Jordan Wolfson: Ecce Homo Le Poseur (Hardcover)

This book, which sold out almost immediately upon publication, is a reprint of the catalogue produced on the occasion of Wolfson’s 2012–2013 exhibitions at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Los Angeles and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent. 

Entitled Ecce Homo/le Poseur, the S.M.A.K. presentation marked the most comprehensive survey of Wolfson’s work to date. The volume’s eponymous title effectively expresses the artist’s interest in the ego and its image as well as destabilizing differences between life and imitation, reality and imagination.

Anchored by full-scale color plates of Wolfson’s three animations—video stills, details, and installation views of the ambitiously conceived Con Leche (2009), Animation, masks (2011), and Raspberry Poser (2012)—the book provides a critical framework for the artist’s vast and varied practice. Images are given context by illuminating scholarship by Esther Leslie and Linda Norden, and a conversation between Aram Moshayedi and Wolfson brings their analyses to ground. Also included is a letter personally addressed to the artist by Philippe Van Cauteren. In Wolfson’s words, his work is “about reaching a place of displacement and control within the space of viewing”; this text exists as an embodiment of that ever-evolving vision, which considers the developments of digital and analogue animation as essential to the histories of modernism and modernity, and posits them as responsible for shaping and relaying the concerns of sculptural and pictorial modes of representation, and defining our relationship to both images and objects.