sensitive, so I try and stay off Instagram. I think it’s literally unhealthy and bad for you physiologically, in the way baked beans and alcohol and tobacco are bad for you. You’re getting exposed to pollution, which is bad for you. A friend of mine says the reason Instagram has kicked off so much anxiety is that, as human beings, we ‘work’ or see in a range. For example, we walk into one room, we walk into another room, and we process in separate parts. And scenery changes when we walk inside and outside. But with Instagram, it’s like scenery change, scenery change, scenery change, but your brain isn’t meant to have so many scenery changes so quickly. And that causes mental health issues.”
He welcomes technology’s role in art’s evolution, though. “What’s compelling is that it presents new and dynamic ways to do this old-fashioned thing done by the likes of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo; but you’re not doing it in marble and you’re not doing it in oil paint, but through AI technology and text commands.” And then he invokes a similarly contentious but admired artist. “One of the best people using technology with art was [the American conceptual artist] Elaine Sturtevant.
Sturtevant was fearless with technology and in many ways, she’s such a great example. [Andy Warhol was once asked about perfecting his silkscreen technique and famously replied: “I don’t know. Ask Elaine.”] So this idea of embracing it and surrendering and witnessing and just letting it flow and doing it through this very traditional thing – which is the consciousness thing – is interesting.”
Hence the lure of Art Basel Hong Kong. “I’m very excited to be showing my work in Hong Kong and Asia. It’s such a dynamic place.” The ox-blood Red Sculpture will be static. “This work is kind of very much an inner-child series for me,” he says. “Looking back, I realise each body of work has expressed a different psychological state that I’ve been in or part of my past that becomes abstracted through generative, intuitive imagery. This work is very personal to me and sort of my inner world.”
And does he “like” his AI-influenced panels? “I’m very happy with them – if I may dare to like my own work. There’s a healthy insecurity we have as creatives; you’re never satisfied because it can always be better. What I will say is that when you make an artwork – I don’t know, maybe you feel this way for writing – it’s like a snapshot of the energy, at that moment, and then you just have to let it be, as long as your intention is good. It’s sort of like that’s the carpet and you can ride out the door.” At which point, he Zooms out and into another portal.
This story first appeared here.
(Header image credits: Jordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture, 2016; Feature image credits: Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)
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