Jordan Wolfson: 'This is real abuse not a simulation' | Installation
Jordan Wolfson: 'This is real abuse – not a simulation'
Stuart JeffriesCreepy and vengeful, Wolfson’s puppet boy is violently smashed to the floor at Tate Modern – then threatens to fight back. But is the controversial US artist just yanking our chain?
In a room at Tate Modern, a boy is getting beaten up. He has a chain fixed to the top of his head, another attached to an arm, a third to a leg. As I watch, computer operatives sitting next to me press buttons, activating cranes that pull the chains taut. He spins into the air, limbs fly out, the torso swivels upside down. The chains loosen, he smacks into the ground. Then music kicks in over loudspeakers. Percy Sledge is ardently, if grotesquely inappropriately, singing When a Man Loves a Woman.
The boy is an animatronic puppet, slightly larger than life, with glossy red hair and loose limbs like the 1950s American TV cowboy puppet Howdy Doody. His gap teeth and leering eyes reference Mad magazine’s Alfred E Neuman, his ragged trousers Huckleberry Finn.
It is as if I’m looking at an artist’s meditation on Abu Ghraib or child abuse – a simulation of suffering. The artist, not for the last time in this interview, demurs. “This is real violence,” Jordan Wolfson tells me as the body gets dragged again across the floor, grazing his face. “It’s real abuse, not a simulation.”
The animatronic boy takes such a thrashing he has to have new body parts transplanted regularlyHow is beating up a puppet real violence? “Because I’m applying real physical violence to a figure even though it’s made of animated parts.”
Tate Modern has just acquired this artwork, entitled Colored Sculpture, for its collection and opens it to the public on 3 May. Neither Wolfson nor the Tate will tell me how much it cost, only that it was bought with funds from Irish art collectors Marie and Joe Donnelly.
Is your piece to do with exploring childhood trauma? “I’m drawing on the figures from when I was a kid, but this isn’t autobiographical. I’m like a sponge, sucking up all those things I see on TV and in the world and putting them in my art. I do it intuitively, not intellectually, and definitely not with an agenda.”
As he speaks, I notice replacement heads and torsos for the puppet lying in readiness. The animatronic boy takes such a thrashing that he has to have new body parts transplanted regularly. The retro vibe of the source material is undercut by the puppet’s state-of-the-art facial recognition software. Sensors inside the puppet’s head scan for human faces in the vicinity and, once found, the puppet’s gaze turns uncannily in their direction.
This is costly art: Wolfson’s animatronic sculptures are made for at least half a million dollars at a special-effects studio in Los Angeles. It’s also vengeful art. The art object has come to life and is staring down the spectator, plotting its revenge after millennia of objectification. As I look at the puppet’s head lying abjectly on the floor, his sinister blue eyes fix sidelong on mine. And then he gets yanked into the air once more, hovering above me like an imperious angel of death. It’s then that Wolfson’s recorded voice lists 18 things the puppet apparently wants to do to me. “Five: To touch you … 13: I killed you. 14: You’re blind … 16: To lift you … 18: To weigh you…”
Next the boy says: “Spit. Earth.” His eyes disappear from their sockets and those two words replace them. Does this puppet want to spit on my grave? Because that’s what I’m hearing. Victim has become aggressor.
It might seem a propitious moment for Wolfson to export what he calls real violence to London. After all, his home city of New York has just been overtaken by London as a murder capital. Perhaps we need American insight into how violence works.
Are you a moralist, I ask Wolfson over green tea in the Tate’s cafe. “I hope not,” he replies. In profile, the handsome 37-year-old reminds me of a young John Cassavetes, a near-permanent hint of a smile by turns making him look knowing, shy and rueful. “I would really hate it if my sculpture is taken as a morality lesson. I’m no moralist trying to shock people into behaving better.”
But he is readily taken for one. I quote him a recent review: “Wolfson makes you feel like we’re all moments away from staggering violence and moral decrepitude … morality is a veil that can drop any second.” That’s how Wolfson’s work is regularly decoded – as stripping away the superego and leaving the id in its unbearable nakedness. That’s why his work so often involves sex and violence. It may also be relevant that his mother is a psychoanalyst.
Over the last decade and a half, Wolfson has yanked our chains as he does his puppet boy’s. He has dragged us, often horrified, into witnessing things we’d rather not. He has used animation, digital imaging, animatronic sculpture, performance and photography to project humanity’s basest impulses into constructed selves.
Consider his most notorious work, a virtual reality video called Real Violence that caused a furore when it was seen at the Whitney Biennial in New York last year. Spectators put on virtual reality goggles to witness an iPhone video of Wolfson apparently smashing a baseball bat into another man’s face, then stamping on his head.
When the spectators removed their VR headsets, they returned to a reality transfigured by his art – but not in a good way. Some critics were exasperated at Wolfson’s failure to take a political or moral stance on the violence in his work. “His formalist approach indulges our culture’s fascination with gore and death while ignoring its causes and consequences in the real world,” wrote Mengna Da on the website Hyperallergic.
I ask him if he evades responsibility for the violence in his art? Wolfson cites the great Frankfurt School Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno. “I had this idea from Adorno that to see the world you need to look at it through a cracked glass. If you imagined your day is a piece of string extending over 24 hours, so it includes your dreams, that string would be punctuated if you witnessed sex or violence, or dreamed about them. The rest of life is kind of flat. And so to see life through that kind of cracked lens is artistically what I want to do.”
No wonder Wolfson is drawn so much to cartoons. He has spoken of cartoons as constituting “a dream world where anything is possible, but everything is subject to distortion and mutation”, and his art is like that. His 2017 video Riverboat Song, for instance, features cartoon cut-outs including a crocodile in the bath and a pair of sleek, animated horses taking breakfast, in a psychodrama in which his recurring Huckleberry Finn-like protagonist dances sexily, then grows huge breasts that ultimately fall off.
Or consider his 2014 piece Female Figure, an animatronic sculpture of a woman in a scanty dress and thigh-high boots. She dances before a mirror on the wall with her back to the spectator, sporting a ghoulish green half witch mask. A metal pole runs horizontally from the mirror into her torso, as if she’s been skewered by the tool of her trade. The sculpture is fitted with motion sensors that are activated when the spectator comes near and with facial recognition software, so if you stand close to the automaton she looks deep into your eyes.
Just as the boy puppet mutates from victim to aggressor, so the Female Figure mutates from sex object to scary monster. One critic even feared the Female Figure looked poised to free herself from her skewer and kill him.
But Wolfson resists my suggestion that his work addresses the violence of objectification. Instead, he cites Georges Bataille’s 1928 novella, Story of the Eye, as inspiring his approach to art. That work, without any apparent moral, dramatised the sexual perversions of two teenage lovers, and included an orgy, broken glass, blood, madness, suicide and necrophilia. “When I read it I wasn’t titillated. I was excited by its freedom,” he says.
“I want to be free in just the same way. I know that if I didn’t do as I felt and I policed myself I would be living a lie. Can’t I talk about violence without being violent? There’s nothing off limits to me, nor should anything be.”
Why do you make art? “Being an artist is a selfish thing. I’m not making this art for a journalist, or anyone else. I’m making this for myself. This isn’t about making people happy or making people like me. Growing up, I wasn’t taught to be liberated, I was taught to be self-conscious. Now I’m grownup I’m just going for it.” He giggles. “Put that in the headline.”
Wolfson seems keen to return to finesse Colored Sculpture for its Tate Modern premiere, so we wander back to the gallery.
Before I leave him to it, I ask him what he wants from people who come to see his art. “I don’t want to come across as egocentric,” he says, “but really I don’t care about your interpretation. I want you to see what I’m seeing.” Maybe we will, but we probably won’t like it.
- Colored Sculpture is at Tate Modern, London, from 3 May to 31 August.
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