Against Inhibition: Jordan Wolfson
““I don’t know if Jordan [Wolfson] has serenity yet. I would suspect he will never get it. I never got it.
”
“The politics were all wrong, yet no one could look away.”
“Lolita has no morality in tow.”
“He is a psycho. He is a monster.
”
In his essay ‘Against Inhibition’, psychoanalyst & writer Adam Phillips illustrates through the liberal arts that Sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you. Poet Kenneth Koch, as a child, is Phillips' psychoanalytic case study. In one early piece of poetry, Kenneth Koch wrote of the urge to “step on a baby's head because it was so big and round and soft like a balloon, and would go squash under my feet”. His teacher, Katherine Lappa, “who had undergone psychoanalysis... remained unflappable. ‘That's very good,’ she said, ‘that's just what you should be feeling – part of what you are feeling. Keep doing it.’” Adam Phillips is not advocating breaking bones, but he is advocating 'words' (vis-à-vis art) of all shapes & sizes & implication, as long as those words don't emerge from a crawl, straighten, & walk off the page in a Darwinian evolutionary sequence & inflict physical pain & hurt in the real world. The use of a young Kenneth Koch, a poet of later exuberance & joy, is interesting, because to “step on a baby's head” infers what I call the ‘dark register’ of art. However, the metaphor of the “balloon” brings a lightness to the image, something that Kenneth Koch alongside the New York School's Frank O'Hara & John Ashbery became known for in their poetry. So it all worked out for Kenneth Koch – he was given enough rope to expel or express his desires by a freeing teacher & didn't end up using the rope on himself or on other people.
Jordan Wolfson; the past.
Over here, in Ireland, for the last decade, it has been in art schools in the form of undergraduate end-of-year exhibitions where I have witnessed art that is less inhibited than in the parent art scene. This trend, of course, is rare: the student-artist, disinhibited, naive, playing with object-subject relationships without shame or defence but an efflorescent sophistication, in the face of artist-lecturers that are setting the rules, handed down by the experience of exhibiting in the art scene proper. Jordan Wolfson, the subject & fillip for this essay, is an example of a disinhibited artist (roleplaying or not?) transitioning from art school into the artworld proper, emerging first with a conservative art practice, albeit selected for the Whitney Biennial in his early 20s, & then transforming into the controversial artist he is today. Painter David Salle says, in defence of the American artist & so-called “enfant terrible”: “I feel someone going direct, taking the germ of an idea and running with it in an uncensored way that might only be available to an artist in their youth, where self-criticality hasn’t kicked in.”
Jeff Koons.
Jordan Wolfson is the twisted offspring of arcane Bruce Nauman & populist Jeff Koons. We are told he “adores” Koons. What better artist to adore and introject (the unconscious adoption of the ideas or attitudes of others) than the most hated artist? The stage of antagonism is set! The Plastic is married with flesh, pop culture with psychological horse- and word-play. Putting Jeff Koons aside for now (an integral influence on Jordan Wolfson), my wife said it best regarding Bruce Nauman in a diner two minutes from MoMA PS1 New York, where, just after experiencing the Bruce Nauman Retrospective of 2018, she pointed out how many rapist vans were lurking around Queens – no doubt a physical & mental association to the Nauman experience she just had, & said, “I need to wash my brain.”
Bruce Nauman.
While Bruce Nauman's legacy is untaintable in the eyes of art institutions & artists, Jordan Wolfson's art is all about the ‘taint’. Between personality & artworld at large, Jordan Wolfson has real issues. These issues are made manifest in his strange & disinhibited virtual, video, photographic & animatronic works, that hold eye contact with you, recite poetry to you, confess the artist's most intimate & violent thoughts to you, dance for you, baseball-bat pummel some white guy in front of you for you, drink piss for you, confront race for you, wear anti-semitism for you, perform privilege for you, display misogyny for you, adore homosexuality for you, hump everything for you, share a naked ex-girlfriend pic in an art fair where the ex & new beau will see it for you. (Well, these are the counts Jordan Wolfson has been accused of – his only defence, plausible deniability, held under the gaze & smirk of a sociopath.) Jordan Wolfson does this all for you because he wants to show you what “freedom” & “fear” look like in an artworld that he calls “conservative” & “policed” in the 2020 documentary ‘Spit Earth: Who is Jordan Wolfson?’ He’s right.
