Last July I was at Jordan Wolfson's house in the Hollywood Hills, sharing a nice lunch with the artist outside by his pool, even though it was raining. Precipitation in Los Angeles is spoken of like a biblical plague when it's hypothetical, and maybe the driving gets a little dicier, but really, people just sort of shrug. The lawn guys constructing Wolfson's poolside garden worked during the drizzle.
Wolfson said he was working on a new show, and invited me to the studio, which is in Glendale, on the other side of Griffith Park, higher up where there's more space. I went a few days later. Wolfson's studio is at a Hollywood animatronics lab that specializes in creature effects and building out robotics models for movies. It's within a gigantic complex, a constellation of multiple jet-size hangars, and after finding the right one, I was brought down some mysterious hallways until opening the right door in the fun house, where Wolfson was talking with engineers who were testing structural solvency, and with tech guys troubleshooting plugging fiber optics capabilities into a giant head.
Then Wolfson showed me a model of a gallery, about the height of his forearm. The model had steel beams going horizontal with gurneys stuck to their undersides, through which cables zipped by. These cables were affixed to a figure that they would dangle, spin, jerk, and then drop hard on the floor, repeatedly. The figure, Wolfson told me, was supposed to represent Huck Finn.