Artist research: Jordan Wolfson VR - Real Violence TODO

Jordan Wolfson VR - Real Violence

Who are they, what is their career
Jordan Wolfson (born October 9, 1980 in New York City) is an American artist living and working in New York City and Los Angeles. His work is known for social commentary and entertainment, using film, sculpture, installation and performance.[1]

What is the artwork/concept or practice that the artist is focusing on ?

Visitors that don Oculus headsets for Jordan Wolfson’s nausea-inducing VR work, which transplants you to a New York street where a scene of visceral, gratuitous violence ensues while an anonymous voice recites a Hebrew prayer.[2]
Viewers are directed to a counter, handed noise-cancelling headphones and virtual-reality goggles, and instructed to grip the railing below them. The video begins with a view of clear sky glimpsed between buildings on a wide Manhattan street, as if you’re lying supine on the ground. You can almost smell spring. Then a cut, and there, kneeling on a stretch of sidewalk, is a young man in jeans and a red hoodie, an obscure, plaintive expression on his face as he holds your gaze. A man in a gray T-shirt stands over him: the artist. He takes a baseball bat and whacks his victim in the skull, then drops the bat, drags the man by his legs to the center of the sidewalk, and proceeds to bash his face in with a series of stomps and kicks. Blood gushes. The victim grunts and is silent. In the street, indifferent traffic is lined up bumper to bumper. Pedestrians mill around in the far background. The bat has rolled into the gutter; the batterer retrieves it and carries on. The camera cuts to a dizzying view from above; it feels like hovering upside down in a dream. Throughout, a man’s voice sings the two Hebrew blessings that Jews recite over the candles during Hanukkah. Abruptly, the sound cuts, then the image.[3]

The whole thing lasts two minutes and twenty-five seconds
The violence in “Real Violence” is not real, insofar as it is carried out on an animatronic doll enhanced in post-production. It is necessary to be reminded that art is not always a moral good. That VR and videogames generate physical and moral dissonances, dissonances that expose how violence is, daily, palpably close at hand for many people, and for others just an abstraction.[2] Wolfson’s contextless work does, after all, have a context: America, with all its indisputably real violence carried out daily on victims of flesh and blood.[3]

image source: Jordan Wolfson Visitors to the Whitney Biennial must be at least eighteen years old to put on a headset and watch “Real Violence,” an extremely bloody virtual-reality project by Jordan Wolfson. 2017

PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL ORCUTT URL:http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/confronting-the-shocking-virtual-reality-artwork-at-the-whitney-biennial (accessed 28 May 2017)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Wolfson
[2]   Eckardt, Stephanie 2017  "The Work Is Repellant": All the Horrified Reactions to Jordan Wolfson's Ultraviolent VR Art at the Whitney Biennial  wmagazine URL: https://www.wmagazine.com/story/jordan-wolfson-whitney-biennial-2017-reviews-reactions

[3] Schwartz, Alexandra 2017 CONFRONTING THE “SHOCKING” VIRTUAL-REALITY ARTWORK AT THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL  newyorker URL: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/confronting-the-shocking-virtual-reality-artwork-at-the-whitney-biennial