Jordan Wolfson at Sadie Coles HQ

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The success of a Wolfson artwork seems how effective the lures are in ensnaring us. The spectacle is always just the technologic bait for the game in which seemingly innocuous - but visually seductive - elements become easily quagmired in overlapped semantic dissonance. Even the James Lee Byars childhood works read like a technology for affective means, a product. This formalizing the world of course causes tension: "political trends and topics, but seemingly only for decorative purposes." Wolfson himself: “It creates a kind of poker face of absurdity to the artwork that negates meaning. They can’t load meaning into it, because it. Just. Doesn’t. Work.”  But we refuse to believe this, we can't believe something that could affect us could be meaningless. That Wolfson has become of the most famous of his generation is a case study in what the artworld demands from its artists. Attention without anything to attend to, a blank slate with bait. Wolfson seems have become a search for new technologic means to repeat the same fantasies.


See too: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner, Blankness

Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner

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Wolfson is a semio super-villain, weaponizing Naumanian irony to outwardly undermine the connection to affective means, objects which establish identification (the artist's interest in the gaze and facial recognition tech as well as nostalgia and cultural mythos) only to systematically abuse and deplete that link through endless tonal dissonance and juxtaposition, e.g. playing saccharine love-songs while a boy who looks into our eyes is repeatedly dragged and dropped onto concrete from a steel marionette of the artist's hand, basically irradiating the gold underpinning our emotive currency, held hostage and tortured. It's akin torture's use of learned helplessness and depersonalization to make its subjects concede to it.
The most successful villainy involved is that in order to say no to a very formally successful scourging of the emotive would require we admit that we believe there is an inherent "good" in art, that art be helpful, admit that we believe ourselves the good guys.

MARTEN: The whole sum is a stylization of wrongness or error.

WOLFSON: That is what I wanted.



See too: Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center,  Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery

“Popular Images III” at Karma

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4 artists, 4 points creating trajectory cut across a spectrum of tone, from a delicate hesitancy to the overt use of its ephebic delicacy as style, and then that style's co-option in advertorial seduction, and then that seduction replaced with forcible assault.

See too: “Popular Images” at Karma