Jordan Wolfson has created a work that cannot be photographed. You can try, but the best you’re likely to achieve is a grid of bleached-out blurs, little resembling the crisp spectacle of floating cartoon bunnies, caged cats and animated stone lettering visible in the gallery. It’s like a sharp prod, a reminder: the world seen through your phone camera is not the world as perceived by humans.
ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS is made for a 3D holographic system called HYPERVSN. Developed to create eye-catching displays at trade fairs, the technology carries pictures on fan blades fitted with micro LED lights that move too fast to see, so the images appear to float. Here, 20 fans show subtly different imagery, rapidly edited: disembodied Mickey Mouse hands beating a puppy, Dutch revellers blacked up as Zwarte Piet; agile quadruped robots tramping across snowy mountains. It is confusing, disconcerting. What are we being shown by this display? What are we being sold?
A floating animation of the Star of David sprouts arms and tugs itself around the virtual space, then unzips to reveal a bulbous love heart that gestures to us affectionately. It’s like a parody of virtue signalling in which the artist is literally flexing his Jewish identity.
Wolfson doesn’t much go in for virtue signalling, though. Earlier works have alarmed, disturbed, confused and offended. The notorious virtual-reality piece Real Violence (2017) featured a graphic beating on a New York sidewalk meted out by his avatar. It was divisive, but a rare instance of an artist understanding the implications of VR, making the audience complicit as bystanders. In 2014 he showed the animatronic Female Figure, which locks reflected eyes with viewers while gyrating in a filthy slip. The 2016 robot marionette Colored Sculpture (absorb that title) is dragged and thrashed around a gallery space by chains attached to head, hand and foot.
“Who Likes Jordan Wolfson?” ran a recent headline in Frieze magazine. The implication being: not us. Well, not any more. But Wolfson has never cared to broadcast the art world’s values back at itself. He performs as a counterpoint to cancel culture, his work precision-engineered for discomfort. His interest in speed and accelerating images is part of that: in ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS things are always beyond our cognitive grasp, moving just too fast for us to pass judgment.
Wolfson once described the gallery as a stage on to which the audience is invited to step and perform. Here the space is arranged for maximum drama. An opening rotunda is hung with works on brass ovals, like fingerprints, each printed with a childhood photograph. They are calculatedly unremarkable snapshots – poorly lit, red eyed – Wolfson dressed as a cowboy and chef, goofing with preschool friends. They broadcast “normal kid” so acutely that we might be looking at a scrapbook proffered as evidence by a serial killer’s mum. Printed on to brass, they recall Byzantine icons or, more pointedly, Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe (1962), made the year of the star’s suicide, her face a small coloured square floating on a huge golden canvas.
The brass also makes me think of Warhol’s Piss Paintings, though that’s perhaps because Wolfson’s last show, Riverboat Song, featured exuberant CGI urophagia. To access ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS you must walk down a long passageway carpeted in dove grey like a very expensive office, and pass through a chain-link curtain like the entrance to a seedy bar. In the centre of the gallery beyond, the HYPERVSN fans are whirring away, offering more or less inflammatory combinations of word and image.
Pictures flick up of chunky US police cars: the title words drop across them one by one, each modifying the image in a different way. Ditto stock photos of kids, animals and the Dutch revellers. How do these arbitrary labels change the images? If they are friends, do they get a free pass? If they are artists, are they allowed to transgress? If racists, do we recoil? An animation of a puppy responding to the words suggests our dog-whistle response to laden terms.
Over footage of firefighters, and Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street, drop the words “fear”, “stress” and “anxiety”: either overused terms or evidence of toxic culture, depending on your perspective.
Unlike Wolfson’s previous works, which have made extensive use of pop (Iggy Azalea, Lady Gaga) and spoken word (delivered by Wolfson, who somehow always sounds like he’s giving you a dirty phone call) ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS is silent but for the whirring of its fans. It’s the deep, defining soundtrack of our era: the cooling fans of vast, power-hungry data centres keeping this new, networked world afloat.
• Jordan Wolfson: ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS is at Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly Street, London until 29 February.
