BY ISAAC KAPLAN
Jordan Wolfson doesn’t like
violence, he told me. The statement may surprise anyone who has experienced the
artist’s virtual reality piece at the Whitney Biennial, in which he forces
viewers to witness a brutal beating on a city street. In a scene that unfolds
over 90 seconds, an anonymous man (played by the artist) takes a baseball bat
and then his shoe to the head of a kneeling victim. A Hebrew prayer plays over
the scene until what was once a face is reduced to pulp. And then the video
cuts to black.
Even if you know the victim
is an animatronic dummy, one made to look perfectly human in post-production,
Real Violence (2017) is perhaps one of the most viscerally disturbing works of
art ever created.
The work provides no
context, no story, and no reason. There is only a pure distillation of violence
delivered through one of the most powerful uses of virtual reality to ever
grace a museum’s halls. Without a narrative to hold onto, what you’re left with
after witnessing the work is an overwhelming feeling of brutality, the sound of
a bat striking against a skull, and incredibly graphic imagery seared into
memory.
This total gut-punch is, of
course, not an accident, nor is the choice to use virtual reality. Wolfson set
out to create a piece that explores the guttural human reaction he felt while
trying, and often failing, to watch violent videos online.
One particularly disturbing
video clip he’d seen showed an attack in a parking lot. The scene, which will
be appropriated for a forthcoming video piece by the artist in April, stuck
with him. Wolfson mined similar videos to determine exactly what about the
violence made him so uncomfortable. He settled on repetition and passivity.
Both are present in Real Violence, as the victim refrains from fighting back
against his steady beating. For the artist, virtual reality up to this point
has been too interactive. Replicating the haunting feeling of being a passive
bystander, watching a passive victim, was key to the work’s conception.
Wolfson’s use of VR means
the simulated scene is completely devoid of the potential for even the most
tepid intervention by the viewer to stop the attack. Stare at it or try in
frustration to look away (my reaction)—once you’ve strapped on the Oculus Rift
headset there is nothing to be done. And once you take it off, there isn’t all
that much to be done, either, except feel the strange discord between the
violence of the work and the calm hum of the Whitney.
That jolt of taking off the
headset, the feeling of disorientation, and then the experience of watching
others, still in headsets, react to what you know they must be seeing is also
part of the piece.
Viewers are arranged at a
table to stand across from one another, holding onto metal bars as they don
headsets. The bars were a relatively late addition to the piece, which itself
was filmed in January and completed last week. Prior to the exhibition’s
opening, one of the biennial’s curators, Christopher Lew, called Wolfson to
suggest including metal bars so that people would not fall over while
experiencing the piece. The bars had the added effect of keeping people faced
forward, looking towards the brutality.
If the piece came with a
narrative or story to go with the attack, it would have a framework through
which a viewer might intellectually parse what, as it stands now, is
unintelligible murder. The desire to find such meaning in a work intentionally
stripped of most everything other than overwhelming brutality means that Real
Violence has become subject of timely projections by critics, who have
primarily critiqued the piece for its gratuitousness.
Jerry Saltz, writing in New
York Magazine, said Real Violence “feels like metaphor for the unfocused furor
I gleaned at Trump rallies.” Saltz isn’t the only one to see Trump’s America
written in the blood of the work’s victim. But Wolfson finds this genre of
interpretation interesting, given that he first had the idea for the piece in
2014, before Trump entered the political arena in a real way. Others viewers
see overtures of a rising tide of anti-Semitism, as the work includes the
Hanukkah prayer. But in speaking to Wolfson, I got the sense that the prayer is
something of a formal slight-of-hand, priming the viewer to absorb and remember
something ritualistic and sacred—only that porousness is filled with something
horrific.
Though Real Violence is
undoubtedly successful in distilling the emotion one feels watching violence,
one shouldn’t walk away from the piece without reservations, or without being
thoughtful about how the work attains that success: What does it mean to treat
violence like a distant specimen for curious study in a virtual world?
But the critique of the
work—that it has no meaning beyond shock—misses that the work’s value arises
not when you map politics onto it, but when you understand what separates the
simulated art and say, the real-life violence of a Trump rally. Both are
emotionally impactful but only the latter has actual consequences. In exploring
the pure distillation of violence without context, Wolfson has created a piece
that captures the difference between Real Violence and real violence.
—Isaac Kaplan
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-gut-wrenching-vr-work-art-talking-violence
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