Jordan Wolfson

Mark from Way To Go Palms goes back to his van and gets 30 pieces of ghost plant root that he offers Jordan for a dollar a piece. Mark says Jordan can just snap pieces off, put them in the ground and they’ll grow. At Jordan’s feet is his dog, Midnight, a black Labrador stray he found outside his studio two years ago. Cheque written, Mark leaves. We go inside.

Jordan, 35, was born in New York but has lived in Los Angeles for the past three years. His house is a large bungalow, light-filled, cosy. In the second seating area is a coffee table by Urs Fischer. Down near the floor, a plug-in air freshener is branded with an image of Mickey Mouse. Hanging from various walls are a scowling Mick Jagger with his middle finger raised, a work by Keither Haring that reads “safe sex” and, on the way to the bathroom, a drawing by Tom of Finland. Dotted around are metal and plastic chairs covered in bumper stickers with phrases such as “Filthy Stinking Rich (2 Out of 3 Ain’t Bad).”

It is a moment of change for Jordan. He is about to move back to New York. During his time in LA, he has created ‘Colored Sculpture’ and ‘Female Figure’, two animatronic works that have elevated his standing in both contemporary art and popular culture. Queues form outside galleries where his works are displayed. Videos of them go viral. Jordan is now represented by two of the art world’s most respected galleries: David Zwirner in New York and Sadie Coles HQ in London. This November, he opens the first of a two-part retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

It’s time for lunch. We get in Jordan’s BMW. It is white, and on its bumper are more stickers, this time made by Jordan himself. One reads “health”, the other “afraid”. In the seat pocket is an old hardback biography of Norman Mailer. Midnight sits on the backseat. When Jordan starts the car, classical music begins to play, but he plugs in his iPhone and instead chooses ‘Kiss It Better’ by Rihanna. We drive to a vegan restaurant called Café Gratitude, whose owners recently received death threats from the vegan community when it was revealed that they kept cows to eat on their farm.

“You will die, if that thing falls on you,” says Jordan. “Truth is it can kill someone.” We are sitting outside on Café Gratitude’s terrace, talking about ‘Colored Sculpture’. All the dishes on the menu have names, and Jordan has ordered a summer kelp noodle salad called ‘I Am Liberated’.

‘Colored Sculpture’ is an extraordinary feat of visceral emotion. On its debut, in May, it was housed in the old garage space of David Zwirner, in which stood a squared gantry of scaffolding with moveable tracks. From those ran three thick lines of heavy chain, attached to which was an over-sized marionette of a boy. The work is a caricature of a wholesome American youth, a freckled redhead with his mouth in a scowl and a gap in his teeth. It is made of rubber and cast in cartoon colours, its body segments held by links so it can flop and fall. The three chains are attached to its head, left hand and right foot. Its exaggerated eyes are actually screens that track the gaze of viewers with visual recognition technology and then flash imagery and words such as “spit” and “earth”.

Over a programmed loop of 15 minutes and 27 seconds, the figure is held aloft, then dashed to the ground in various degrees of violence. It is dragged around the floor, the chains unspooling to their fullest length to create a pattern before winching the figure up again for more abuse. There is a sustained period of tension where the machine toys with the figure. At one point a recording of Jordan’s voice is played, followed by a bout of wanton violence, soundtracked by a snippet from ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ by Percy Sledge. It is horrific and captivating, a work that breaks new ground for its bravery, technical accomplishment and sucker-punch power.

“When you’re making a piece like that, it looks normal to you,” says Jordan. “I think to everyone else it looks alien, but to me it was very, very normal, because I had been working on it for so long.” He says he had the idea for the piece in May 2014, just after he had revealed ‘Female Figure’, a character with long white-blonde hair and scuffed skin wearing a witch mask and a soiled negligee, facing itself in a mirror. ‘Female Figure’ dances to songs such as ‘Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke, while facial recognition software allows its eyes to lock with whoever is in the room. Only two people at a time were allowed in the presence of ‘Female Figure’, but video of the work posted online soon went viral. A headline in the ‘Daily Mail’ read: “Is this the most terrifying robot ever?”

