54 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
Zwirner told me. “If you’re annoyed,
you’re not indifferent. The work ma
nipulates me, so I’m being triggered.
Transgression is key. The only way to
know you’re succeeding is if people are
upset.” The outraged responses, he says,
are a dimension of the art.
Wolfson’s work is owned by cul
tural institutions and private collec
tions throughout the United States,
Europe, and Asia. The
Stedelijk Museum, in Am
sterdam, presented a two
part Wolfson retrospective
in 2016 and 2017; next year,
he’ll take over the Kunsthaus
Bregenz, the most impor
tant contemporaryart mu
seum in Austria. Supporters
of the work see it as a mel
ancholy commentary on a
lonely, mutually enslaved
machine future, and a reflec
tion of the caustic cruelty of humans.
“There is a feeling of something un
tethered to aesthetic values such as we
know them, things like good taste,” the
painter David Salle told me. “I feel
someone going direct, taking the germ
of an idea and running with it in an
uncensored way that might only be
available to an artist in their youth,
where selfcriticality hasn’t kicked in.”
Detractors, of whom there are
many, interpret Wolfson’s work as a
noxious expression of privilege, casu
ally appropriating pain he seems un
likely to have experienced personally.
In a field that prides itself on open
ness to transgression and cheek, he
has attracted unusually pointed crit
icism. “Who Likes Jordan Wolfson?”
a recent essayist asked, summing up
his artistic formula as “technically vir
tuosic production + shock + destabi
lizing juxtaposition + empty, judg
mentless vision.”
The work is complicated by the
matter of Wolfson’s personality, which
ranges from syrupy, selfabsorbed en
titlement when he is feeling good to
viciousness when he is not, with in
termittent considerateness and situ
ational charm. “One could describe
Jordan in the most unflattering way
possible, and it would be true, but
none of it bothers me,” Salle said. “You
can be an extravagant narcissist and
a nice, wellbred young man at the
same time.” Wolfson’s closest friend,
an artist named Joey Frank, told me
that, in an astrology class he teaches,
he lectures on Wolfson as the quin
tessential Libra. When I asked him
what that meant, Frank replied, “How
do you drown a Libra? You put a mir
ror at the bottom of a swimming pool.”
Like the Internet, which is Wolfson’s
greatest source and muse, his work can
be both inflammatory and
affectless. He refuses to
make his intentions clear:
pursuing meaning in the
work is like stumbling
through a mirrored maze.
One New York collector told
me that he considers Wolf
son to be the perfect man
ifestation of the nastiest im
pulses of online life. “Like
Keith Haring and Kenny
Scharf in the eighties em
bodied streetart culture, that’s what
he is with Internet trolling,” he said.
The question, he added, is: “How in
control of it is he?”T
he first time I met Wolfson, three
years ago in May, he asked me to
pick him up at Los Angeles Interna
tional Airport. When I got there and
called to arrange a rendezvous, he told
me to circle while he went to another
terminal. His new girlfriend, Char
lotte DayReiss, happened to be ar
riving on a different flight at the same
time, and he wanted to plant a love
note for her near her gate: a test of
proficiency in the thought patterns of
Jordan Wolfson.
Wolfson is pale, with dark, tousled
hair, and full lips that he pooches out
to Zoolander effect. He is both overly
familiar and eerily oblivious. Getting
in the car, wearing a hotpink Wolf
gang Tillmans Tshirt and a pair of
track pants, he immediately apologized
for his shoes, highfashion sneakers
covered in fake graffiti which, in the
company of a notetaker, embarrassed
him. “This is the first time I’ve ever
worn them, and it’s a little much,” he
said. “They’ll be good dirty.”
He called DayReiss to see if she
had found the note—she had—and
to issue an invitation to join us for
lunch, which she declined. “Even me
asking my friend to come, if anything,it shows a little character weakness on
my part,” he said, performing intro
spection. He promised I could talk to
DayReiss “if she became important,”
and asked me to drive him to a vegan
restaurant. He mentioned that he has
a daily exercise and meditation rou
tine, and, in what would be the first
of many times, he told me that I should
get a Tesla. Last year, instead of a hol
iday gift, he asked David Zwirner to
offset his annual carbon footprint, and
he posted the certificate on Instagram.
In art, though, Wolfson professes
disdain for virtuesignalling and po
litical correctness. His hope is to make
uncensored work that honors his in
tuition above all else: whatever pops
into his brain, followed by tedious
years of sorting out technical and pro
duction details with a team of collab
orators. On the plane, he had sketched
a new animatronic sculpture. “It’s been
in my head for so long, and I actually
fleshed it out on my drawing pad,” he
said. After lunch, we stood by my car
on a busy street, as he flipped through
the pages of a black hardcover sketch
book, past notes for a piece involving
a biker jacket painted with a swastika,
before arriving at a drawing of a box
with articulated arms and hands, sus
pended by a length of chain from a
robotic arm used in car manufactur
ing. He was calling it the Cube, a “body
sculpture” that would engage the view
er’s physical self.
“Cube can play the floor like an
instrument,” he said, pounding rata
tattat on the hood of my car. “Cube
can play its own body like an instru
ment”—he patted his torso. “Cube
can caress the floor.” He smiled. “Cube
can rape the floor,” he said, holding
my gaze—would I blanch?—as he put
both hands down on the hood and
mimed sex with my car. (At that mo
ment, a parent from my kids’ school
happened by, and shot me a perplexed
look.) “Cube can beat the floor, right?
Cube can be lifted up and spun and
do, like, jazz hands.” His hands jit
tered excitedly as his face curled into
a joker’s smile. “No, I’m serious,
wouldn’t that be fabulous?”
For the nearly three years since that
meeting, the Trump years, Wolfson has
been in Glendale, working on the Cube,
as the divisions and inequities and hy