Jordan Wolfson, photographed by Morgan Maher.
Jordan Wolfson was first struck by the work of Matthew Barney in high school during a visit to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. While the two artists might seem wholly unalike in style and form—Barney’s a surrealist wizard; Wolfson’s a digital provocateur—they’re cut from the same mad-genius cloth. Both blow past the boundaries of art, dragging viewers into deep, squirmy territory—and they don’t come out clean. This summer at the Fondation Beyeler, Wolfson drops “Little Room,” a VR trip into his twisted headspace—think full-body scans, identity swaps, and a healthy dose of existential dread. Wolfson, holed up in L.A. with his dogs Tofu and Broomstick, was still fine-tuning the madness when he rang up Barney to talk sculpture, slapstick, and the vast indifference of the universe.
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SUNDAY 11 AM APRIL 13, 2025 L.A.
MATTHEW BARNEY: What’s up, Jordan?
JORDAN WOLFSON: Hey, man. You’re in your kitchen? Is that the one I had breakfast in?
BARNEY: Yeah. How are you doing?
WOLFSON: I watched Cremaster 1 last night, and the first part of River of Fundament. Then, I watched Cremaster 3 and Cremaster 4 at my studio during a break.
BARNEY: Oh my god.
WOLFSON: I think I get it.
BARNEY: [Laughs]
WOLFSON: Can I just say what I think all of them are about?
BARNEY: Sure.
WOLFSON: Okay. So you’ve got the penis.
BARNEY: Uh-huh.
WOLFSON: And then you’ve got the testicles, and then you’re having sex. The penis is doing something, and then the testicles have their own theater happening, and the penis has its own theater happening, and then they come together, and it’s creation.
BARNEY: Uh-huh.
WOLFSON: [Laughs] Is that insane? Anyhow, I love this idea of two things happening at once.
BARNEY: Yes. There are often two things happening at once.
WOLFSON: The thing with the cars and the Chrysler Building, did you build that set?
BARNEY: We did.
WOLFSON: You built it strong enough to drive the car into it?
BARNEY: Yes. [Laughs] That was an elaborate set. So I feel like I should lead this, because you have a show coming up.
WOLFSON: Yes, but I want to let you know I really enjoyed your films and your book. I also love this Houdini drawing you did. I don’t know if it’s a penis or a bone, but it’s, like, Houdini wrapped in chains.
BARNEY: Thank you. You went in deep. My god.
WOLFSON: I mean, we had a lot of technical problems at the studio this week. [Laughs] I wanted to ask, was the reason you shot the Cremaster series on video because sports are recorded on video?
BARNEY: That’s where it started with the two pieces that are four-by-three aspect ratio. They were made with broadcast sports in mind. In fact, I even had this ambition that the first one I made, number four, would be shown on television, like on BBC, which I couldn’t get to happen. But I want to ask you some questions about your work. [Laughs]
WOLFSON: Wait, hold on. Just let me ask one more question. The elf and the giant [in Cremaster 5]. How did that come about?
BARNEY: That was a funny situation. I found the smallest person and the largest person I could find who had wrestling experience. The giant was a pro wrestler, but he ended up having some pretty serious mobility issues. It often works to cast people just for the physical specialty that they bring into the role.
WOLFSON: The River of Fundament is insane. I had a sense that there was almost a slight influence of Dogma in the work. The thing with Maggie Gyllenhaal was intense. And I loved the little guy with his penis wrapped in a silver ribbon. That was gorgeous.
BARNEY: I’d just been rewatching this series called Treme. It took place in New Orleans, where they filmed in and around the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s mainly set around the music industry, but it’s made by the same people who did The Wire, so it goes into the political and legal and social spheres. You really get a deep understanding of the place in that particular moment. But there are all these scenes where a live piece of music is performed in the background from beginning to end, and the lead actors are embedded in that performance. I remember seeing it around the time we were making River of Fundament. I was really influenced by that.
WOLFSON: You were such an important figure to me and my generation. I grew up with this work and I remember getting bootlegs in college. I watched Cremaster 4 over and over because that’s the only one I owned. It was a treat revisiting it, especially while I was working on my own art, which is so different, but thank you for that.
BARNEY: Thank you. And also thanks for sending me the archive of your work. I know that you’re preparing an exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, so I want to talk about the piece that I saw in your studio, “Little Room.” I understand it’s still in progress, but it seemed clear that it was departing from some of the sculptural traditions you’ve been working in, like “Female Figure” or “Body Sculpture.” Your works are operating in a tradition of the figure within the proscenium. If you think about some [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini pieces, like “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” where there’s a kind of frame around the figure that’s trussed up but also functional, this piece, “Little Room,” feels to me like it’s quite specifically departing from that idea of sculpture. I’ve heard you say that this space you’re creating is a utilitarian space, not necessarily a sculptural space.
