ART-PREVIEW:Jordan Wolfson-Riverboat Song
Jordan Wolfson belongs to the post-Internet generation: artists who reflect upon the increasing digitalization of society and developments in genetics, robotics, and cybernetics. The artist borrows intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, and the technology industry, producing ambitious, enigmatic narratives. With this, he creates idiosyncratic content often featuring a series of fictitious animated characters.
By Dimitris Lempesis
The US premiere of Jordan Wolfson’s video “Riverboat song” (2017) is on presentation at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. The installation is presented on a video wall made up of 16 monitors and adopts formulaic elements of the internet such as avatars, memes, clips, and mash-ups combining them into a dark psychodrama, in which the line between the perverse and the gleeful is erased. Combining animation and found clips, pop soundtracks and voiceover, “Riverboat song” revolves around the well-known character from his exhibition “Colored sculpture” (5/5-25/6/16). The figure’s red hair, freckles, and boyish look draw associations to such literary and pop cultural characters as Huckleberry Finn, the pioneer in children’s television programming Howdy Doody and Alfred E. Neuman from Mad magazine. The fictive world of animation, that has been revisited and expanded by the artist with new scenes that are shown for the first time, grows more lurid as the video progresses, is contrasted by the found reality of YouTube footage. In the opening the figure dances to “Work” by Iggy Azalea wearing high heels. Suddenly, prominent breasts and buttocks appear on him, and he drops them like prosthetic aids, with a hip move, before launching into a soliloquy, which one imagines addressed to the partner, in which he reveals an extreme and malevolent form of narcissism: intimate, manipulative, detached. While he delivers the speech he mutates in a family of animated anthropomorphous avatars (CGI punk rats, a green crocodile lounging in the bath and a pair of sleek, animated horses taking breakfast) as to multiply, hide, and share individual responsibility. Then he observes us while he contemplates himself in a mirror revealing a childish pleasure, until he reaches the climax, when, after lowering his trousers, he begins to urinate streams that rise like the waterworks of public fountains. He drinks his own pee, and rinses his face with palpable excitement. The closing section of the work shows Wolfson surfing through YouTube. The movement from animation to YouTube signals a shift from introspection to an outward view, a subjective shift from the images and fantasies of the inward imagination to the outward search for place and identity through the surfing of the web, a clip shows a pair of brawling men, one viciously raining punches on the other. This clip was the stimulus behind Wolfson’s virtual reality work “Real violence” (2017, in which the manic brutality of a witness’s iPhone video of real-life violence is translated into a heightened, disorienting, and contextless experience.
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, New York, Duration: 2/5-30/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com
