SHADOW SELVES
New York, October 2022
JORDAN WOLFSON is a good artist and a good person. He is forty-two years old and lives in Los Angeles. His work holds up a funhouse mirror to the world and has courted controversy for its uncompromising directness, obsidian comedy, and psychosexual pitch. He shows with David Zwirner, Sadie Coles, and following an announcement in April, Larry Gagosian. He recently closed a survey exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, and opened a re-installation of his 2014 work (Female figure) at The Brant Foundation’s New York City location. In 2020, an animatronic sculpture, which will be unveiled for the first time next year, was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia for a reported $5 million. He speaks here about art’s histories, representation, and what’s not next.
I don't know if people describe you as a Californian artist, but I feel like your work is perfectly situated at this intersection between Hollywood CGI and animatronics, and Silicon Valley and the new frontiers of the metaverse and robotics: this convergence of fantasy and reality. You’ve spoken also about Mulholland Drive, which as a film in itself, takes the mirage of Los Angeles as its most elemental metaphor. I’m wondering if you feel like your work is inextricable from these ideas of fantasy and delusion and illusion?
I’ve never thought of it in those terms before, at all, but I think that’s an interesting question. I don't really think about my work or I don’t really have an opinion about it. There’s a function within its fabrication of being in Los Angeles, but I feel that my art practice at the core is quite conservative. And even though I use all of these dierent technologies, I feel that the art is very much in line with a conservative track within ... not that I am in art history, but just a kind of line of progression of ‘art’. I feel strongly that my art is, in a way, in line with the progression of art through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Not that I am a dominating force within that; what I mean is that my references aren’t the metaverse or Instagram filters, although they could be, but my references go back almost to traditional sculpture and the problems with traditional sculpture. I think my work also has relationships to theatre as well, but more traditional sculpture. I think the attitude of my work is similar to the nihilistic attitude of nineties Post-modernism, which I feel quite connected to. I’m really just trying to make artwork that I have a physical relationship to, and I find that using holographic fans and VR, or animatronics, enables a very specific relationship. You can basically tap into the viewer’s body in a pretty subjective way, and that’s what I’m interested in - this feeling of physicality and change.
Well, all of those technologies do have a relationship to the body – a kind of prosthetic relationship. The mobile phone is the mass-produced prosthetic that everybody has in their hand now.
It is, it’s an extension of your intelligence quotient. I don’t speak French but I can translate anything in French, and I’m not very good at math, but I could do anything in math right now. I’m not a psychic, but I could tell you what different parts of Bangkok look like right now. [laughs] It’s not information that’s retained in me, it’s information that’s retained in this appendage to me. It’s actually information that’s retained in what appears to be a non-local consciousness, but is quite localised in a number of warehouses spread throughout the world: deep-cooling warehouses.
To that extent, you’re also not a robotics specialist or an AI researcher, but you can draw on the expertise in Los Angeles to make these works. I was reading a little bit about the guy that does a lot of your animatronics, who has worked on various !lms in the past. I’m curious about the CUBE and if he has been involved in that project as well?
Oh, Mark Setrakian? Yeah, fully. Completely involved.
Can you tell me anything about it?
I hesitate to because I don’t want to ruin it for the audience, but I would say that the sculpture’s title is Body Sculpture and it’s a piece about the viewer and the times we live in, how we feel about ourselves and other people.
I was interested that you brought up art history so soon because I wanted to ask you about that. When the National Gallery of Australia announced the acquisition of Body Sculpture, the director made a statement about the museum’s commitment to “collecting art that has the potential to change the course of art history.” That’s obviously a lot to live up to. Do you feel vulnerable in those moments, where something like that is put out into the world?
That's interesting. How do I feel about that? I’m so used to hyperbole and I do very much like the director, but at this point, I’m used to reading hyperbole about myself and others, and you just take it with a grain of salt. It is what it is. Art history is an arti"cial construct, there are probably thousands of art histories.
Oh, for sure.
There’s an art history about Generation X in New York, and Colin de Land and Mark Dion and Cady Noland. And then there’s another art history in late 90s/ mid 90s China and Beijing. It’s hyperbole, I would say. It’s not productive for your human consciousness to take those kinds of statements enormously seriously, it’s quite immature to do so. I’m just trying to make the piece good. Every day I wake up, I write in a journal. I make a manifestation and a commitment to this art and my other art, to stay true and do a good job.
I wanted to stay with art histories for a second. There are so many currents of brutality within them. To what extent do you think the violent images of today have always been present?
