Jordan Wolfson: Body Sculpture

Jordan Wolfson, like many artists before him, is trying to understand and interpret the often-contradictory world in which we live. He does this by embracing twenty-first-century technologies, using the eternal themes of sex and violence, to produce confronting videos and installations.

Jordan Wolfson first came to the attention of the hermetically sealed New York art world with his work Real Violence, which was shown as part of the Whitney Biennial in 2017. This is an intentionally provocative two-and-a-half-minute video viewed wearing a virtual-reality headset and noise-cancelling headphones. In this work, a CGI dummy resembling the artist violently and without hesitation beats another man to death, while a voice, perhaps a cantor, sings two Hebrew prayers, signifying Wolfson’s own Jewish ancestry. I suspect that this work, and much of his oeuvre, draws on the character golem from the history of Jewish folklore; golem can be either good or evil, man or woman, oppressor or oppressed. Real Violence is a prescient work given the ongoing slaughter in the war between Israel and Palestine.

In 2014 he showed an earlier work at Los Angeles’ The Broad museum. This was (Female figure), comprising a life-sized animatronic doll performing an erotic pole dance that wouldn’t be out of place in a gentlemen’s club. She’s wearing a negligee and thigh-high boots and is dancing before a mirrored wall, a witch’s or old crone’s mask covering half her face. The stark contrast between the highly eroticised figure and the ugly masked face is startling, especially when the robot uses facial recognition software to make eye contact with audience members, returning their gaze. Wolfson’s use of the half mask is a clever device because as Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés has suggested, the crone is “the one who sees far, who looks into the spaces between the worlds and can literally see what is coming.”

Continuing to use juxtaposition as a trope, Colored Sculpture, 2016, shown at the Tate Modern in 2018, is a robotic mannequin modelled on figures from a more innocent and nostalgic past; a past that never existed in the US, except for an elite white Anglo-Saxon minority. The larger-than-life redheaded doll is a peculiar mix of Mark Twain’s fictional character Huckleberry Finn and Dennis the Menace from the 1950s television series, with a dose of the freckle-faced boy marionette Howdy Doody thrown in for good measure. The apparent innocence of the boy is ruptured by the violence of his chained “body” being repeatedly hoisted and dropped to the ground. Wolfson again uses facial recognition software, so that the figure turns, scanning for faces on which to commit retribution for the humiliation he suffers at the hands of humans. Of course, this revenge of bioengineered humanoids isn’t new and was the central premise of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Blade Runner, and the various film and television adaptations of Michael Crichton’s Westworld.

It’s against this background of sex and extreme violence that you enter Wolfson’s newly commissioned $6.67 million installation Body Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. One enters the exhibition through a long narrow gallery or anti-chamber, filled with works the artist has selected from the NGA collections, including those of Mike Kelley, Elaine Sturtevant, and Robert Mapplethorpe. This is perhaps shorthand for explaining some of his influences, which are all US artists, although this isn’t surprising as Wolfson was born in New York City and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design. After moving through this space, you enter a vast gallery that’s more like an abandoned industrial warehouse or airplane hangar than a museum space, refreshingly flooded with natural light. Body Sculpture “performs” twice a day, with each performance lasting about thirty minutes, and is closely monitored by gallery staff, who keep the audience at a safe distance from the almost one-square-metre metal cube; some art really is dangerous. My first impression of Body Sculpture is of an animatronic work, best described as an escaped Tesla car manufacturing robot and its gantry crossed with the actor Marlene Dietrich doing a strip-tease in Blonde Venus, 1932, waving about elaborately manufactured robotic arms. The influence, conscious or otherwise, of the Parisian cabaret Le Crazy Horse de Paris, and its many global decedents, is evident in the choreography, as the humanoid cube dances and prances across the stage in an enigmatically burlesques performance. The nuanced hand gestures are disturbingly human, ranging from the sexual, some might say obscene, to the aggressive, to moments of great pathos. At one point during the performance, I was reminded of the poem Invictus by the Englishman William Ernest Henley—written after he had a leg amputated—particularly the fourth stanza:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.

Wolfson understands that the museum is the new cathedral (or synagogue), where the audience or congregation reverently move silently through each gallery paying homage to the various trophy works, safely protected by armour glass, signalling their monetary value. Wolfson breaks this coded silence with the thrashing and crashing of chains, metal, and wood. Thus, creating another opportunity to offend, frighten or seduce the audience.

He has cited the French philosopher Georges Bataille’s erotic novel Story of the Eye, 1929, as an influence, positioning himself as an observer or voyeur; however, given the recurrent themes of sex, violence, and a sense of a dystopian world, I think that Bataille’s concept of the abject is all encompassing in Wolfson’s oeuvre.

Artists are generally early adaptors of new technologies, but this is often accompanied by criticism from the more conservative elements of the art world, regardless of the century. A good example of how technology changed the direction of painting is the tube of oil paint, invented in 1841 by the painter John Goffe Rand. This invention liberated artists from the tyranny of the studio, leading to the development of plein air painting. Without this new technology it’s quite conceivable that we wouldn’t have the sublime works of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Corot, and Claude Monet. While I’m not placing Wolfson in this exalted company, he is an exemplar of this drive to adapt some of the most advanced twenty-first century technologies that include robotics, animatronics, facial recognition software, and some very sophisticated computer programming. He, like many artists before him, has collaborators (in previous centuries referred to as artisans) and for Body Sculpture Wolfson continued his long-term collaboration with roboticist, composer, and choreographer Mark Setrakian, who cut his teeth working for George Lucas. The NGA installation was realised with input from a new collaborator, Richard Taylor, the co-founder and creative director of the New Zealand studio Wētā Workshop, known for its work on the film trilogy The Lord of the Rings, 2001–2003.

Of course, works that use nascent technologies require significant financial support at a level that isn’t available to most artists. In the case of Colored Sculpture, recently acquired by the Tate Modern, it is reported that neither Wolfson nor the Tate would reveal the purchase price, only disclosing that it was purchased with funds from Irish art collectors. In December 2023, Jessica Simmons-Reid writing in the New York Times said that Wolfson developed “a pitch video that was subsequently presented to multiple institutions, a strategy designed to both secure funding and ‘articulate what [the work] could be or what it’s trying to be’.” Obviously, NGA director Nick Mitzevich took the bait and commissioned Body Sculpture.

Mitzevich appears to be emulating NGA visionary founding director James Mollison’s strategy of collecting major works by international artists. Mitzevich himself has spruiked the purchase by Mollison in 1973 of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, 1952. However, when this work was purchased, there was widespread agreement that Pollock, who died in 1956, was a key figure in the development of mid-century modernism. Over the past two decades there have been several major exhibitions that have explored robotics, including Robotic Art held at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris in 2014–2015. While Wolfson is certainly an intelligent, clever, and resourceful artist, he is but one of a gaggle of artists globally who are using these new technologies. Which leaves one to ask the question: whether spending forty percent of the gallery’s acquisitions budget on one work is a sustainable strategy?

Perhaps the last word should go to Sir Humphrey in Yes, Prime Minister: that strategy is “extremely courageous,” Nick Mitzevich.

This review was originally published in issue 66, Artist Profile 

EXHIBITION
Jordan Wolfson: Body Sculpture 
9 December 2023 – 28 July 2024 
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra