THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 57
the Ukrainian Institute after the open-
ing. “I’m sure the dinner cost as much
as we sold the art work for,” Zachary
said. (He now works in finance, where,
he says, the people are nicer.)
The piece, “Animation, masks,” is
an animation of a Shylock character
flipping through the pages of French
Vogue. It begins with the character
mouthing both sides of an intimate
dialogue voiced by Wolfson and a
woman. “Will you tell them how I
am?” Wolfson asks. “Well, your cock’s
a lot bigger than you say it is,” the
woman replies. “And you’re a very
playful lover.” The character, which
Wolfson generated from images he
found by searching “evil Jew” on Goo-
gle, has tufts of wiry black receding
hair escaping from underneath a yar-
mulke. The nose, a beaky precursor to
the mask worn by “Female Figure,”
turns cartoonishly phallic when he re-
cites Richard Brautigan’s kiss-off ode
“Love Poem.” Wolfson’s parents were
worried. “One, they thought it was
anti-Semitic. Two, they thought I was
going to ruin my art career,” he told
me. “But they don’t know anything.”
Zachary told me that he had in-
tended to review “Animation, masks”
before we talked, but couldn’t bear
to. “It’s such a painful, cringe-induc-
ing piece to watch, less for the Jew-
ish content and more for the Jordan
content,” he said. His indelible im-
pression of exhibiting the work, other
than mortification, is something that
Wolfson told him as they were plan-
ning the show: “He said, ‘We won’t
be punished for this.’”
Wolfson’s instinct proved correct. In
the Times, Roberta Smith praised the
video’s “intellectual density” and “vi-
sual power,” its “balance of seduction
and subversion,” writing that it had
“the hallmarks of a classic.” Sadie Coles,
a prominent gallerist in London, took
Wolfson on the following year. “He al-
ways says he was my rescue dog,” Coles
told me. “He did seem very puppyish.
He wanted to find a home.” Soon af-
terward, David Zwirner saw a video
piece by Wolfson at Coles’s gallery and
invited him to show some of his work.
Wolfson began referring to the two
dealers as his mom and dad. He was
the kid who always asked for more.
Zwirner, planning a group show,
told Wolfson that he could partici-
pate if he didn’t mind taking his work
down early, to make way for the next
exhibition on the schedule. Wolfson
indicated that he wasn’t really inter-
ested in that. “It devolved,” Zwirner
told me. “I think he was playing me.
He knew if he pushed me a little
harder I’d give him a proper show.
But first he came to me with the idea
for ‘Female Figure’—for which he
needed half a million bucks. We had
never done a show together!” Zwirner
was taken with Wolfson’s enthusiasm.
“He’s a beautiful salesman,” he said.
“He can really present his work, he
acts it out, he has a great physicality.
But could he make it?” “Female Fig-
ure” was unveiled ten days late. Zwirner
said, “From that moment on, it was a
total sensation.” Wolfson insisted that
no more than four people at a time
be allowed to view the sculpture, and
the gallery, like a takeout restaurant
with a tiny front room, soon had a
line down the block—a form of pro-
motion that money can’t buy. Zwirner
created an online reservation system
to meet demand.
“Galleries—they’re Seymour, you’re
the Venus flytrap,” Wolfson told me.
He was referring to the plot of “Lit-
tle Shop of Horrors,” in which a sad
sack discovers a mutant plant and helps
it bloom into a human-eating mon-
ster. “But you could also say the art-
ist is Seymour and the Venus flytrap.
Or the art work is the Venus flytrap.”
In May of 2014, a month after “Fe-
male Figure” came down, Wolfson
“Female Figure,” from 2014, vogues, twerks, and makes eye contact with viewers.
© JORDAN WOLFSON. COURTESY THE ARTIST, DAVID ZWIRNER, AND SADIE COLES HQ
