56 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
high-end design stores selling chil-
dren’s furniture and expensive bath-
room appliances. By one reading, the
piece provides a devastating brief his-
tory of the disappearance of an artists’
community and the consumer temples
that rose from its ashes. By another, it
provides a tour of the neighborhood
in which Wolfson aspired to live, and
where he rented a top-floor loft in the
summer of 2017. When I visited him
there, he took me to a bathroom store
similar to the one featured in the video,
so he could price fixtures for the guest
room of a hundred-acre farm he owns
upstate. He left with a tear sheet for
a two-thousand-dollar black toilet,
whispering, in a campy New York ac-
cent that he said was a put-on of his
mom, “Don’t put the nice toilet paper
in the guest bathroom.”
Wolfson grew up on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. His mother,
Patricia Burrows, is a psychoanalyst;
during the eighties, she counselled
numerous AIDS patients. His father,
Milt Wolfson, who has a theatri-
cal-fabric supply business, also knew
people afflicted by the disease. “Me
making an art work with the AIDS
virus doesn’t mean I like AIDS or think
the AIDS virus is funny,” Wolfson told
me. “It terrifies me. There were con-
stantly homeless people you would
see dying on the street of AIDS. There
was my father’s best friend who died
of AIDS. This was omnipresent in my
life. My mother was coming home
crying every night.” Another time, he
said, “Gay people don’t own AIDS.
When we witness suffering, we expe-
rience it by proxy.”
As a child, Wolfson struggled with
dyslexia and attention-deficit disor-
der. In Manhattan, attending Colum-
bia Grammar & Preparatory School—
where, he told me, Barron Trump was
a student—he felt special. When he
was ten, his parents decided to move
to their weekend house, in Fairfield
County, and they sent him and his
older sister to public school. “We
moved to Connecticut, and I was dis-
abled and I was, like, Jewish,” he says.
Discovering that he could paint was
his first experience of fluency, a prom-
ise of liberation from a feared future
working in a video shop.
The Burrows side of the family was
wealthy and cultured. In the early nine-
teen-hundreds, Patricia’s grandfather,
an immigrant from Hungary who
never learned to read English, founded
a large linen-supply company that
laundered towels and sheets for ho-
tels; her parents collected art by Mil-
ton Avery, George Grosz, and Ben
Shahn; Larry Rivers taught her mother
to paint in the basement of the house
on Long Island where she lived. In
describing his family, Wolfson em-
phasized the reverence for art and art-
ists. His mother’s brother, he told me
the first time we met, is married to
the writer Erica Jong. Becoming an
artist wasn’t an act of rebellion; it was
a way to secure his parents’ approval.A
t Wolfson’s graduation from the
Rhode Island School of Design,
in 2003, his parents approached his fa-
vorite teacher, Mark Milloff. “They
said, ‘We have money to send him to
grad school, or he can go to Berlin,’”
Milloff recalled. “They wanted to
know, ‘Can he make it?’ I said there
was no chance Jordan wasn’t going to
succeed.” Wolfson moved to Berlin
with his girlfriend. “She was RoseLee
Goldberg’s daughter and Klaus Biesen-
bach’s assistant,” he told me. (Gold-
berg is a foundational figure in per-
formance art. Biesenbach, a German
curator, recently became the director
of the Museum of Contemporary Art,
in Los Angeles.)
“I was psychotically serious about
art, embarrassingly serious,” Wolfson
says. In 2006, three years out of art
school, he was included in the Whit-
ney Biennial, along with Dash Snow
and Dan Colen, close friends and col-
laborators whose expression of hedo-
nistic downtown life formed the dom-
inant aesthetic of the young New York
art scene. “Jordan was between girl-
friends,” Joey Frank says. “I went as his
date to a lot of dinners. We saw Dan
Colen and Dash Snow, and I remem-
ber Jordan being, like, ‘Those are the
cool kids. We’re not going to say hi.’”
For the Biennial, Wolfson contrib-
uted a modest work, based on a film
called “The Perfect Human,” by Jør-
gen Leth. Shot in black-and-white,
Wolfson’s piece featured a sign-lan-
guage actor, shown from the bow tie
down, silently delivering Charlie Chap-lin’s final speech from “The Great Dic-
tator.” Polite self-containment ended
with the title; Wolfson named the piece
with the full text of Chaplin’s speech,
nearly seven hundred words to forever
flummox the catalogue department of
any institution that might acquire the
work. Thinking about this gesture, I
keep returning to a nature-documen-
tary image of an ant in the rain forest,
overtaken by a parasitic fungus that
bursts through its head in order to
disperse spores. Wolfson was emerging.
“I still have a shitty reputation be-
cause of my twenties, because I behaved
so badly,” Wolfson told me. “I was ar-
rogant, I was rude, I was pushy with
art dealers and competitive with other
artists. I would say mean things, terri-
ble. I was one of those—I hate to say
it, but I was one of those guys, one of
those people, really a problem. People
thought I was a shit, a brat.” He for-
gives himself: he was suffering, plagued
by career anxiety. He says, “I was not a
relaxed young person. I would always
hear, ‘You’re difficult! You’re difficult!
So-and-So says you’re difficult, they’re
not going to want to show you.’ I was
difficult because I was in pain.”
After a period of confusion, Wolfson
renounced safe conceptual art, decid-
ing that his unhappiness stemmed from
repressing his true artistic impulses.
He searched the Internet for anima-
tors who could help him bring to life
the images in his head. Brooke Gar-
ber Neidich, a trustee of the Whitney
Museum, provided funding for him.
Although she owns an early concep-
tual piece, she had no desire to buy any
of the new video work; it was too dis-
turbing for her taste. She says, “I give
him that motherly ‘Sweetie, maybe you
want to talk to somebody about this?’”
Alex Zachary, a gallerist in New
York at the time, remembers meeting
Wolfson on the art circuit. “He was at
once sociable and antisocial,” Zachary
said. Wolfson asked if he would show
a video piece he had been working on.
“Like many people in the face of Jor-
dan, I ended up doing and saying things
I didn’t fully plan to,” Zachary told
me. Wolfson insisted that he buy an
eighty-inch monitor and carpet the
gallery wall-to-wall, so that viewers
could sit down on the floor to watch.
The gallery hosted a large dinner at