The shadow part of the human self has always been present. The shadow part of all animals and all consciousness has always been present. Great art has exposed this shadow self.
Are you speaking in Jungian terms?
I don’t know, I’m just aware of the shadow self. Is that Jung who speaks specifically of the shadow self?
He’s very keen on the shadow!
It’s something I speak to my therapist about a lot. The shadow self cannot be suppressed and if it is, it causes great danger to the entity that is suppressing it. When we see great art or great literature, it all contains this shadow. We’re in a period where people want to deny the shadow or say that if you expose the shadow, you are the shadow. It’s very unhealthy because it’s just a release of the natural transgressions of the mind, and the discomfort of living in an indierent world, and the horror of that, and the lack of control. I believe that we need to express it and we need to feel entitled to express it. It’s something that everyone is entitled to – everyone – and no one can escape it. We do great injustice to ourselves if we don’t express this collectively.
Do you know this art historian at Columbia called David Freedberg?
No.
He presented a fascinating series of lectures about empathy when I was at Cambridge. He was speaking specifically about videos of iconoclastic acts, things like ISIS destroying ancient monuments. He had done an experiment where he monitored the neurological activity as people were watching these videos of iconoclastic acts, and found that the brain actually responds empathically to seeing these precious objects destroyed.
It’s interesting, I watched that thing of those girls throwing the tomato soup at the painting, and I was like, “don’t do that!” [Gasps] And they did it with such indierence, they did it quite amazingly, I think. But that’s dierent. That’s not representation, that’s documentation. Right?
How do you mean?
What I mean is, okay we’re watching ISIS destroy these monuments, or we’re watching these young women throw soup at the Van Gogh painting. All of these things are real, but then when you see a film ... I watched Nocturnal Animals by Tom Ford last night and I thought it was really moving and powerful, but none of that’s real. All of that is staged representation. And my art is also staged representation, it's not real. What I’ve always been really curious about was that human beings have a dificult time interpreting the difference between representation and documentation. It’s interesting - when does documentation also become representation?
There’s this thing in Buddhism where you say, if you saw a dead person lying there, you can feel grateful that they’re no longer suffering. Or if you drive down the road and you see an animal that was hit by a car and killed, you can look at that, and when I see that animal I tell myself, “Don't worry, that animal is no longer suffering. The suffering is over.” And so if you see documentation of a horrific act, you can be confident that, if there was a murder, the person murdered is no longer suffering. Their family might be suffering, the person who murdered them might be suffering, but the subject of that is no longer suffering. And so because it’s not a live act anymore, I ask myself, “Does that make it representation?” Maybe you’re watching something from a hundred years ago, or fifty years ago. Is that now representation because of the passage of time? This is something I was thinking about, personally, maybe it makes no sense.
No, it does make sense. I guess it’s the transformation of something into an image.
Exactly. For example, when I made (Female figure), I was interested in how representation could lead to arousal, and then I was interested in negating that, and then I was interested in the viewer’s relationship to that and then negating the viewer’s relationship to that – inverting it. Real Violence was made for the viewer’s nervous system, to treat the hypervigilant response, almost like a readymade. That’s fully representation. Nothing there is real. The only person who got hurt shooting that is me. I damaged the fascia around my hamstrings, and I was in chronic pain for almost one year.
What I mean is, we've got these primitive lizard brains – we see representation and we believe it’s real. Or we believe representation is a document of reality, or that it’s actually happening. That’s something I've always been interested in, even when I was a child. I was noticing how, as a kid, I remember reacting to my reactions towards representation and being like, “That's really interesting – that I can feel something – that representation is arousing me, or scaring me.” I remember seeing horror films and knowing that it wasn’t real, but also that the representation was terrorising me. Or seeing a pornographic cartoon when I was a teenager and being interested in my arousal response to that: that I’m aroused by a hand drawing. And that’s why Tom of Finland is so powerful.
Why are we so primitive that we can be so influenced by representation? I’ve always been interested in anthropomorphisation, and seeing, and how representation influences seeing. Aren’t we a peculiar species? We’re supposed to be so smart and so logical, yet we see an image of something and it will scare the shit out of us. And we will think that it’s real, and it will offend us, and we will believe that we’re a victim to this image.
In the Zwirner podcast with Jeremy O. Harris, you were talking about being able to remove yourself from the present and to adopt this disembodied gaze that osmotically absorbs what's going on around and puts it back out into the universe.
Oh, like the ‘witnessing’?