“It was after ‘Female Figure’,” he says of ‘Colored Sculpture’. “I was on an airplane and I just saw it in my head. And it wasn’t even that profound of an image. ‘Female Figure’ going to tell you, ‘Do not drop it on its face, it’s got glass eyes,’ and ‘Do not drop it on its head.’ But it’s not about maintaining something. It’s not about anything but the artwork. It’s hard to explain this feeling of being so driven, and also kind of irrational, that you basically have to ignore the fact that this might not be physically possible.”

The preparatory work was intense. “There were these basic tests they would run in the studio where they would drop it from the ceiling, record it with a high-speed camera and then review the footage,” he says. “You can also put things in the head to measure the G-forces.” Much was about finding answers.

“There’s a solution to everything. If someone says, ‘This battery only lasts three hours,’ what’s the solution? Have another head that you can switch it out with, not try and find a different battery that doesn’t exist.”

Limiting how many could see the work at any one time was another solution. “With ‘Female Figure’, if you had too many people in the room, I thought it would become a spectacle,” he says. “They would see it as an object, a sex object. When you have just two people, and you have this figure looking back was such a profound image in my mind, while this wasn’t and that worried me. But then I just trusted that I had this idea, and I didn’t have any other ideas.”
He says that the initial idea and finished work are very similar. “It kind of looks the way I thought it would be,” he says. “I didn’t anticipate there being music. I didn’t anticipate there being dialogue. I just thought it would all be content in the eyes. Then when you’re making it you realise you’re dealing with something compositionally and you have to invent stuff to make it work.”

‘Colored Sculpture’ was initially intended for Serpentine Galleries. “It just didn’t pan out,” he says. “We couldn’t give them a final budget number so they didn’t know how much money to raise.” The reality of a piece of such ambition is that it needs to be privately funded – a co-production between Jordan’s two galleries.

Jordan worked on the piece for two years with animatronic experts. Much of the work was problem-solving: how can a figure holding sophisticated electronics be repeatedly dropped from a great height without sustaining damage? Jordan had to get the experts to think his way. “These guys are and forth between them, you have this relationship. That’s a better experience.” With ‘Colored Sculpture’, the maximum spectator quota is 20. “It’s not a piece for the domestic collector,” he says, “but it’s also not a theatre piece. It’s also not a performance piece, and it’s also not an installation. It’s a sculpture. So it’s very simple and it’s very complicated at the same time.”

Much of the power of Jordan’s work comes from its being both specific and elusive. His feelings, ideas and emotions are present in a raw, often uncomfortable form. But it is not autobiographical, and even though his voice and sometimes his image appears in the work, there is also remove and distance. “It’s myself but it’s also not me,” he says. “It’s also fiction. Of course it comes from some of my life experiences but I also make a lot of stuff up. I use my life, but I don’t just use my life. I use my imagination.”

Jordan says that his work is about freedom. “I’m not going to censor myself, ever,” he says. “That’s the first rule: no censorship. Total freedom. Without complete freedom, I don’t have anything.” He first became aware of this at college, while he was studying sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design.

“I didn’t have a way to articulate it,” he says. “All I knew was that there was a tension and rawness to the idea. It was, like, it touched a nerve. It was like when I was a kid. I’d do things, like, in the back of the car when my parents were driving on the highway, I’d open the door for a moment. The way that felt made me feel so high, the potential for risk or danger is something that I’m drawn to.”

Crucially, this is not about deliberate shocks. “I find it very charged, but it’s not, like, ‘Oh I want to provoke.’ It’s more, like, it excites me. It’s beautiful and it’s ugly and it’s bold and it’s weak. It’s like pressing the funny bone. I get excited by that.”

Jordan says he had a breakthrough four years ago, around the time his film ‘Raspberry Poser’ debuted. “I had this revelation. The success of the work couldn’t be measured in professional terms. The success of the work could only be measured in freedom. I realised that by putting yourself in danger for your ideas, or putting your work before your reputation or whatever, when you did that, you were free. And so my goal became freedom. Dos and don’ts in art seem ridiculous to me, because it’s not real life. I think the only thing that plays out is whether something is inauthentic or authentic. So either someone is bullshitting or someone is being authentic, and I think that’s what really divides it.”

