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The show features a dozen sculptures with UV-printed images: Michael Jackson, a Robert Mapplethorpe photo of flowers, several images of other 20th-century cultural figures rendered as characters in a Pixar animated film. There are two sculptures in the center of the gallery, ramps with those medieval spikes. The sculptures with images are polished in the center, creating mirrors that open up the space, resting on the floor and on the wall. The spikes suffuse the air with a hard to describe but palpable dread.<\/p>\n
I could spell out in detail what it\u2019s like to witness Jeff Koons\u2019s explicit \u201cMade in Heaven\u201d tableau of Koons penetrating his wife, Cicciolina, as rendered by Wolfson into a still from a Pixar-esque film. I could tell you how Wolfson described it to the AI tool he used: \u201cDistort Jeff Koons in the style of Pixar to show me how the world looks right now.\u201d But having either of us explain it to you is missing the point. Even reproducing the images here is missing the point. Which makes my job difficult, sure, but we\u2019re all in the same boat.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re constantly lost at a language barrier. We\u2019re constantly lost in translation and having to ask someone to basically explain how they feel<\/em> through language, and unable to simply just feel what they feel,\u201d the artist says. \u201cAnd if you were able to feel what I\u2019m feeling, you\u2019d be like, Oh, wow, I felt what you felt in the show. Or maybe you do, and I just don’t know.\u201d<\/p>\n His Gagosian show points to a new Jordan Wolfson. He hasn\u2019t given up the gigantic robots, but this is a classical sculpture show, one that is meant to be experienced by moving around. He cites as points of reference the capital-S Sculptors, the kings of modernist objects: Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Rodin, Henry Moore. He talked about taking the benches out of the gallery to allow movement around the sculpture, preventing visitors from looking at them while sedentary.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything we\u2019re doing with technology always comes back to the body,\u201d he says. \u201cRight now you\u2019ve got these things you can put on your legs and run faster. I\u2019ve got tinnitus; some doctor\u2019s going to shoot a laser into my ear.\u201d<\/p>\n Wolfson\u2019s always been ambitious, but even now, he says he has \u201ca healthy amount of insecurity\u201d\u2014quoting at length from a Masterclass given by Frank Gehry<\/a>. I think that gives the show a stealth quality. The longer I spent in the gallery, the farther the experience was from the PDF a dealer sent me, and the deeper the spikes went into my brain.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve definitely gone through cycles of being a younger person, a younger artist, where I was quite nervous and quite self-conscious, and I think you can rewire yourself,\u201d he says. \u201cSomehow I did it.\u201d<\/p>\n Like everything he\u2019s done, perhaps most specifically the robots, Wolfson says, the dozen sculptures in the show are connected by a common thread: perverting technology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n