Jordan Wolfson first came to the attention of the hermetically sealed New York art world with his work Real Violence, which was shown as part of the Whitney Biennial in 2017. This is an intentionally provocative two-and-a-half-minute video viewed wearing a virtual-reality headset and noise-cancelling headphones. In this work, a CGI dummy resembling the artist violently and without hesitation beats another man to death, while a voice, perhaps a cantor, sings two Hebrew prayers, signifying Wolfson’s own Jewish ancestry. I suspect that this work, and much of his oeuvre, draws on the character golem from the history of Jewish folklore; golem can be either good or evil, man or woman, oppressor or oppressed. Real Violence is a prescient work given the ongoing slaughter in the war between Israel and Palestine.
In 2014 he showed an earlier work at Los Angeles’ The, comprising a life-sized animatronic doll performing an erotic pole dance that wouldn’t be out of place in a gentlemen’s club. She’s wearing a negligee and thigh-high boots and is dancing before a mirrored wall, a witch’s or old crone’s mask covering half her face. The stark contrast between the highly eroticised figure and the ugly masked face is startling, especially when the robot uses facial recognition software to make eye contact with audience members, returning their gaze. Wolfson’s use of the half mask is a clever device because as Jungian psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés has suggested, the crone is “the one who sees far, who looks into the spaces between the worlds and can literally see what is coming.”