Of greatest importance to Jordan is the process of making the work itself. “What’s satisfying is the action,” he says. “The exciting part is the practice of doing the work. After it, the professional stuff that happens with the work is all kind of dark to me and a little boring. But those moments of working are so invigorating, it’s really unreal.” It’s been a month since he finished ‘Colored Sculpture’. “Right now, I don’t know what’s come over me. I’ve been feeling insane because I don’t have this piece to work on. So I planted that garden. I need projects all the time. I’m in some type of withdrawal from making that artwork. I want to get back there, but at the same time I know I’m not ready. I’m not ready to create something creatively now. I want to move out of LA, I want to get my studio in New York and start working there.”

We get the check and walk back to the car. “Let’s go to the studio,” he says. Jordan scrolls through his playlist and chooses ‘Come Fly With Me’ by Frank Sinatra. He sets the volume high and we drive east along Melrose Avenue, windows closed, air conditioning on. Jordan is a man who provokes extreme reactions. Polly Staple, director of Chisenhale Gallery in London, recalls crossing paths with the young artist in 2009, when Jordan was on a residency in London as part of the Cartier Award to stage a project at Frieze London. “This annoying New York kid kept popping up every five minutes wearing a baseball cap, being in your face. It was, like, ‘Who is this guy?’”

Two years later, the artist Helen Marten suggested they go see Jordan’s latest video, ‘Animation, Masks’, at Johann König’s stand at the 2011 iteration of Frieze. “I thought it was just brilliant,” says Polly. “It’s quite hard as a seasoned curator who’s seen many things to be stopped in your tracks. I remember thinking, ‘I have to work with this artist,’ and then thinking, ‘Oh god, it’s Jordan Wolfson.’”

In 2013, Chisenhale Gallery gave Jordan his first UK solo exhibition. “We met and just got on. We started a really good dialogue,” says Polly. “One of the first things he said was, ‘You can’t afford me.’” The gallery usually commissions new work, but by this point, Jordan was already planning his first animatronic, ‘Female Figure’. His ideas for new work had budgets way beyond that of a not-for-profit organisation. Chisenhale Gallery agreed to present instead the UK debut of his already completed video ‘Raspberry Poser’.

Not long after Jordan finally unveiled ‘Female Figure’ at Zwirner in New York in spring 2014, he staged a free exhibition of his films at the Glasgow International biennial. Jordan spent over a week in Glasgow installing the show in an abandoned museum space, far from Manhattan’s glamour, in a prime location for the city’s many art students.

“He’s with these huge galleries because they facilitate his ideas,” says Sarah McCrory, the director of Glasgow International. “In some ways he’s manipulating that situation to do the work. But he’s still really enthusiastic. It was a really interesting project to do a mini-retrospective of an artist who isn’t that old. The work he makes is totally visionary.”

His London gallerist Sadie Coles describes working with Jordan. “He is like his work, really,” she says. “There’s a psychological side to the content, quite complicated and manipulative. That is in the work and that is part of working with him. It is incredibly engaging and fascinating and exciting and demanding. It’s not an ordinary experience. It’s something quite special.”

Sadie says the time Jordan gives to each piece is exacting. “It’s incredibly precise,” she says. “It’s very refined. He does spend a lot of time thinking through his ideas and rejecting anything that’s superfluous or decorative. He sharpens his tools so it’s as lethal as it can be. I do think of his work in those terms. It’s quite lethal.”

Behind these offices is the vast warehouse, a space that Jordan says was actually too big. He points to a large crate up in the corner, which he says holds his copy of ‘Female Figure’. On the floor is a scaled-down model of the gantry for ‘Colored Sculpture’. To the side is a small-scale version of the figure that he flings into model, mimicking the violence it withstands. He had hoped to work on the actual sculpture in the space, but though the warehouse is large, the gantry still didn’t fit.

Wrapped in plastic on the floor nearby is a version of the figure in black rubber, an option eventually rejected by Jordan once he saw how dirt from the chains and floor quickly built up on the coloured version, an effect he liked. He unwraps the black figure. Its head is unexpectedly heavy. Jordan says the real version is even heavier with all the electronics inside. Up in a corner are segments of a standing alligator figure, its hands raised. Jordan says it was initially considered to be part of ‘Colored Sculpture’, another figure to endure the same ordeal. He plans to use it in some other way.

