58 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
posted on Instagram, “I’m at the gym
listening to Cat Stevens and I’m feel-
ing emotion and weird. I don’t even
really like him but maybe it is good.
A work of mine just went for 100k at
auction. I think it’s lame and boring.
I didn’t start as an artist to make cash
or grow cash. I’ve been showing since
I was 21 and now I’m 33. This is the
first year that I’ve made real money
and to be honest it doesn’t mean any-
thing to me. I just love art and mak-
ing art. So don’t be a poser.”
O
ne day in Brooklyn, Wolfson had
lunch with Joey Frank. Wolfson
gave him a present, a T-shirt printed
with a meme-y palindrome, “Taco Cat
spelled backwards is Taco Cat,” which
Frank seemed genuinely excited about.
Wolfson considered the menu—smoked
trout, or caramelized fennel?—before
settling on an austere scant-oil om-
elette and dry lettuce leaves. They gos-
siped briefly about an angry screed
that another friend of Frank’s had
posted about Frank’s girlfriend.
“Your work,” Frank said. “It’s about
angry outbursts.” A semiotics student
at Brown when Wolfson was study-
ing sculpture at RISD, he is Wolfson’s
most loyal interpreter.
Wolfson smiled. “Not really, no,”
he said.
“Isn’t your most recent piece, ‘Real
Violence,’ about that?”
“It isn’t about anything.”
In “Real Violence,” a virtual-reality
piece, Wolfson beats an animatronic
dummy with a baseball bat until its
face is obliterated by computer-gen-
erated blood, to the incantation of the
Hanukkah blessings. The dummy,
with red hair and pale skin, looks con-
vincingly human. When the piece was
shown in the 2017 Whitney Biennial,
critics declared it assaultive, sadistic,
“borderline insane.” As with “Female
Figure,” the dummy makes eye con-
tact with the viewer, but this time the
viewer can, by turning her head in the
headset, decide to look away. “His
work is self-psychoanalysis, looking
at the building blocks of what self is,”
Adam Weinberg, the director of the
Whitney, told me. “The violence is a
metaphor for tearing himself down
psychologically.”
Following the Biennial, Wolfson
was besieged by critics and spectators
demanding that he take responsibil-
ity for what he presents. In a Q.&A.
at the New Museum, Aria Dean, a
black female curator who had orga-
nized a screening of some of Wolfson’s
videos, asked what he intended by
making a work showing a white man—
the artist—brutalizing a simulacrum
of another white man. “I’ve never re-
ally thought of, specifically, white-on-
white violence,” he said. When a mem-
ber of the audience referred to the
privileged viewpoint from which the
piece seemed to emanate, Wolfson ap-
peared lost. “What privilege?” he asked.
At lunch in Brooklyn, Frank tried
again: was he sure some of the work
wasn’t about anger?
“You’re letting the pimple define
the body,” Wolfson said. He paused,
and added, contemplatively, “I haven’t
had a pimple for a long time.”
“Have you ever traded art work to
a dermatologist?” Frank asked.
“Actually, I have.”
“But, really—I really do want an
answer to the question about anger
in the work.”
“It’s like a piano. Anger is in the
keyboard.”
With financial backing from Zwir-
ner and Coles, Wolfson had gone from
Casio to Steinway, and he was ham-
mering the keys. In 2016, he showed
“Colored Sculpture,” a demonic,
larger-than-life amalgamation of
Huck Finn, Howdy Doody, and Al-
fred E. Neuman, attached to a gan-
try system by heavy chains at its limbs
and its head. In the course of a fifteen-
minute performance, during which
fragments of Percy Sledge’s “When
a Man Loves a Woman” play, the
gantry flings the puppet around the
room and bashes it noisily against
the floor.
The puppet’s eyes, which have video
screens behind their convex surfaces,
display an inscrutable kaleidoscope of
images—snickering emojis, a child
pointing a gun into his own mouth,
Betty Boop—as Wolfson recites a hor-
ror-movie version of a nursery count-
ing song. “Two to kill you,” he says.
“Three to hold you/four to bleed
you/five to touch you.” The rest of
the time, the eyes are alert and emo-
tive, the irises an electric cornflower
blue. Using a machine-vision system—
the same type used by the mili-
tary-grade robotics company Boston
WOODEN BENCH
I was sitting on a wooden bench
when six men wheeled her on a gurney right past me,
except she was inside a wooden box
and the lid was closed. She was on her way
to becoming a skeleton. My father
is definitely a skeleton at this point.
Death is confusing. Is my father the bones
that sit inside a box on a hillside
in Odessa, Delaware? Or is he on the other side
of that keyhole in my mind that I talk into sometimes?
Can he be in two places at once? Am I allowed
to make it up, the way twelve-step programs tell you
you can make up God? God can be a ribbon
on the door, a nail in the wall.
