Foundation News
Jordan Wolfson in Interview Magazine
October 24th, 2022
Jordan Wolfson Just Wants You to Trust Him
By Anne Imhof
October 24, 2022
When Jordan Wolfson unveiled his phantasmic sculpture (Female Figure) in 2014 at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, it caused such a stir of curious anxiety that lines formed to get a glimpse of it. Wolfson’s life-sized animatronic work gyrated in front of a mirror to pop songs wearing a long blond wig and a sexy white bunny outfit. But there was nothing easy to consume or digest when trapped alone in a gallery space with this nymph Frankenstein, who looked as if it had dragged itself across gravel to get here, its eyes periodically making contact with the hapless viewer while half its face was covered in a monstrous mask. Wolfson managed, in a single work, to capture the unease coursing through so much of our present culture—the repulsive lure of technology and the one-way consumption of bodies—that the success of the piece belied the years of research in animatronics that the artist undertook to develop his creature. Now (Female Figure) is back in Manhattan, this time on view in the East Village at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, when our cultural anxieties seemed to have only grown more frazzled. On the occasion of the sculpture’s exhibition, Wolfson, who lives most of the time in Los Angeles, talked with his fellow art upstart Anne Imhof, who he calls “a female version” of himself, about provocation, interactive art, and the difference between representing and endorsing violence.