On the walls are prints of images that have been used in a series of digital paintings. These works are large scale, with strange steel sills and frames decorated intermittently with Jordan’s bumper stickers. He is considering how to push them further, maybe including objects in them. Some will appear in his upcoming show with Sadie Coles.

Parked in the studio is the artist’s Porsche. He says he’d take me for a drive, except Midnight can’t fit in the back. It is almost five o’clock and he calls the animatronics studio that manufactures his figures for him. He asks if he can bring me to visit. They say they’re working on a secret project for SONY, with no visitors allowed. Instead, he says, “Let’s take a hike.”

But it’s still too hot for Midnight to be in the full sun with his thick black coat, so we go back to Jordan’s patio to drink some iced water, sitting in the shade on a white lounger. “It’s unfortunate that we live in such times that artists are overproducing,” he says. “I think there’s something sacred about the artistic practice, and that practice cannot be abused. I believe that overproduction is an abuse of that practice.”

It is 12 years since Jordan broke through with a video titled ‘The Crisis’. It features Jordan walking around a Romanesque church, talking to the camera about his passions for and anxieties about art. He cites among others Robert Smithson and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, then says, “I mean, I don’t know if I’ll ever make a work as great as those guys. I mean of course I hope to. What does it take? Is it practice? Do I go to the studio every day and try to make a great work? Is that possible?”

Since then, he has produced relatively little work: a series of videos, some sculptures of lobster claws stickered with images of gay pornography, the wall-mounted digital paintings and the two animatronic sculptures. “Not everything I do is good,” he says, responding to a question about his precision with language in his work, especially on his bumper stickers. “There’s a lot of crap. There’s an editing process. It doesn’t just come out like that. It’s work. It’s really hard. I was talking with Wolfgang Tillmans at the ‘Colored Sculpture’ opening and he said to me, 230 ‘It’s so hard to make good art.’ It really is. Any artist who’s really serious about their work will tell you the same thing. We’re endlessly confused about what we’re doing. It’s like trying to grab flies in the dark.”

For an American male artist, his work is unusually devoid of bravado. “That’s not part of my value set, that’s not part of my desire,” he says. “Maybe another artist feels something from physical scale. Maybe that rings a bell inside them. Maybe this type of emotion rings a bell in me. Especially with ‘Colored Sculpture’, that whole piece is composed of me deciding what was an increase of feeling. I was making decisions on just feeling more.” It is this intensity of practice that also limits his output. “It’s kind of like a romance via text messaging,” he says. “The less you communicate, the more profound the elements you communicate are. It’s more special. You don’t want to send messages all day to someone. You only want to send a couple of really special things that you think that person would like.” Earlier in the day, Jordan had texted a cartoon from ‘The New Yorker’ to a female acquaintance. “That message I sent to my friend, do you think that was a good one or no?” he asks. She has yet to reply.

The limited output of work also has the benefit of making Jordan’s career still feel like it’s at its beginning stages, as if he is still exploring the possibilities of what it can be. “I hope it will always explore the possibilities of what it could be,” he says. “It always should. I haven’t given up yet.” Midnight walks by and Jordan taps the lounger. “Come here. Come here. Come on. Come on, baby.” He taps on the lounger again. “Midnight. Come here.” Midnight doesn’t jump up. It’s time for a hike.

Turn right out of Jordan’s home, walk up the hill, and the road eventually leads to Griffith Park. From a high ridge, the view looks across the hills and down into the city. Jordan moved to Los Angeles specifically to make ‘Female Figure’. “There’s fabulous sculpture production out here,” he says.

“Which is going to be an obstacle for me in New York, because I have to figure out how I’m going to produce my art there. But that’s why I’m keeping my house and using my garage as a studio, so I can come back here and work.”

He heads to the road that leads down through the park. “There were times when I’ve loved LA, and times when I’ve loved it less,” he says. “Times when I really didn’t like it at all. I think it has to do with not being from here, maybe,” he says. “It’s also difficult being a single person in this town. It’s quite lonely, very isolating. I have some nice friends who I like very much but everything feels so temporary here. I’ve always had it in mind to return to New York.”

