Jordan Wolfson Is Opening a Major Show at Gagosian. He Does Not Want to Talk About It
Next month, Jordan Wolfson will open an exhibition in Gagosian’s capacious galleries at 555 West 24th Street—his first solo show of new work in the city since 2017, when his discombobulating video Riverboat song (2017–18) alighted at David Zwirner.
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It will be a major moment for one of the signal artists of our era, but when I reached Wolfson by phone at his Los Angeles studio last week, he was not overly eager to get into details.
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“I don’t care what people know or don’t know” coming into the exhibition, he said, while also acknowledging that “part of my job is to do press for the show.” He quoted Elizabeth Peyton: “I always paint for myself.”
Wolfson, who is 45, then offered some thoughts on publicity. “You start out as an artist,” he said, “and the idea of getting attention is attractive to a young person. That attraction is a symptom of being an amateur.”
Still, Wolfson seemed to be in high spirits, and he was more voluble on a variety of other topics. Eventually, he got around to addressing the exhibition, which opens September 18.
Jordan Wolfson, Body Sculpture (2023), detail, installation view, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Photo: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, courtesy Jordan Wolfson
The big news is that Wolfson is at work on a new animatronic that will debut at a time and a place that he said he is not allowed to reveal. His last one, Body Sculpture (2023), was “a box that has sex with the floor,” as he put it in a lively conversation with Matthew Barney in Interview last year.
These faintly evil contraptions harbor dark, of-the-moment energies, like so much of Wolfson’s work. Last year, at the Fondation Beyeler outside Basel, he presented Little Room, an elaborate VR project that allows two participants to trade bodies in digital space, a thrilling and slightly sickening bit of digital magic.
Wolfson retains his boyish mischievousness (he told me that he was 59 years old, then 38, amid other unsupportable claims), but he became suddenly sincere when he got to talking about how his practice has developed over time.
“Being an artist is like being an athlete, and so you advance to different stages,” he said. “It’s not easy, and it’s not hard, but you have to pay attention—pay attention to your work and pay attention to yourself. What I mean is, pay attention to the voice inside yourself.”
As artists get famous, that can be difficult. It can also become harder to get candid feedback. Sometimes, Wolfson said, when he asks people what they think of his work, they “get nervous, and I go, How did I get to this point where people are bullshitting me? I’m here to make art. I’m not here to retain power and transform that power into mediocrity. I’m here to do art. This is serious.”
An image of New York in 1968, amid a garbage-collectors’ strike, that accompanies an announcement of Jordan Wolfson’s upcoming show at Gagosian in New York. Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images.
What art has he done for the Gagosian outing? “This is a sculpture show,” he said. “This is a very traditional sculpture show. I have yet to do one, but it feels like the time to do it.”
Are the sculptures big? Small? “Could be medium-ish,” Wolfson said. “Biggish, medium-ish. Depends how big you are.” He then uncorked a Barnett Newman line: “Size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. It’s human scale that counts. And the only way you can achieve human scale is by content.”
He’s been developing these sculptures for about a year and a half, and they will incorporate images, but he declined to go into specifics.
Gagosian’s website includes a photo of a Manhattan street in 1968, when a sanitation-worker strike led to garbage piling up all over town. “I’ve been interested in images of garbage for a while,” Wolfson said, mentioning their presence in Animation, masks (2011), his breakout video, and the excellent Raspberry Poser (2012). He’s also a fan of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957), which places two actors in trash cans.
Will there be more images of garbage at Gagosian? “I don’t think so,” Wolfson said. “Not literal garbage.”