Speaking from Los Angeles, where he’s parked his car at a gas station, Jordan Wolfson would like to get one thing straight: “I’m not a bad person. I don’t commit bad acts, and I don’t have bad intentions.”
He’s speaking to a fate that many artists face: being confused with their work. That means, in Wolfson’s case, highly provocative video and sculptural installations depicting acts of mayhem and depravity. In a piece that became the sensation of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, viewers donned VR goggles to witness Wolfson beating another person to a bloody pulp with a baseball bat—a dummy, actually, but given the 360-degree field of vision afforded by the technology, the work’s verisimilitude certainly earned its title: Real violence. For his latest show, opening May 2 at Chelsea’s David Zwirner Gallery, Wolfson is presenting an animated video, Riverboat song, whose main protagonist, a cross between Huck Finn and Alfred E. Neuman, pisses into his own mouth. That same character appeared in Wolfson’s 2016 audio-animatronic coup de théâtre, Colored sculpture, as a gigantic marionette being mercilessly dragged around the room by thick chains suspended from a gantry.
“These things aren’t me,” says Wolfson, adding that “[Vladimir] Nabokov wasn’t a pedophile; he just wrote a story [Lolita] about one.” True enough. More problematic, however, is that Wolfson denies his work has meaning. Real violence was prefaced by a Jewish prayer, prompting some critics to see undertones of the Holocaust. The word colored in Colored sculpture, and the cruelty inflicted on the figure, suggests nothing so much as a lynching. Wolfson dismisses all of this. “My work is agenda-less,” he says. “It’s not provocative for the sake of provocation. I’m just expressing myself. It’s a kind of channeling—like you’re looking at the world and channeling it through you.”