We head to dinner, first stopping at the store opening of his friends the designers Eckhaus Latta. Jordan has reserved a table at Alimento in Silver Lake. We sit outside and order a whole grilled orata to share, a fish known in Europe as the gilt-head sea bream. “I was born in New York,” he says, “on the Upper West Side, across the street from the Museum of Natural History. I lived in New York City until I was ten years old, and my family moved to Connecticut, to a little town an hour away from New York.”

His father co-owns a theatrical fabrics company. “For theatre curtains, movie screens, anything that uses fabric or uses material as a display on stage.” His mother is a psychoanalyst. “How was it growing up with a psychoanalyst as a mother? Well, they ask you to talk about how you feel about things all the time, or explain why you did something. It’s like how it is now when people ask me about my work. The funny thing is, you don’t have an answer, or you do have an answer, but that answer seems almost banal.

‘Why did you break that window?’ Well, I wanted to see what it looked like if a window broke. ‘Why did you throw rocks at the UPS truck?’ Because it was passing by. The idea of throwing rocks at it excited me. ‘Why did you piss in a cup and tell your sister it was ginger ale?’ Because I have a fury of hate for my sister and I wanted to trick her after all the abuse she had given me. Unfortunately, when you’re a kid you can’t really say those things. You just say, ‘I don’t know.’”

Did he really give his sister urine saying it was ginger ale? “I did, yes.” Did she drink it? “I think she maybe had a sip. I’m not sure.” His aunt is Erica Jong, the author of ‘Fear of Flying’. “But not by blood,” he says. “My uncle married her in 1989. It was interesting having Erica around because she always had a really good irrational answer for things.” Irrational? “Yeah. Everyone else was so straight, and Erica was able to see things in a different way, from the perspective of an artist. We grew up in a house full of conformists. They were just regular straights. To have an artist around, a creative person who’s non-conformist, it was very interesting.”

When he lived uptown as a kid, did he have downtown envy? “I was too young to understand that.” Did he miss New York when his family moved to Connecticut? “Completely,” he says. “It became, like, a mythical place to me. It became part of a self I used to know, and longed for. But in a way it formed me a bit, Connecticut. It gave me a sense of isolation I may not otherwise have felt in New York City. I lived that life where you sought out information.”

Was this pre-internet? “There was internet. I remember the first time I went online. My friend was, like, ‘Check it out. This is the World Wide Web.’ I was, like, ‘Cool, what can you do with it?’ He was, like, ‘You can find images of stuff. I’ll type in the word “babes” and we’re going to get hot naked girls.’ I was, like, ‘Yeah, woah.’ He did it, and I was, like, ohmygod. I think that was 14.” How long did the images take to load? “I don’t remember.”

“One pair of jeans. Or maybe two pairs of jeans.” It is the next morning, and Jordan is in his bedroom in his bungalow in The Oaks packing for two weeks in Europe. He is due to speak at a conference in Stockholm before travelling to Paris. Even though the summer weather of northern Europe is notoriously unpredictable, he plans to do the whole trip with just a hand luggage suitcase from Rimowa and a backpack. An hour or so ago he had been boxing with his personal trainer, and then he meditated. On the walls of the bedroom are posters by some of his art heroes: Jeff Koons, Charles Ray.

How does he feel about his upcoming show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam? “It’s a double show, so I have two shows in a row, and we’re going to produce an ambitious monograph so that’s exciting,” he says. “I try and do a show when I think an institution is interesting, when they have an interesting programme, when I like the curator and how they think about things, and when I sense they’re not just asking me to do it. But I don’t want to do a lot of shows. Is it sweater weather?”

He holds up an orange, deliberately pilled sweater by Acne Studios. In Europe, it’s definitely sweater weather. “One or two?” Two. “A sweater and a jacket in Europe?” Two sweaters and a jacket. “Just a sweater and a jacket.” The Acne Studios sweater goes in the case. “Maybe this isn’t enough space. I can throw a pair of shoes in my backpack. I really don’t want to make a whole thing out of travelling. I want to travel really light. The problem is, I have all these vitamins that I take.” How much room do they need? “I don’t know. Maybe I can minimise it.” When he shows ‘Female Figure’ and ‘Colored Sculpture’ in Amsterdam, will there be the same controls on how many people are allowed in at any one time? Jordan initially doesn’t answer, but has a question of his own. “How do you fold a jacket to put it in a case?”

