THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 63
I asked Mark Godfrey, of Tate Mod-
ern, if Wolfson was in the process of
being cancelled. “Four years ago, ‘Col-
ored Sculpture’ was first shown at
Zwirner,” he told me. “One would have
expected a major American museum
to do something focussed on Jordan
in that time. I think you’ve got your
answer. He’s an extremely ambitious
artist wanting to engage in the most
difficult aspects of contemporary life,
the dirt. Any number of American
museums might have been interested.”
“The fact that Jordan hasn’t been
cancelled in an open way is a testa-
ment to how carefully he’s played these
notes,” the artist who knows him well
told me. “ ‘Colored Sculpture’ has just
a little hint of racism, like cinnamon
on a cappuccino. Literally nothing is
being said about race. It’s a note being
played to raise some eyebrows. It’s very
safe—just enough of a titillation of
something unpleasant that it makes
the audience feel uncomfortable.” Leav-
ing the gallery, he said, people have
nothing to think about, so they just
shrug and say, “That was weird.”
Like “Colored Sculpture,” “Real Vi-
olence” has found a more receptive au-
dience overseas. It was recently acquired
by the Castello di Rivoli, a museum
outside Turin, where it will be included
in a group show in the fall. “Nobody
wanted to acquire it in U.S. institu-
tions, because the work is very chal-
lenging and provocative,” the director,
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, told me.
“How do I say this without conde-
scending? The American art world
takes things very literally, and his work
puts the knife right in the wound.”
European curators and gallerists
bring their own intellectual and polit-
ical baggage to Wolfson’s work. Chris-
tov-Bakargiev told me that she sees
“Real Violence” as a critique of the de-
structive potential of drone technol-
ogy, or of a smart home that can, in
the hands of a fascist government, be-
come a prison. “This is the same as the
critique of Arendt and Adorno,” she
said. “He’s an heir of the school of
Frankfurt—though I don’t know if he
reads.” Zwirner admitted to me that
when he first saw Wolfson’s “Con
Leche,” a video that shows marching,
milk-filled Diet Coke bottles, he
thought of Hitler’s goose-stepping
Army. Many Europeans I spoke to in-
voked exhausted clichés of Jewishness
to describe Wolfson, citing his anxi-
ety, his neuroticism, his “Woody Allen”
affectations. “He’s sarcastic, he’s witty,
he’s fun, and also there’s the Jewish be-
havior to be ironic, self-ironic, and very
aggressive,” Thomas Trummer, the di-
rector of Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Austria,
told me. “In the V.R. piece, you’re sup-
posed to intervene, but you don’t, you
can’t. This is a reference to the burden
of history. When is the point when we
are supposed to intervene?”
Wolfson wanted the Cube to have
its début in a prominent American mu-
seum, rather than at one of his galler-
ies, but that didn’t happen. “It’s O.K.,”
Wolfson consoled himself. “It’s totally
O.K. Some people are interested, other
people are not.” Eventually, he made a
“pitch” video, a giddy hard sell for theart-historical importance of a metal
box that fucks the floor.
The pitch worked, but not in New
York or L.A. Last fall, the Cube was
bought by the National Gallery of Aus-
tralia, in Canberra, where it will go on
display in 2021. The cost was nearly
five million dollars, the museum’s en-
tire acquisition budget for the year.
“It’s quite the bush capital,” Nick
Mitzevich, the museum’s director, told
me. “You have to drive through a few
hours of rural Australia to get here.”
He thought that the Cube would be
a real draw. It can point at the audi-
ence members’ genitals, he told me,
wonderingly. “There is a sense of pil-
grimage,” he said. “Jordan’s work will
help enhance that idea that you’ve come
to see something extraordinary.” If it
causes a scandal, they might not even
hear about it in New York.