The show features a dozen sculptures with UV-printed images: Michael Jackson, a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of flowers, several images of other 20th-century cultural figures rendered as characters in a Pixar animated film. There are two sculptures in the center of the gallery, ramps with those medieval spikes. The sculptures with images are polished in the center, creating mirrors that open up the space, resting on the floor and on the wall. The spikes suffuse the air with a hard to describe but palpable dread.
I could spell out in detail what it’s like to witness Jeff Koons’s explicit “Made in Heaven” tableau of Koons penetrating his wife, Cicciolina, as rendered by Wolfson into a still from a Pixar-esque film. I could tell you how Wolfson described it to the AI tool he used: “Distort Jeff Koons in the style of Pixar to show me how the world looks right now.” But having either of us explain it to you is missing the point. Even reproducing the images here is missing the point. Which makes my job difficult, sure, but we’re all in the same boat.
“We’re constantly lost at a language barrier. We’re constantly lost in translation and having to ask someone to basically explain how they feel through language, and unable to simply just feel what they feel,” the artist says. “And if you were able to feel what I’m feeling, you’d be like, Oh, wow, I felt what you felt in the show. Or maybe you do, and I just don’t know.”
His Gagosian show points to a new Jordan Wolfson. He hasn’t given up the gigantic robots, but this is a classical sculpture show, one that is meant to be experienced by moving around. He cites as points of reference the capital-S Sculptors, the kings of modernist objects: Brâncuși, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Rodin, Henry Moore. He talked about taking the benches out of the gallery to allow movement around the sculpture, preventing visitors from looking at them while sedentary.
“Everything we’re doing with technology always comes back to the body,” he says. “Right now you’ve got these things you can put on your legs and run faster. I’ve got tinnitus; some doctor’s going to shoot a laser into my ear.”
Wolfson’s always been ambitious, but even now, he says he has “a healthy amount of insecurity”—quoting at length from a Masterclass given by Frank Gehry. I think that gives the show a stealth quality. The longer I spent in the gallery, the farther the experience was from the PDF a dealer sent me, and the deeper the spikes went into my brain.
“I’ve definitely gone through cycles of being a younger person, a younger artist, where I was quite nervous and quite self-conscious, and I think you can rewire yourself,” he says. “Somehow I did it.”
Like everything he’s done, perhaps most specifically the robots, Wolfson says, the dozen sculptures in the show are connected by a common thread: perverting technology.
