Shows of new sculpture by American artist Jordan Wolfson are rare—his technology-intensive works can take a long time to make and are reliably unmissable. His latest, Body Sculpture, 2023, is a metal cube with animatronic arms and mesmerizing, slightly oversize hands, choreographed to perform uncanny, humanlike gestures in a complex presentation. Six years in production, it had its world premiere in, of all places, Canberra, the unassuming capital city of Australia, known for seeming strangely insular despite its political connection to global affairs. Shrewdly commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia in 2019, when it was still an idea in development, Wolfson’s latest razzle-dazzle corresponds somehow to this locale; his most inward-looking work, its cultural quotations are met with transfixing moments of self-absorption.
Reminiscent of Donald Judd’s boxlike work, but flaunting the rivets of its construction and a Rorschach-like patina from previous performances, the cube is first seen suspended from a chain above a stage, controlled by a robotic gripper (similar to those used in automobile manufacturing) on an overhead horizontal track. After a leaden click, the cube’s arms move up as if to signal “Stop,” “Enough,” or “I surrender,” with the gentle intentionality of a tai chi practitioner. For those familiar with Wolfson’s pointedly provocative works (Female figure), 2014, and Colored Sculpture, 2016—which form a trilogy with this piece, all produced with world-leading roboticist Mark Setrakian—what is at first surprising about Body Sculpture is its calm. The chain slowly descends, and the cube’s hands make soft contact with the platform—a birthing scene, the moment when sculpture first shares gravity with its contextual ground.
What follows is roughly thirty minutes of a near-perfectly balanced hanging cube performing a sign-language dance about its own agency. The industrial-looking object moves necklike, on a vertical axis, as well as left to right via the chain on the horizontal track, machinic whirring accompanying every hand gesture. More theatrical performance than art installation, the sequence has three discernible climaxes: (1) The cube’s sensual self-exploration leads to primate-like gesticulations and aggressive sexualized thrusting before becoming free from the gripper. (2) The cube makes beats by tapping on its metal surface until the gripper interrupts, loudly demonstrating its own agency by repeatedly banging the chain against a metal column at stage left. (3) The gripper reconnects to the cube via the chain, but the cube now seems morose; it uses its fingers, Taxi Driver–style, to mime a gun pointing at its head/body, outstretches its arms to resemble a crucifix, accusatorily points to the audience, then graciously hugs itself as it is lowered to the stage. Over the course of these three movements, the cube’s hands enact numerous subtle poetic gestures that belie easy explanation and confuse attributable body parts (a touch to its “head” could also be a touch to its “heart”). The power of the work stems from its capacity to slow the room down to its own methodical yet unpredictable tempo: a sculpture exploring its intrinsic psychology and space.
Aligning debates about AI and anthropomorphism with the enduring charge of anthropomorphism Michael Fried leveled at Minimalism in this magazine in 1967, Wolfson, in a discussion with exhibition curator Russell Storer, stated that the piece originated from an idea of “bonding Minimalism with figuration.” Rather than picking a side about whether art should anticipate its viewer or act like they’re not there, Body Sculpture flits intuitively, like the best of Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, and Paul McCarthy, among concerns for formal armature, spatial articulation, and the associative power of representation. Turning sculpture into a programmed performance, the piece is as much about the sociocultural hand gestures associated with, say, Travis Bickle, Beyoncé, and Michael Jackson as it is about the poetic play of formal components that draw us in and the brute presence of machinic objects that spit us out. Even a question as passé as the line between abstraction and figuration is turned by Wolfson into an unabashed, critical, emotional, and visceral thrill.
