THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 59
Dynamics—the puppet can identify
individual people in the room and
meet their gaze. Mark Godfrey, a se
nior curator at Tate Modern, told me
that, seeing “Colored Sculpture,” “I
lost control of my critical faculties and
gasped out loud.” The piece, which
cost a million dollars to produce, was
quickly bought for three times that
amount and donated to the Tate.
“Colored Sculpture” took a de
mented white figure that seemed con
jured from Midwestern Americana,
invested it with attributes of both vic
tim and aggressor, and, through the
title and the music and the chains,
seemed to relate its position to that
of enslaved black Americans. In an
essay for a book that accompanied the
show, Godfrey praised Wolfson’s ap
proach: “Imagination married to am
bition.” He wrote, “Like other artists
before him, Wolfson refuses to let his
imagination or production be policed,
and knows that to confront the world
as one finds it, one has to look at it
wholly, taking in its ‘cute’ freckles and
its ‘ugly’ warts; understanding its gen
tle touches and killer punches.”
Reviewing the show, Ajay Kurian,
an artist who often addresses matters
of race, argued that it should be seen
in the context of politics, not art his
tory. “Like most racism of the current
moment, plausible deniability works
like a welloiled escape hatch,” he
wrote. The sculpture’s name was too
loaded to simply be a reference to clas
sical sculpture, brightly painted be
fore time turned it white. “The title
leads me to believe something more
sinister is at work (intentional or not),
and that the resentment of this figure’s
gaze is particular to our moment—a
moment where just days ago a misog
ynistic, racist, resentful, angry, over
bearing, incoherent, unqualified, and
profoundly dangerous man was voted
in as our next president of the United
States.” Kurian wondered what the
effect would have been of seeing a
black boy in the place of the Huck
doll. (A later version of the piece,
shown at Sadie Coles’s gallery, was
monochromatic black; the title was
“Black Sculpture.”)
“Sensitivity is his material,” Coles
told me. Just as the culture was de
manding an end to the dominance
of straight white men, Wolfson seized
on the identity as the last taboo. The
choice was provocative, but, by theemerging rules of political discourse,
defensible. No one could deny his right
to explore the most troubling facets
of that identity.“
M
ade in Heaven” is a singularly
transgressive series of works,
by Jeff Koons, that depict him and
his then wife, the whiteblond porn
actress Ilona Staller, acting out the
Kama Sutra against an Edenlike
backdrop of flower mounds and writh
ing snakes. The project débuted in
1990 and was thoroughly panned. For
a time, Koons, who had crossed an
invisible line, was expelled from the
art world. Then he was back, more
exalted than before. In “Female Fig
ure,” Wolfson borrowed several im
portant gestures from Koons: the idea
to sully the figure, the platinum blond
of the figure’s hair, and the fact that
the figure makes eye contact, as Staller
does in a central image in the series.
It placed him in a lineage, flattering
both the more established artist and
the viewer alert enough to notice.
From the beginning of his career,
Wolfson has dropped hints about his
sexuality; playing an everso slightly
gay straight man is one of his favor
ite gambits. An early project of his
took lobster claws and covered them
in images of gay porn. On a podcast
released in September by David Zwir
ner, Wolfson, chatting with the play
wright Jeremy O. Harris, who is black
and gay, said that his “goto porn”
when he was a kid was “Trading
Places,” and that he considers himself
slightly gay. “I’ve hooked up with guys
and vibed with guys,” he said. Harris
told him, “You’re gayadjacent.” An
other time, Wolfson asked Stefan Kal
már, the museum director, if he be
lieved that a straight man could make
queer art.
Wolfson told me that an intensive
course of “plant medicine” had opened
him up to the idea of a male partner,
but that, “for the record, I’m basically
straight.” In most of his art work, he
assumes a posture of dominant het
erosexuality, issuing directives and
commands, calling the shots.
Visiting Wolfson’s Brooklyn studio
in 2017, I saw a large inkjet printer
spitting out a photograph of him,
naked, crouched in front of the ovenA nail in the coffin. It’s 4:59 a.m. The sky
a deep ocean blue. The birds going nutsin the trees. Do birds dream?
My daughter likes to tell me her dreams,especially when I do something bad.
In an hour, she’ll get up for school.It’s exactly midMay and half the trees on this street
don’t have any leaves. Do I miss my father?In his presence, my head would start to throb
like a blister and I’d take naps in random placesto make the throbbing stop. We were close
when I was a child, and he wasn’t lying when he saidhe was my history book. The birds are whistling
but they are not whistling for me.—Jeffrey McDaniel