You talk about ‘seeing it first’; seeing the present before other people notice it. That’s something I often think about with contemporary artists: whether they have the facility to do that. But I was also interested in the fact that you’re thinking consciously about that, and to some extent, I felt like maybe it was a little contrived.
It’s funny, I haven’t thought of it in so long. The whole idea of ‘seeing it first’ is that I could look at something and I could see something that was so new; that you would take something that was so new and you would say, “I see it as if it was anachronistic. I see it as if it was made ten years ago.” And I can look at in a distorted way, like, “Whoa that's fucked up,” or “Whoa that carries this really peculiar, potent gestalt.” So I would be able to look at something like the texture of contemporary computer-generated animation, or cutting-edge robotics – something that has the texture of technological cutting-edgeness. And then you see it and you’re like, “I can imagine that as if it was now anachronistic, and I can then import it into my art with that intention, and its newness becomes radical and shocking.” And suddenly you’re seeing the present as if it was nostalgic like the past, but it’s not nostalgic at all. And because of the subtraction of the nostalgia, the subtraction of the anachronistic, it becomes radically new, and unfamiliar, and jarring.
Also what I mean by ‘seeing it first’ is, of course, that I see it first because I’m the first viewer of my work, and then every other viewer by proxy stands in my shoes. And I know that’s maybe kind of an arrogant statement, but I mean that in the most generous and subjective way. It’s like, I see it so you’ll see my intentions, you’ll see my morals. I’m the first viewer and then I invite all the viewers to stand within my viewership to see the work. We’re saying as artists, “You see through our eyes.” And that's what's so special about seeing an artwork.
It’s like when you see Caravaggio: you’re seeing through Caravaggio but you’re also seeing through just pure consciousness, and witnessing, and in terms of consciousness as just a point of perspective, that’s enormously sublime. And that’s why when someone is like, “Why is this artwork timeless and universal?”, it’s because consciousness is timeless and universal. Consciousness is the only thing that actually depicts truth.
It makes me wonder how someone would describe to a blind person some of your installations.
And I’m sure the blind person would be able to experience them. People sit with blind people at basketball games and narrate the basketball game to them. And the blind person becomes enormously excited. And you know why that works? Because the information they’re being told is ... representation! [laughs] We’re just creatures that are hard-wired to imagine things. Isn’t that fabulous?
Something I often think about is people talking about how they wouldn’t want to bring a child into the world today.
When was it ever convenient to bring a child into the world?
I’m wondering what scares you in the world today? And whether you think you're more desensitised than the next person?
I don't think I’m more desensitised. I have a high threshold for pain and anxiety and suffering, but I’m also enormously sensitive to it. I would say what scares me today is that ... I mean, this whole conversation scares me, everything we talked about. What scares me is that we live in a place - and I don’t know if this is true any more - where people have been given permission to identify and separate and create separatism through moralism, and I think who’s really going to lose in this is the coming generations. And I don’t think they’re going to really realise their loss until it’s almost too late, and then they’re going to recapture, and there will be a rebirth of culture.
Does that mean you think we’re at a moment of the paralysis of culture?
To be honest, I’m optimistic and I actually believe that people are relaxing about it now. But yeah, I think there was this hysteria of, “Am I bad? Are you bad? Wait, am I racist? Are you racist? Wait, am I homophobic? Are you homophobic?” I think there was a lot of pointing. And for me, a healthy society is a tolerant one.
Of course. My last question: what’s not next?
Not being myself, and not being true to myself, is what’s not next. And I think everyone should do that, it’s so easy. It’s not easy, but it’s like ... What’s not next? Selling out. Or not trying hard. Or not trying to do my best. Or not caring. What’s not next? Not making sure I’m working correctly with all my employees and fabricators. What’s not next? Betraying my friends is not next. Or not protecting the people I care about, or giving up on my sick dog. What’s not next? Torturing people for no reason. Harming. Not forgiving myself. What’s not next? Not trying to be a witness. It’s hard. It's hard to be a person, huh? Right, Archie?
Right.
But that’s the thing about this whole art practice. You really think that it’s about making the shit, but it’s really about knowing yourself and being in the world. And all that other stuff, all the art, is just this extra thing that comes from it. It’s not the thing. The thing is the quality of consciousness and the quality of freedom that I’m able to acquire from the work. And I don’t mean financial freedom, I mean freedom to see. And that’s what I think all artists should work towards, freedom to see.
Interview Archie Squire
Photography by Yael Temminck