(link)
Wolfson is a semio super-villain, weaponizing Naumanian irony to outwardly undermine the connection to affective means, objects which establish identification (the artist's interest in the gaze and facial recognition tech as well as nostalgia and cultural mythos) only to systematically abuse and deplete that link through endless tonal dissonance and juxtaposition, e.g. playing saccharine love-songs while a boy who looks into our eyes is repeatedly dragged and dropped onto concrete from a steel marionette of the artist's hand, basically irradiating the gold underpinning our emotive currency, held hostage and tortured. It's akin torture's use of learned helplessness and depersonalization to make its subjects concede to it.
The most successful villainy involved is that in order to say no to a very formally successful scourging of the emotive would require we admit that we believe there is an inherent "good" in art, that art be helpful, admit that we believe ourselves the good guys.
MARTEN: The whole sum is a stylization of wrongness or error.
WOLFSON: That is what I wanted.
See too: Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery
