Jordan Wolfson

Jordan Wolfson’s four-minute film untitled false document, 2008, commissioned by the Swiss Institute, begins with an attractive woman on the bow of a yacht, holding still-life photographs. She struggles to secure the papers’ edges, which are turned by the sea breeze. The film gestures to Bob Dylan’s video clip for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in which the song’s transcribed lyrics slip into misspellings and incongruities. But other references accumulate, including allusions to the French New Wave and Surrealism, all of which, like the still-life images that improbably pair pumpkin and eggplant, pineapple and mushroom, are subtly dissonant with the viewer’s expectations. The film zooms out to reveal the scene as a video playing on a flat screen in the artist’s empty Brooklyn apartment. In unstable sync with the film, “Vicki” and “Fred” from Apple’s universal-computer-audio settings recite a text by Wolfson that connects the instability of authenticity to authorship: “All of this rolling together to support a system of the unmistakable unrecognizable. Like a good truth in the form of a lie. The lie being something original because it is existing on our inside and the truth being something unoriginal because we accept to hear it again and again and again.”

Wolfson has divided the space with cinder blocks and drywall into two chambers connected by French doors from his home, another red herring suggestive of subjectivity. One room contains the film, where Wolfson saves the Eiki 16-mm projector from sentimental interpretation by his self-reflexive discussion of the film’s making, as does the noise of the reels, which hum in competition with the audio track. The front room contains bleachers at its perimeter, as well as the muffled audio from the film. Too large and oppressively empty for the relation and exchange suggested by the seating arrangement, the space fills with allusion, impossibility, and, inevitably, emptiness.