WOLFSON: All those spaces around my sculptures had been functional. They were mostly designed by engineers, and then I could select texture or color, but there wasn’t much I could do within them other than decorate them superficially. I did that in “Body Sculpture,” with the robotic arm. We purchased it unpainted. It came with a matte primer that was red because that’s the only way you could get it. So I decided I would clear-coat it to make it look like an exposed organ, the way a dog’s penis looks when it’s exposed.
BARNEY: Uh-huh.
WOLFSON: Initially, “Little Room” was going to take place in a three-dimensional model of a room, but it became too artificial. We had been looking at this thing called AR-51. It’s a motion-capture space that relies on AI. When I went into it, it was a gridded space similar to the gestalt of The Matrix or the last scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I noticed that the experience of being in this liminal, gridded space was expansive in a way that I hadn’t felt before in VR. Mostly, VR felt like a contrived, claustrophobic experience to me. So when I saw this infinite space, I thought it was additive. I also liked the paradox of titling this infinite space “Little Room.” Our bodies are little rooms, and we look out from these little rooms at the world.
BARNEY: You probably don’t feel the way I do about the interface. For example, when there’s a video installation in an exhibition and I have to put on a set of headphones, I’m really irritated to have to do that. I feel like it always creates a problem for me to engage with it as a sculptural work. It forces me into dealing with it as an image. I thought a lot about that piece that you made at the Whitney Biennial—
WOLFSON: “Real Violence.” Yeah. There’s an initial problem that happens when artists engage with technology. And there’s a tendency for the artist to insist on things like headphones. But when you simply ask the viewer to do almost anything, you’re creating an interactive dynamic with them. I have a superstition that any type of interactivity turns a key in your brain and takes you out of an experience of art, and it puts it into a slightly pedagogical experience. When I started working on “Real Violence,” I really didn’t like the VR medium, and I specifically didn’t like it for its interactive qualities. The first part of the piece is not interactive. In the second part, you witness an extreme act of violence, and then there’s the Hanukkah prayer that plays and then that cuts out. A lot of people said to me, “Oh, you have a robot sculpture. Is it going to interact with the audience?” Initially, “Body Sculpture” was going to point at the audience. I thought it was going to be similar to the way it felt when “Female Figure” looked at your eyes. But it was such a dramatic change. The difference of how you cognitively react to eye contact versus how you react to the sculpture approaching you and gesturing towards you was something I couldn’t predict until I saw it. Then, I basically removed that interactive part of the work.
BARNEY: I think what the piece is not doing in “Body Sculpture” is as important as what it is doing. It has a kind of withholding that could belong to butoh tradition. It’s about potential energy.
WOLFSON: For me, “Body Sculpture” is like a musical composition that has a foundation. I have high expectations for the physicalities that the work could contain. And in a way, I have a lot of really unrealistic expectations for them. I approach every project, almost irresponsibly, with optimism. And every time, it never works the way I think it’s going to, and that sends me into crisis. I’m in that right now with “Little Room,” to be honest with you.
BARNEY: [Laughs] Okay.
WOLFSON: In “Body Sculpture,” I was very foolish, and I didn’t predict this. When the robotic arm picks up the box, if it moves it too quickly, the box swings and it just looks silly. And so, I was like, “This isn’t working for me. This whole thing is going to have to move really slow,” and then nothing worked. Then, I found a tempo of slowness— I had studied butoh in college. It’s like a whole performance where you imagine yourself as a rock. You imagine yourself as a flower. So anyway, I had to find where the work was active. The work was active in a slow movement. So what you’re looking at and responding to are the limitations and dependencies of the artwork to make it operate formally.
BARNEY: Which is a great place to be, in my opinion.
WOLFSON: It’s a realistic place to be. You have to be realistic as a professional artist.
BARNEY: It’s the thing that really differentiates a sculpture practice from a painting practice. Within the frame of a painting, anything can happen. What we deal with as sculptors is a kind of sequence of compromise, in that you get really good at negotiating. I mean, compromise on the level of just making something stand, or the kind of dance with gravity that you’re talking about with your piece, it’s a set of contingencies you have to deal with and eventually master.
WOLFSON: You’re dealing with the physical realities, you’re dealing with mass, you’re dealing with time, and how mass changes in time.
