Many would agree that it is much easier (and less time-consuming) to look at the pictures that illustrate a text in book or magazine than to read the actual text itself. This is one of the many contested ideas in Jordan Wolfson’s current exhibition in Rome, where iconographic appearance is so complex and stratified that reading a text would actually be much less work.
Two flat-screen monitors face off in the gallery’s central space, while thirteen digital prints are distributed over the walls. Each of the prints is the result of a superimposition of different types of images, and viewers may be able to recognize some of the source material. Included here are George Grosz’s 1919 drawing Ledebour, from the artist’s “Ecce Homo” series; the logo of a Santa Cruz skateboard manufacturer that depicts a hand, dismembered from its body, with a shrieking mouth on the palm; reproductions of the painting Pages from a Painted Album, ca. 1930, by Uemura Shōen, in which a woman is raped by two men; American corporate logos; and a still from an animated cartoon depicting Shylock (protagonist of the artist’s 2011 video Animation, masks).
The two monitors nearby show contrasting pictures of lobster claws, each featuring a sticker with a pornographic image of a young man gazing directly into the camera. Slowly, on first one video and then the other, a hand holding a razor blade cuts the elastic band that holds the claws closed. The prints and videos don’t immediately seem to belong together, but this apparently incongruous pairing points toward the conceptual core of the show: Wolfson has given us an overproduction of icons, generating a subtle play of references that leads us to reflect on the credibility, the value, the power and––why not?––the futility of images themselves.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