Jordan Wolfson, from the documentary ‘Spit Earth: Who is Jordan Wolfson?’ May 2020
“To sum up, poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need.”
Once an art school lecturer said to me, “It was lucky Gregor Schneider found art” & dropped the mic. In the 1980s Gregor Schneider built a suffocating & psychologically rooted warren within his family home, where he hoofed, crawled & breathed into the camera that recorded the episode for the artworld to fawn over for the next decade – he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Jordan Wolfson is in the same category of artist as Gregor Schneider, digging up his ‘house’ & head afflicted by private not-yet-worked-through desires. That's all fine in the privacy of your home or head, but the artist is not satisfied with just an internal dialogue with himself in the family basement; the artist has to show it to the world, an artworld that facilitates the artist's want for public empathy & affirmation in the aftermath of such outpouring of deep-seated desires, desires which are not set, but ever exploratory & evolving & ultimately dangerous. Jordan Wolfson is trying to find himself, his sexuality, his... something, through art-making, which makes his art alive with presence. His work is the definition of the fetish in its magical, commodity & sexually driven replacements & displacements. His vocal & bodily impressions of Jeff Koons is a substitute for the unbearable prison of the nagging self. It’s always easier to be someone else.
Some people might think the issue is, he has issues, like Hans Belmer, Gregor Schneider, Edvard Munch (who whipped his paintings but not found on the popular art history curriculum), Forrest Bess, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Louise Bourgeois & others before him, artists who look deep inside themselves while exploding outwards in failed self-containment. You might be surprised that contemporary art prankster par excellence, Maurizio Catellan, gives the most sensitive & introspective definition of the artist in this psychological vein: “I don't know what art does for people who look at it, but is saves people that make it.” All artists want to be saved; Jordan Wolfson is no different. “‘He always says he was my rescue dog... He did seem very puppyish. He wanted to find a home.’” (Sadie Coles, London dealer) Jordan Wolfson refers to Sadie Coles & his New York dealer, David Zwirner, as “Mum” & “Dad”. Artists like Maurizio Catellan disguise themselves better in their work. They do their best to mask themselves while hoping to unmask their inbred desires & ambitions. Biography or any connection with the artist's state of mind are set aside, erased, so the artwork is autonomous & untethered to the artist, existing by itself, orphaned, while the artist hangs back in the aisle & does her nails, so viewer & collector & passerby can vomit up their own autobiography & fantasies & anxieties before the work. The artist is clean, the viewer is dirty; the artist supplies the desire & the dirt, the viewer laps it up. Jordan Wolfson's hands & voice are dirty with the effort of digging & rummaging around in the back of his brain, the lizard brain, with its tongue licking the centres of instinct & intuition rather than political correctness & self-censorship.
That voice & those dirty hands smear his seminal work of 2014, Female Figure. A life-sized animatronic barbie doll gyrates in front of a mirror to a pop song. The pop song is not slowed down or sped up or altered in any way that might make its mainstream provenance more palatable for the artist & art audience, an audience who cannot bear the mainstream leaking into the artworld undigested by the intestinal enzymes that make art into art. Jordan Wolfson's Female Figure dances to a pop song. She is dressed in cliche. She wears a white négligée & stripper moves. Her eyes arrest through an oily green Venetian mask. She is sexualised but negating sex. She is a spoiled heterosexual fantasy, the moment when wet dream turns nasty, Dorothy becomes the Witch, and yet you cannot look away. Jordan Wolfson's desires are not cloud borne but earth borne. The eyes “ground you”: she watches herself dance; she watches you watching her dance; the other three people allowed in the gallery at one time watch her watching you watching her dance. It's an orgy of eyes with Jordan Wolfson as the mumblecore director speaking & spitting desire, sweet & sour. He is giving you what you want & don't want at the same time, positive negation. Kenny Schachter says in the documentary that the 1980s was the “me me me” era & Female Figure is of the #metoo generation. For me, Female Figure is only partly externally motivated by the social foment that proliferates under protest hashtags. Writer Erica Jong, whom Jordan Wolfson's mother's brother is married to, is the most insightful & open contributor in the documentary (although infantalising the artist as a little boy merely playing with himself): “People who are not uncomfortable in their skin do not become artists – Can I say that? – I mean Jordan had to find a way of being comfortable in his skin, which he wasn't. And that is a strong drive.” However, the post-critical world of ‘cancel culture’ & moral sensitivity is a trigger for these internal drives. In one arresting moment in the documentary, Jordan Wolfson embodies his fist without doll or ventriloquism, rotating it while projecting the different censors that represent the subjects that the conservative & policed artworld tell him not to touch as a white privileged male, such as race, anti-semitism & so on. “Sensitivity is his material” says Sadie Coles. Artnet described the documentary as a “psychological portrait”, but Jordan Wolfson's work is the portrait, down to the very flesh & bone & marrow & mind of Jordan Wolfson. Where does the artist end & the art begin? is the wrong question.
