Jordan Wolfson

Jordan Wolfson's Body Sculpture is a robotic work of art, combining sculpture and performance to generate emotional and physical responses in the viewer. Exploring the affective potential of physicality, motion, sound and duration, Body Sculpture is designed to be experienced in person. Upon entering a dedicated gallery space for a scheduled performance, viewers ‘are confronted by a large metal cube sprouting two oversized, articulated limbs and manipulated by a robotic arm using a heavy chain. These two interacting robots are framed by a giant steel gantry and a sleek white platform…’²

Employing cutting-edge technology, while drawing on diverse art historical reference points, Wolfson describes Body Sculpture as ‘figuration and minimalism meeting each other in an object’.² An initial visual impression of imposing, industrial materials and surfaces is challenged by a range of subtle and emotive animatronic gestures and movements, which unfold in ‘an intricate choreography that questions the intersection between human and machine…’³

During a half-hour cycle, ‘the cube is lifted, lowered and swung around by the chain as its arms and hands enact an extraordinarily expressive range of movements from slow balletic poses to sexual or comedic gestures and frantic drumming and simulations of violence. As with all of Wolfson’s works, meaning is undefined; emerging from the clashing interaction of formal elements, it finds its own way through our minds and bodies.’²

In developing Body Sculpture, Wolfson collaborated with roboticist Mark Setrakian to explore possibilities for particular qualities of movement and to bring form to his ideas. Initially, individual scenes came to Wolfson as ‘intuitive downloads’² and these became the building blocks for a choreographed sequence with multiple climaxes, ‘Wolfson gradually pieced these scenes together into a narrative that traverses a variety of actions, references, rhythms and emotions.’²

Throughout most of this narrative the animatronic cube appears ‘blankly indifferent to the audience, its actions largely self-directed. We observe it observing itself: its physical capacity, its internal impulses and motivations, its self-realisation. The performance breaks the fourth wall at specific moments, however, such as when it beckons and points to the audience or makes cacophonous noise, disrupting the formal distance that is conventional in the theatre where the spectator remains squarely outside the event.’²

In considering whether the audience shaped the development of Body Sculpture, Wolfson remarked,
‘The audience is an abstract idea to me, in that I consider myself the audience. All my work is tailored to my experience as the first viewer, so what you see is basically how I see or what I prefer to see or what I saw intuitively. I assume the audience will have either similar or different reactions. It’s almost as if they’re wearing a mask of my consciousness: sometimes it fits and sometimes it doesn’t. Either experience is productive.’⁴

Jordan Wolfson

Jordan Wolfson was born in 1980 in New York City and lives and works in Los Angeles. Wolfson is an artist whose work reflects the situation of the world today. Acting as a witness to the shadow forces within the human condition, Wolfson positions the audience in a physical and moral confrontation with issues facing society and our own place within them.

Wolfson’s animatronic sculptures stage the artist’s desire to reach a deeper register of audience feeling. His works reside at the interface of art history and new technology, drawing from a lineage of 20th century sculpture as well as images and motifs from the mass media, popular culture and the internet.

Body Sculpture – a major acquisition for the National Gallery’s collection, premiered in 2023 and was the first solo presentation of Wolfson’s work in Australia. Body Sculpture extends Wolfson’s investigations, building on previous animatronic works Female Figure 2014 and Colored Sculpture 2016.

Provocations

• Wolfson’s intention is that the movement of [Body Sculpture] elicits the viewer to become activated in their bodies and therefore present in the experience of viewing the work. How do you think the kinetic aspect of Body Sculpture would affect your awareness of your own body? Have you ever experienced a performance or work of art that has made you feel present?
• In the above introduction to Wolfson’s Body Sculpture, Curator Russell Storer uses terms such as stage, performance, choreography, scenes, spectators and ‘the fourth wall’. What do you associate these terms with and what do they suggest about the audience experience of Body Sculpture? How do these terms relate to Wolfson’s ideas about audience from the artist quotes you have read?
• What does it mean to say something everyone else is thinking? Is there an obligation of care in that statement?

Prompt

• Wolfson describes wanting to make art that ‘doesn’t leave you cold or with a lesson or an answer.’ What would you like people to take away from your works of art? Try posing the concepts behind your body of work as a list of questions. What research questions might guide your creative investigations and what questions would you like your audience to be left with after experiencing your work?
• How can you further extend or refine this idea in your own work? Start by connecting these questions to the material(s) and process(s) in your own work of art or body of work?