62 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
about overstepping, but as determined
as ever to invite condemnation.
Coles thought for a moment. “The
thing is, your position as an artist has
always been to present this material
without judgment,” she said. “It’s not
so different from any other thing you
might choose to put in this collage.
By presenting the Ku Klux Klan or
Black Pete, you’re not saying, ‘I con-
done it,’ you’re not trying to put your-
self in a judgmental position, you’re
presenting it as a collage. You’ve said
interesting things about the moral au-
thority of the artist. This material is
out there, so therefore you have the
right to use it.” The bagel was out;
Black Pete and the Klan were in. But
maybe, Coles suggested, he should skip
the pictures of himself as a devil-child.
Wolfson immediately grasped why.
He was trying to occupy a new posi-
tion, that of investigator rather than
instigator. “Baby Me implicates me as
a trickster who should be in prison,”
he said. “The point of the work is that
I’m a seer, not a trickster.”
Wolfson says that “Artists Friends
Racists” is about trauma. “My career
has been a traumatic event for me,” he
told me in London, the day before the
opening. “Regardless of how much the
art world says, ‘Make whatever you
want, do whatever you want,’ I do find
it relatively conservative, with invisi-
ble lines of things that are permitted
and not permitted.” I said I
perceived numbness in the
work; perhaps the lack of a
moral stance had become a
limitation. “If art is sup-
posed to be celebratory and
propose a better world, for
me that’s decorative art,” he
said. “That’s fine. But you’re
looking at my work from
another genre.”
For the opening, Coles
promised a mega beer party. Students
in streetwear—fashionable sneakers
and brightly colored woollen hats—
clustered in front of the whirring fans.
In blue light, everyone was a teen-ager
up all night, with the computer work-
ing to cool itself down. Wolfson wore
a rust-colored vest, to keep his core
warm. “Do you like it?” I heard him
ask several people, as they looked at
the piece. “It’s cool, right?” I talked to
an artist in a faux-leopard bomber,
who described her own work as “Mat-
thew Barney on a budget, and a
woman.” A former sex worker, she saw
“Female Figure” as the embodiment
of how society sees women, the male
gaze laid bare. “I wouldn’t say it’s de-
grading in any way,” she said. “But
this—I’m Jewish, and I’m a bit an-
noyed. He’s not really had to struggle
in New York, being an upper-class Jew.
I’m a lower-class Jew, and I had to
struggle.” Later, I saw a man with long
dreadlocks watch thoughtfully through
a sequence showing black-and-white
cop cars, then seem to lose interest
when the Black Pete pictures started.
“I don’t fully understand where you’re
going,” he said to Wolfson, who was
nearby. Wolfson smiled evasively and
said, “I don’t fully understand where
I’m going, either.”
The day after the opening, Wolfson
came into the gallery wearing track
pants and a sweatshirt, on his way to
the gym. Someone showed him a pair
of good reviews, and he was pleased.
He had just one question: why had
the show been awarded four stars in-
stead of five? The gallery staff reas-
sured him that that part of the review
was meaningless.
“You have the impression that I’m
not good at taking negative criticism,”
he told me, as a gallery assistant handed
him a green juice. “I’m pretty much
O.K. with negative criticism,
but trolling art criticism is
a trend currently. It’s not se-
rious art criticism, but it’s
potentially the appropria-
tion of hate—like hate crit-
icism. It’s not just me. It’s
other artists, we’re in this
very polarized environment,
and writers are writing from
a more antagonistic, vitri-
olic place than we’ve seen
before. One hundred per cent I will
not defend myself. In Buddhism, they
say, ‘Let the karma die.’”O
ne night in London, Wolfson
went to dinner with a group of
studio employees and representatives
from Sadie Coles’s gallery. It was the
second Yotam Ottolenghi restaurant
he had dined at that day. He was chew-
ing on the question of who is allowedto say what. “People said I don’t have
the right to make ‘Real Violence’ be-
cause I didn’t grow up in a place where
I witnessed violence,” he said. “I grew
up on the fucking Internet. Are you
out of your fucking mind? Who came
up with that! What’s intersectional-
ity—the person who suffers most has
the most right to speak?”
Kenzy El-Mohandes, Wolfson’s stu-
dio manager, a woman of Egyptian de-
scent, corrected him. “No, it’s about
double jeopardy,” she said. “Your per-
spective is informed by the number of
identities you carry.” She looked at him
with gentle reproach. “Cancel culture
has negatively affected your under-
standing of intersectionality,” she said.
“I’m not here to heal the world,”
Wolfson said, digging into his fish. “I’m
an artist. My job is to see the world.”
Wolfson’s major contribution could
be his ability, however unconscious, to
embody the world, describing and even
enacting the degraded standards of in-
terpersonal behavior that have accom-
panied enhanced technology. Aria Dean,
who was recently promoted to editor
and curator of Rhizome, a digital-me-
dia platform affiliated with the New
Museum, thinks that Wolfson gives the
art community a place to focus its rage.
For her, the work is a relief from tidy
self-expression and meaning-making.
“There’s got to be room for art that
asks questions rather than answers
them,” she said. “And it’s sticky—it’s
doing something that creates friction,
and I want to figure out what it is.”
But a number of curators who have
worked closely with Wolfson seem to
be quietly withdrawing public support.
Wolfson cites Scott Rothkopf, the chief
curator of the Whitney, as an impor-
tant ally, but when I asked for an in-
terview he thanked me and said that
he was “all talked out.” Chrissie Iles,
one of the curators who selected Wolf-
son for the 2006 Biennial, suggested
that she wasn’t the right person to talk
about his recent work. “My experience
really is at the very, very beginning of
his career,” she said. Alex Zachary,
whose gallery showed “Animation,
masks,” said, “If I were in the field
today, I certainly would not present
that work, at least not if it had been
made today. Even at the time it was
made, it was probably ill-advised.”