What has Jordan Wolfson — still possibly best-known for his decidedly pre-#MeToo 2014 robot dancer — been up to since creating Real Violence, the disturbing VR piece he debuted at the latest Whitney Biennial to widespread condemnation? An expansive, sure-to-offend multiscreen new video dubbed Riverboat song.
Expect to be reunited with a figure who merges Huckleberry Finn and Alfred E. Neuman, an animatronic version of which Wolfson subjected to torture in Colored Sculpture at Zwirner a couple of years back. In Riverboat song, the little guy does a sexy dance to Iggy Azalea and, with echoes of a certain rumored presidential escapade in Moscow, romps in a pool of his own piss.
The show also delivers on the violence you may be counting on, and in what might seem like Wolfson’s own middle finger to his critics, no less: A YouTube clip in Riverboat song includes a savage beating — a white man beating a black youth! — that inspired Real Violence itself, so strap yourself in for a disturbing and maybe offensive ride.
(For a more subtle non-bad-boy experience, go see the show of South African painter Marlene Dumas, also on view at Zwirner, which may provide a breather after the Wolfson brawl.)