Jordan Wolfson’s Mysterious Gagosian Show Apparently Includes AI Imagery, 9/11 References

Jordan Wolfson, one of the most widely acclaimed provocateurs of today’s art scene, has been loath to speak about his latest exhibition, opening at Gagosian gallery in New York on Friday. Queried by Artnet News editor Andrew Russeth about his first New York show of new work since 2018, Wolfson simply said, “I don’t care what people know or don’t know.” The exhibition, which Wolfson said in that interview was “a very traditional sculpture show,” comes with a three-paragraph release that isn’t very revealing, either.

Head, then, to Gagosian Quarterly—the mega-gallery’s print magazine, which is not typically a font of information—for more details on what Wolfson has cooking. (Consider this your spoiler warning, if you’d prefer to go in knowing less.)

Wolfson, whose past artworks have included a gyrating female android and a chained-up sculpture of a boy that got repeatedly slammed to the ground, does appear to have something jarring up his sleeve: works that enlist AI images related to Bob Dylan, 9/11, and Jeff Koons’s controversial 1989 “Made in Heaven” series, in which the artist pictured himself having sex with La Cicciolina, a porn star who was then his wife.

Gagosian Quarterly features a conversation between Wolfson and author Ottessa Moshfegh, who is taken on a virtual tour of the exhibition via VR, a technology that Wolfson has himself used for past works. The conversation begins on a rather unusual note. “You told me recently that you reread My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” Moshfegh notes, referring to her 2018 novel. “Why?” Wolfson responds, “Because my show has references to 9/11.” What those references might be are still unclear, but the article includes a 2026 artwork featuring an image of the Twin Towers at night.

Things take another turn once Moshfegh puts on her VR goggles. She sees a “CGI image,” as Wolfson calls it, of a half-naked Bob Dylan that she confuses for a picture of Wolfson himself; Dylan is shown dripping with water, having just emerged from a pool. Wolfson says that Dylan signifies “singularity—the loneliness of artmaking, or the autonomy of the creative experience.”

Next Moshfegh sees an image of a crowd watching Allen Ginsberg perform in London in 1967 that Wolfson tweaked using AI. “We gave it the original of this image and then we changed it so all the eyes were looking at him,” Wolfson says, adding, “There was a newspaper in the original image and then AI hallucinated some gibbily-gobbily text.” AI, Wolfson goes on to note, “takes all emotions and simplifies them.”

Another portion of the show seems to feature appropriated artworks, or at least pictures of them, including a Philip Guston painting—it’s unclear which one—and a work from Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series. The latter, Wolfson says, looked to him like “AI cartoon porn” at first.

Then Moshfegh removes the VR goggles and the conversation continues on, with the novelist musing on a Wolfson work featuring an image of the cast of the 1991–92 season of Saturday Night Live. That photo, Wolfson notes, is “particularly racial” because the showrunners “divided up the Black people and the white people and made a pattern out of them.”

That leads Moshfegh to ask: “Are you obsessed with race?” Should you want to learn whether Wolfson is obsessed with race—and indeed some have, as Ajay Kurian once did in a negative essay about Wolfson’s art around the time he debuted a work called Colored sculpture—here is the artist’s response: “I think I’m obsessed with the times we live in. It’s not so much about race, it’s about the idea that you would create separatism toward another individual based on a physical attribute that they have, and the absurdity of that. And your initial assumption would be that this individual or group of individuals is less good than me, or specifically less conscious than I am.”