He is holding a black Raf Simons blazer, which he folds, saying he can get it pressed when he gets to Stockholm. “What were you asking? Yeah of course. It’s a specific way of being shown. You have to follow that.” He takes another blazer from his wardrobe, this time by A.P.C. “This jacket’s actually cooler,” he says. It replaces the one by Raf Simons.

What’s the work he’s making for Sadie Coles, to show at her space in January? “It’s a new video,” he says. “It’s quite ambitious. I’d been working on it for a year and a half, two years, but I had to stop to work on ‘Colored Sculpture’. The production is very high end. Okay, this fits.” He is done with packing the suitcase and closes it.

Can he work on two things at once? “I was working on ‘Colored Sculpture’ and this new video in tandem, but it comes down to the fact that I could only focus on one thing at a time. If you really want to do something right, I find, one thing at a time is very effective.”

Is working on videos different from making sculptures? “It’s totally different, because in video you have live timing happening. It’s more clunky with sculpture, more difficult to finesse timing. That’s not really an in-depth answer. Follow me and I’ll explain.”

Jordan leaves his bedroom and goes to the kitchen to sort out his vitamins. “By the nature of video, you can always hit undo; you can always save multiple versions,” he says. “But when you’re doing something in sculpture, it’s more permanent. There’s something incredibly fluid about video.”

He goes to his kitchen cabinet and takes out a big tub. He unscrews it and starts counting out see-through sachets of pills. “One, two, three, I don’t know how many fucking days I’m going for.” Is that one sachet a day? “I’m supposed to take two of these every day. It’s a very, very high-quality multi-vitamin.” For the exhibition in Amsterdam, ‘Female Figure’ will come out of her crate. How does he feel when he encounters his characters again? “I really think of them in a ‘weird object’ way,” he says, “like, almost in a dead way. I don’t have emotions for them. I don’t really think of them. I see everything as a problem, not in a negative way, but as an obstacle that can be remedied by a solution.”

So if he went to visit ‘Colored Sculpture’ right now, he wouldn’t think, ohmygod, that poor kid? “Yes,” he says. “I don’t have that relationship to the artwork, like, ‘ohmygod, that kid.’” Did he when he was making it? “No I never did. I mean there were moments when you see it and it becomes anthropomorphised and I become a viewer like anyone else, and I find that quite effective. But I don’t have a consistent anthropomorphised-emotional relationship to this artwork just because it’s a kid. I have a relation to it because it’s an artwork that needs work, that needs to be maintained.” But if he did have that anthropomorphised relationship with it, would it fuck him up? “Sure, but then I wouldn’t be looking at it. That would be weird. That would be counterproductive. I need to have distance from it. You also need to take into consideration that I made it, and I also have to manage all the people who work on it. It can’t be as simple as an emotional relationship.”

He takes out another tub of pills. “This is a very interesting supplement,” he says. “It supposedly actually slows the ageing process. It’s a special chemical. You order it online. It’s been in the news.” What does it do? “It has this chemical – whatever chemical compound it is that your body starts running out of – that repairs your DNA, or tells your body to repair the DNA.”

What does he think about ageing? “I want to be able to keep making art and I want to stay functional. It’s weird we spend the first half of our lives young, and then the rest in decline. It’s very weird to me.”

How does he feel about leaving his home in LA? Once he gets back from his European trip, it’s only a couple of weeks before he moves to New York. “How do I feel?” he says. He looks around his bungalow. “It’s so pretty, isn’t it? It’s lovely. What a lovely place to live, huh? But I’m not leaving it. I’m just not going to be living here full-time anymore. You can look around and say it’s so beautiful here, but if you’re not feeling good in a city in a general way… If I don’t want to be here, then I don’t want to be here. I don’t have such a big emotional attachment to this. But maybe I do and I just don’t realise it, and later I’m going to feel, like, ‘Oh I miss my house and the evenings in the quiet and the walks with my dog and my garden.’ I always have the option to jump on an airplane and come right back here. But I’m really excited to be in New York.I told myself I’d come to LA for three years and I did it. And now it’s over. And I’m glad.”

He knocks on the kitchen bench 23 times. His gardeners Ernie and Mario are planting the shaded area. Jordan is going to jump in the pool, oversee their work and then get the flight to Stockholm.