BARNEY: How much do you think about theater in your work?
WOLFSON: I’m not. I’m thinking about patterns and form, and I think about how to use form as an unlocking mechanism. So it’s like 30 seconds in, 60 seconds in, 90 seconds in—and then how it’s constantly changing, almost switching gears like you’re driving a manual transition car. It’s like a dance or marriage between form and content, how they intertwine and break, intertwine and break.
BARNEY: What about text? There’s a piece of text at the end of the dossier on “Little Room” that you showed me when I was at your studio. We talked a little bit about [Samuel] Beckett and [Bruce] Nauman and just the way that that text operates.
WOLFSON: Maybe I should quote some of the text. “My thumbs, my hands behind your heart, my palms inside your lungs, my thumbs behind your teeth.” Those are three lines.
BARNEY: There’s a starkness to it, and within that virtual space, it has some of the brutality that you feel in Nauman and Beckett. Just hearing you read it in your studio made me realize how good of a performer you are. Do you have any training in that way?
WOLFSON: I actually come from a showbiz family. There are some comedians and television directors in my family. I remember acting when I was a kid, but I never liked it. I’ve always felt more comfortable directing. There’s something different, though, in hiring an actor to do something and me doing it myself. It was important that I was enacting this. It was stranger than working with some theater professional. Would you say you feel the same?
BARNEY: Yeah, I feel a big difference. I also feel really limited as a performer. What I can do is rather specific, so I love bringing somebody in who can really lay it down in a way that I cannot. My project has become more and more of an ensemble cast, and I’ve moved away from the single-performer work, although the drawing restraints keep pulling me back in. I’m still really interested in working in that reductive way. But even with those, I’m often working with a different performer. It’s interesting that comedy is in your background because it’s such a hard energy to tap in visual art. It’s something you do really well.
WOLFSON: It’s hard to bring humor into art. In the beginning of Cremaster 3, they’re making funny noises. I was watching it last night being like, “Matthew’s doing funny.” In a way, funny is as difficult as negotiating interactivity, in terms of art. For my work, I imagine there is no other viewer but me. What gives our art distinct qualities is that an artist is unlocking a liminal space in the viewer’s mind that’s not really placeable. There’s a tension in this non-position that allows the viewer to witness a scene in the present moment, and everything that’s within that moment, and everything that’s come before it and after it. I think that’s what artists, authors, and composers do. It’s kind of absurd, all the lengths that you and I go to. Cy Twombly can do it just by scribbling a little bit. You rebuilt the Chrysler Building. I built a box that has sex with the floor.
BARNEY: [Laughs]
WOLFSON: And Félix González-Torres puts candy in a pile. We’re all just doing the same thing. And it’s a farce, what we’re doing.
BARNEY: I’ve heard you use the word ambivalence. How is that central to your work?
WOLFSON: Art is like sailing, and you need to have a combination of tension and slack on the sail. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about ambivalence. It’s like, where do you withhold and where do you give, formally and contextually? Withholding can be deciding not to hang a picture on one wall, or how you edit a film. At the end of “Female Figure,” the sculpture says, “I’m getting old, I’m getting fat, and I don’t believe in god.” And then it loops into, “My mother’s dead. My father’s dead. I’m gay. I’d like to be a poet. This is my house.” For me, this kind of nihilism was an act of withholding.
BARNEY: It’s an interesting thing to think about, ambivalence located in nature—the way that a waterfall is ambivalent, or an earthquake is ambivalent. It doesn’t care about you.
WOLFSON: I would use the word indifferent. I used to see a cliff on Big Sur and be like, “It’s so beautiful and it’s so scary because it’s so indifferent.” I don’t see it that way anymore. Sometimes on Instagram, you see people killing turtles to make turtle soup, and it’s horrific to see the human animal act so indifferently. It’s as if we’re acting with a mask, and this mask gives us permission to be indifferent with a similar hostility that god or nature comes down upon us with. That’s something that lives inside of us as human animals.
BARNEY: That’s probably a pretty good place to end. [Laughs]
WOLFSON: I’m very grateful to you, Matthew. Thank you. That was a real treat. I think you’re one of the greatest. Do you still have that dog?
BARNEY: Yeah, Clover. My daughter named him.
WOLFSON: I have a dog named Tofu, but I didn’t name him.
BARNEY: Who did?
WOLFSON: I think the person who abandoned him. I wanted to rename him Mario, but it just felt weird. Alright. I’ve got to go to work.
BARNEY: Have a good day.
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Fashion Assistant: Tristan Nguyen.