Erica Jong, from the documentary ‘Spit Earth: Who is Jordan Wolfson?’ May 2020
Artists, of all people, are not inhibited. The professional artworld in which artists navigate & negotiate the terms of their art, awaiting acceptance or to be saved, is. Artists who are interested in free will & the dark register, which doesn't mean stepping on a baby's heads, need permission to explore the depths so they might manifest lighter & more brilliant in the light of the gallery. Art is not a consolation for the suffering in the world; or worse again, a distraction from the lifeworld's ills. “I’m not here to heal the world,” Jordan Wolfson said, “I’m an artist. My job is to see the world….I am affected by the same things you are affected by.”
Jordan Wolfson, ‘Real Violence’.
“Morality has to do with relieving suffering. The aesthetic has to do with knowing what you do when the demand to relieve suffering lets up for a while.”
In Richard Rorty's estimation, morality & the aesthetic are separate. The aesthetic that Rorty values is one of bliss. For example, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, where the subject of morality plays out in the denaturing of innocence in a little girl, offset by the best & most beautiful language language can be. Vladimir Nabokov's language, his beautiful art, relieves the suffering of the subject in the book, but is not consolation for the real-life little girls groomed & hunted by monsters. In aesthetic terms, Jordan Wolfson's work doesn't relive anything, but compounds the question of morality. There is no aesthetic conceit or veil to lure the observer in, no art for art's sake – slap, bang, wallop & it's done. The moral-aesthetic distinction is entangled; cruelty & contradiction shift gears in violent outbursts that have a childlike agility in terms of mood & its swing. Jordan Wolfson turns you on & off at the turn of a switch. “Ha” is followed by “Eww”. You are not allowed the time for relief or pleasure, Friends Artists Racists (an artwork that displays a fluttering fanfare of racially sensitive images, including & making complicit artists, friends & peers as conditioned conspirators in the array) come without commas.
Jordan Wolfson, ‘Coloured Sculpture’.
To ‘disavow’ in psychoanalytic jargon, is to witness something new & different & potentially traumatic, & continue on with those suppressed images & feelings in a repressed mode of living, which manifest in manifold violent & creative ways in a substitutional system that includes the fetish. Artists have the luxury (or need) of letting it all go, or letting it all rip. Jordan Wolfson's aesthetic tirades in the gallery setting is more on the side of an aesthete's private perfectionism (his works take years to extract from his head) than a moral crusade against the ‘police’ for freedom of speech & expression in the artworld. The police is his therapist. There is a strong sense that Jordan Wolfson has to get these images out of his head, perfect the dance & stage-setting, achieve momentary satisfaction, until the next bad-tooth extraction. Vladamir Nabokov uses the metaphor of bad teeth in the mouths of his monsters to bring you deep into their decay. It's a good ploy for good plot. Jordan Wolfson's voice, inside & outside his work, is from the same mouth. There is no real censorship. Most artists hold something back for themselves. Jordan Wolfson is his work; his work, him. How many times have you said that about an artist in a lifetime?